My Fever Dream About Fever Dreams

My fever dream about fever dreams begins with a man rising out of the East River and approaching the shore like MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. He strides with certainty onto the island and into a hotel. He proceeds to rise up through the ceiling and crushes everything around until the space metamorphises into a ballroom.

The music blossoms – for this appears to be a music video fever dream – into a kind of Indian techno. The room is filled with spectacular light and joyous people. It pulls back to the dreamer – me – trying to embrace and share that vision with others, waking, wandering out into the night, telling others, old friends, strangers, students, even casting them, promising roles, searching out the exact location for each scene. Everyone is inspired and encouraging. This really could be something.

He – I – cannot use my phone and then pee into the front engine of a car, sure signs that this is still a dream, not as fevered, but soldier on, trying to remember all of the details of the genesis and come up through the layers, less feverish now, and awake, holding on to the key moments. This is the thing that will reach others, to you. You will understand me now. And so I write all of it down.

The Art of Procrastination

I meant to post this blog a long time ago…

I was going to do it first thing in the morning. That was the plan. I’m good at procrastinating, and I was going to write about that, all the things I do instead of the things I’m supposed to do, but I needed to get something to eat. And the apartment needed tiddying, the plants watering. The windows were dirty too. And I had the laundry and the shopping. And so…yeah. I would have to get to it tomorrow.

I wrote notes the next day – or maybe it was the day after that – about tiddying and dirty windows. And then I opened my emails and deleted and answered, one an announcement about a Stereolab concert and bought tickets to that, and fiddled with my playlist. My CDs were a mess, completely disorganized; I had to reorder those.

I went for a hike on the weekend, certain my mind would get moving on the trail, and came up with a script idea about a woman, more of a spirit or witch, something like that, who wanders about and subtly moves different people in the right direction to keep the world in some kind of order. I’d finish the blog when I got home and start the outline.

I didn’t do either. It was a long week, calling and emailing, convincing, buying and answering, following up, calculating, choosing alternate dates, transferring, confirming, calling again, reminding, booking, dealing and answering again, listing and crossing off, adding again, feeling like I was getting somewhere when I wasn’t.

And then things got weird. I was a trapezoid person running along a shoreline. I was trying to out-distance death. The more I ran, the more I turned on myself and tried on different meat puppet skins, some electric, others baggy and old fashioned. I checked my head again and again to find out what wasn’t working, what was working too fast, and realized my lungs were outside myself. I was racing along the shoreline again.

Goya sketch

It was a trap, my little trap, being conscious of one day never being conscious again, as if that meant anything, but I could blog about that, Yes, the procrastinating blog, and even while thinking about why bothering with anything, especially that, I began.

I can’t believe I got this done. I doesn’t feel like it.