22-apr-97

While we were waiting for her ride to arrive and take her to work, Skot drove up in his Green Machine. Actually I never saw him in the car, which is just as well because he couldn't have fit in it anyway. It looked like two slabs of metal toast welded together and set on wheels. It was also smoking. While Skot looked on, the Green Machine bumped the back of another car in the driveway, but this was inevitable since it had such poor artaficial intelligence and couldn't park itself reliably.

Skot hung around with my sister and I while we were waiting. There were large black beetles here and there on the asphalt, and in most serious concentration, Skot smashed each of these thoroughly with the butt of a golf club. It looked like a sand wedge. I was outside without my shoes on, and spent a lot of the time going "EeK!" and jumping away from the beetles and fungus Skot was disturbing with his antics. Eventually Lindsey got picked up and I went back inside for a map.

I woke up, dressed, and had nothing else to do at home so I began driving along the freeway. I followed turns randomly and took the exit leading to my sister's work on a whim. I hadn't even decided I wanted to go there. I came off the freeway ramp as a person floating along the ground wearing a loose-fitting pinstripe jacket. The jacket blew off as I passed through an intersection and I chased it past a gas-station filled with young teenagers and into a fenced-in park consisting of a cascade of light brown dugout dirt in a series of steps. The foot of the steps met a line of open-air bathroom stalls (hey, you get used to it) along the fence. My jacket had blown down next to one of the toilets, and I walked down to get it.

Just then one of the teenagers entered the stall looking for a baseball. He knew I was looking for the jacket and asked if I had seen the baseball. WHen I said no he said "too bad, we could have arranged a trade." I interpreted this as his plan to keep my jacket from me until I found his baseball, and as I claimed my jacket from next to the toilet I said "Oh yeah, well fuck you!" I immediately thought this was a harsh thing to say. As I was walking up the dirt steps I realized I had claimed the dusty rim of the toilet bowl instead, so I walked back and got my jacket, glad that the kid hadn't taken it out of spite.

When I came to the top of the stairs and put on my jacket I passed by a woman who asked me to join the baseball team. I told her I didn't even live in this city, m'aam. Everything I said had a southern twang to it. She got really buddy-buddy with me and put her arm around me and told me I had to get to know the lord. She led me into a building about ten feet away.

It was a very minimal church, with a cross high on the wall, a big desk at which the minister sat, one bench, and few mirrors shaped like the star of David. The lady went to introduce me to the minister and I was feeling particularly pernacious, and thought that if he looked at me my expression would make him think I was possessed. However the minister ignored me and the lady began to talk with another woman, so I leaned over and onto the bench as if sick, walking with visible difficulty. I slight limp even. I don't know why I felt so queasy all of a sudden.

After a while of feeling queasy I stood up and went to one of the mirrors. I realized that I looked disheveled, so I began to tuck in my shirt. Here I noticed that I had a big belly and huge love-handles that wiggled all around as I stuffed my shirt in. I was in extremely bad shape, compared to how I usually looked, I thought! And had I aged?

I turned away and looked at the cross on the wall. I considered casting a magic spell that would make it look like I was a minor diety talking to god, with lots of pyrotechnics and earth shaking, but decided against it. I was actually an agnostic, but a very "high level" agnostic, which granted me special powers, and the ability to pull the chains of god-fearing folk for laughs. Though I would have relished the act, I guess I just wanted out of there. (Hey man, don't ask me why an agnostic would be able to cast magic spells. I just dreamed it.)

Several sequences later that I can't remember, my Dad and I were going to sleep in part of a hotel in some strange foreign land. I was lying on a pad attached to the floor of an indentation in the side of a huge, curved metal wall. I had a thick blanket over me. There was a railing separating my alcove from the open air, and over the side of the railing was suspended a kind of hammock composed of canvas in a frame of steel bars. My Dad was sleeping in this. I realized that if the canvas broke in the middle of the night, anyone sleeping in it would fall many stories to their death, possibly without even waking up for the event. My Dad appeared to trust the canvas, however, since he was sound asleep. I had a vague sense that he had slept at this hotel before, taking my sisters on volleyball trips.

The curved wall our indentation was set into was home to many similar indentations, making other rooms in the hotel. What's more, the wall curved all the way around and met itself to form a giant grey cylinder. Stranger yet, it appeared to be along the seashore, as our indentation was constantly intruded upon by waves of seawater. The water was only slightly cool, and my blanket was heavy, so I remained warm even though the waves kept me almost constantly submerged, like I was sleeping in a bathtub. Dad was unfazed by all of this.

Later on my Dad woke up and I was able to ask him questions. Off in the distance I saw a crate float rapidly by in the water. This crate was immense, at least fifty meters to a side, and slowly rotated as it moved along. My Dad said that that was cargo, and that a tugboat was towing it in to port. I looked to the left and saw a row of similar boxes, all half-submerged, grouped loosely in a net. When the water currents were like this, my Dad explained, they could let these cargo boxes float from port to port by themselves. All that was necessary was to drag them into the dock when they came near.

Somewhere between night and dawn in this strange land, all the ocean drained away and was replaced with a vast green valley of rolling hills, sprinkled loosely with trees. Our hotel room was situated high above the ground, and I could see quite a distance, to the horizon, and mountains off to the side. The view scrolled by from left to right, and I realized that the entire cylindrical hotel was slowly rotating! So we got a 360 degree view of our surroundings. Pretty posh. Now if only they could do something about these 'rooms'.

Dad woke up again and we talked about the view. The sky was probably the most gorgeous, breathtaking thing I've ever seen in a dream. It was almost completely blanketed by a roiling mass of clouds, that shifted and stretched like something alive, like the stomach of a huge beast. Sunlight shone through these clouds and made them glow a burning, incandescent shade of red. Somehow the weather had formed thicker clouds in criss-crossing yellow lines like stripes on a blanket, subdividing the red into a malleable pattern of diamonds. Here and there were gaps in the cloud-weave that penetrated through to the sky above, forming short tunnels lined with wind-torn fragments, resembling the webbed hallways made by spiders into the holes of a log. These gaps ended in stark, contrasting blue, and zipped accross the sky at impossible speeds, like bubbles moving horizontally.

I noticed that a huge billboard had been erected in the distance. A changing projection was being cast upon it from some unknown source in black and white. After some study I realized it was the satellite scan of the cloud region we were under. How thoughtful of the hotel managers.

Off in the distance I saw what could only be the serpent form of a tornado touching down to the grassy plains, though I've actually never seen one in real life. It was only partially there, visible in pieces by the black debris that whirled within. For some reason the debris were all black.

The tornado scrolled out of view and when it came back I saw that it had fragmented into a number of much smaller, thinner tornadoes, that moved furitively along the ground like dust devils. Only an instant later I saw the shaft of a much larger tornado touching down less than a thousand feet from the hotel wall!!! When the hotel view swung back around I was relieved that the tornado appeared to be gone. Then the hotel began to rotate faster, and faster, and I realized that we were directly beneath it.

I had to hang onto the divider bars to keep from being ripped from my alcove by the centrifugal force and the powerful wind. My father was nowhere in sight for a while, but then the hotel's spin slowed, and the wind settled, and everything was back to normal. Except the alcove was now a mere ten feet above the grass. Perhaps the hotel had screwed itself into the earth. My Dad walked over, climbed a bar up to the alcove, and sat down in his hammock. I asked him what happened, and he said something about killing the tornado. I guess that's just one of the things you learn as you get older. How to kill tornadoes.

Eventually Dad and I decided to leave our odd little hotel room. We climbed down the convenient bar and I noticed that it was only partially attached to the wall, and that we should fix it. About thirty feet away I saw a lion sitting on the lawn, regarding us with veiled interest. Dad said not to bother fixing the bar- we should just find another room. He began to walk away and I told him to watch out for the lion, which had instantly moved a good twenty feet closer, without even sitting up. Dad turned towards where I was indicating and said "huh?" just as the lion decided to pounce him.

It attacked more like a grizzly bear than a lion, and stood on its hind legs trying to knock my Dad down. It had it's jaws only partially clamped around both of my Dad's fists. I ran up and began to bash the lion on the jaw until one of Dad's hands was free. He used his free hand to draw his huge set of keys out of his pocket, and told me to hold the keys in one fist and sock the lion unconscious. I reckoned I wasn't heavy enough to manage this, so instead I poked the lion in the eye with a single key. I didn't want to blind such an endangered animal, but I didn't want my Dad to become breakfast either. I felt I had no choice. I poked the lion's other eye. It was a lot like piercing the skin of a grape.

The lion let go of my Dad and just stood there, looking both shocked and confused. Was it because it suddenly couldn't see? I moved in a bit closer. Upon intimate inspection the lion had the facial features of a collie dog. One eye was pale yellow, and the other was a shocking shade of grey. It was staring like my grandfather used to, with his one false eye. The lion's eyes didn't look damaged by my piercing, which I thought was strange.

My Dad, free of the lion, showed me a trick. He leaned down close to the lion's neck, gripped it in a funny way, and gave a little twist. There was a muted click, and though one would expect that my Dad had just broken the creature's neck, instead it lay calmly down, set it's chin on it's paws, and fell asleep, providing us with ample time to get away. My Dad patted it once on the mane and stood up. I guess that's just another thing you learn as you get older. How to put lions to sleep.

There's more, but it's sketchy at best.

Pretty nutty!