Sleeping Outside the Box

“Hey man, if you get this mod, it adds a 1/4-inch jack to your computer so you can record the instrument with no prob. It also has this 1/8th-inch jack that receives bootleg radio–all the music shows going on right now in the world, man, all there for you to record with a simple turn of the dial. It’ll tear up your available storage, man, you’ll run out in no time. You’re music collection is dust compared to what you will capture with this baby!” The music shop boy laughs in a semi-maniacal technolust.
“Well,” I waver, “I don’t really need to add anything else to my music collection–that’ll just suck up my time. I’ve already got so much I haven’t listened to.”
“Get the instrument, man. For a hundred bucks you can’t pass it up. You’ll never find another like it. Say it with me man, Electric-Guitar. Nobody has seen one of these things in forever man! It’s claa-ssic, man! It’s got strings and all.”
He tempts me with the antique but I’m here looking for some new tech–something I have never seen. But this guy hasn’t got anything like that. I was syncing musical DNA before this little terminal stain was suckling his first drop of Infojuice™.
I walk out into the bright Thai sunlight and met up with my friends. “Let’s swim through this mess,” I say in the cool vernacular of my day. My friends agree, but we need a map. We’ve never been to this part but Lena knows a bookshop in the area where we can get a secret map.
“It’s hidden in the cover of The Beach. I put it there last summer. Nobody will find it.” She assures.
“What if someone bought the book?” I query.
“Don’t worry, I had some cheap labor make copies in all the versions of the book–but even if someone finds it, they won’t understand it :)” She points at the air making two dots and a swish. She doesn’t need to smile anymore, her hands can do it for her. It’s the new rave that all the kids are doing, gestures for emotions. They say it let’s you stay young by never needing to wrinkle your face. Emote with your hands and never need ironing.
When we get to the bookshop, there’s only one copy of The Beach left. I fish under the cover of the book and find it. “Is this it?” The map doesn’t look all that special. It’s like a theme park map, something you would pick up at Space World with all the attractions in big cartoon pictures.
“That’s it. Let’s run.”
We literally get lost so we can test out the map.
“OK, 3rd and Franklin, look it up.”
“There is no 3rd on this map, it’s 10 years old. We’re standing on a dirt road. This was obviously built recently.”
“Let’s walk up a block then.” She suggests. We get up another block and end up in a stream, swimming with guppies and huge schools of little round fish. I snap photos while the tide carries us downstream.
“Hey, check out the walls around the river, they look like gargoyles.” I point and click. Around the mountains, half way in the water are midget sized gargoyles with octopus tentacle hair and huge alien eyes. Their bodies are fish like but they have little arms, no bigger than the tentacles on their heads. As I photograph and float on by, they start to lift their heads and watch us. One heads over and I realize it has a humongous head. “Does it speak telepathically,” I ask, to nobody in particular.
“How did you know.” My friend answers.
“Just a lucky guess, it doesn’t have a mouth but obviously they have bigger brains than we do.”
The creature swims around me. It’s not threatening, just curious and eventually we exit it’s domain. The water carries us far.

I spent the night looking for my cat. At one point, after I fell asleep, I found him hanging out on the street, cleaning himself, with a blue collar and a new name tag. He had been catnapped by a neighbor and given away as a gift. We found the people who took him through some clues left behind at the scene. We took it home and pieced together who they were and why they did it.
Half-way through the night, I woke up disappointed, realizing it didn’t really happen.
Later, I dreamed that I found him across the street, in a dark cave-like crevasse. I could see his green eyes light up inside it and when I meowed at him, he came running out. I woke again, several times, disappointed that the place I found him in my dream doesn’t really exist. I dreamed and awoke not realizing that I was still asleep in each waking. After dream frustration, I got up and ran out to find the area that I had dreamed about. It was just across the street from the house. I found the small cave underneath a pond and surely he was there. I woke up Lena with him in my arms and she was amazed to see him. She wanted to know where I found him so we went out to the spot, Thor still held tight.
As Lena was examining the area, the wind started blowing extremely hard.
“Is this where you found him?” Lena shouted over the wind.
“Come over here, we need to head back.” I screamed.
We were only a couple blocks away from the house and I hit the crosswalk button with my foot, clutching Thor with my hands.
“The wind is picking up, we need to get out of this hurricane! I don’t want to lose him again!” This last part felt strange, like a sappy movie quote.
The cars and trucks driving past us started to drive much faster. A massive truck went by, floating several feet off the ground. A Metro bus passed us with only one wheel remaining, floating in the middle of the undercarriage. It had lost all the others from skidding over the sidewalks at magnificent speeds and smashing it’s parts into the sides of the concrete. Pieces of vehicles started to glide by us and drift off the cars and trucks as they came by.
I pushed against the wind, holding myself on the ground with the weight of my guilt for losing Thor.
A car went by sideways, parts flying and riping off it. Lena exclaimed, “yes, you are dangerous,” to the driver, as if he was spinning out for fun–and he may have been.
Time slowed and we used it to our advantage, navigating between parts of the flying wreckage, like a giant 3D Frogger but instead of cars and logs, it was massive pieces of automotive shrapnel.
We eventually made it inside the house but then I realized I must still be asleep. Thor was home and the world outside was in windy chaos. The streets were coming up off the road and telephone polls where I had stuck the “Missing Cat” posters were being eaten by the Nothing.
I woke up for the last time, “I’m working from home today–so I can look for Thor…” I told Lena.
We’ll find him.

I’m on an unknown island with a bunch of tourists. The trees are strange, like a cross between Palms and Redwoods. Sometimes they look upside down, fruit on the bottom and roots in the high sky.

I have come to this place for treatment. I have a tree growing in my scull. It was planted there to aid in the destruction of a parasite that would have killed me. But now, I worry that the tree might do the same.

“What kind of tree is it?” asks a fellow traveler.
“You see those Redwoods? kind of like that, only thin. Really tall, but not wide enough to break my scull. Someday it will be up to 10 times my height and I don’t think I will be able to stand up any longer to carry it.” As moments transition, sometimes the tree is already partially grown out of my head and I feel it’s weight.
“Where are we anyway,” he continues.
“Isn’t this the redwood forest? That’s where they film all the movies with redwood trees. See there… wait the trees are changing. None of these are Redwoods… they look odd, like no tree I know…” I continue in baffled amazement, staring at the changing landscape. A well dressed man walks over to our group and begins to explain.
“Welcome,” he begins with a smile. “You all have many questions, I am sure, and you have all come from different places. You will find that barely anyone here speaks the same language and most find it best to speak in raw tones rather than familiar words. You will find that over time, you will understand perfectly everyone’s thoughts and intentions. Merely listen and what you have come for will be granted.”
My hopes do not increase but the landscape and buildings remain impressive. Most of the man-made structures appear Greek. Pillars and open public swimming pools with people falling into them fully clothed.

I’m in London, infiltrating a Scientology community. They’ve taken over the city, claiming all of London’s precious history as their own. I ride the free Scientology train across the city, pretending to be one of them.
A big English man stops me as I exit the tubes.
“Where you headed boy?”
“Oh, I’m just seeing the sites, taking it in… you know. Hey, how do we prevent people from using this free tube service if they aren’t involved?”
“We don’t have to worry about that. Nobody has yet taken advantage of our system without soon entering the ranks.”
“Oh,” I raise my eyebrows, “good then, I’ll just be on my way.”
I have a feeling he’s on to me so I take off running up a broken marble staircase. The whole city is in ruins. Every attraction looks like the Colosseum, broken and disheveled.
“What happened here,” I ask myself. A passerby stops, looks right into my eyes and speaks in a slow drone.
“We are building the new mecca. It’ll be like Disneyland, only better. We just had to tear down some old things that were in our way. We might use some of the parts for the rides.”

In the shallow ocean, I’m lifting mussels and sea-snails from the bed. Multicolored, shiny, they swim away, extending thin pneumatocyst filled anemone strands, like little Cthulu tentacles reaching for freedom. They roll in and out of the shells, extending with great length and gracefulness, gliding around the water.
“Look at that.” I point to a bright orange one I just picked up.
“When do we get to dive into the water?” Says a member of the group. I’m teaching a diving course and for some reason everyone thinks I mean Olympic diving rather than scuba diving. I give in and drag a tall diving platform out into the water and everyone climbs up to the top. It’s just floating on the water, somehow buoyant, unanchored. I check the water level and note that we are still too shallow to have someone dive off the platform. They would certainly see some great shellfish but too quickly and with an abrupt end.
I push the platform further out into the ocean and then realize that we aren’t tied to anything on shore. We could float away with the tide. There is no tide. That is the strange part about this ocean. Perfectly calm, it has no waves, like a vast and open salt-water swimming pool. I tie the platform up to something on the shore, but only a little bit. The divers are so eager, I don’t have time to do it properly.

In a restaurant above the water, it’s valentine’s day and a couple celebrates. Their food is terrible and their service is worse. I am waiting tables there.
We are playing a board game and I put all the pieces in the wrong place. “It’s a game like Roborally but with bots”. Nobody is very excited because they don’t like Roborally.

At my grandmother’s house, a band wakes up early to jam. They are playing Beatles songs with a punk overtone and I wish I brought my accordion because I could certainly jam with them. They record on Protools and sing like demons. I worry that they will wake my grandparents but then I figure they have already left for the day.

I’m killing time in a book store. The shop keeper has several old and valuable books for quite reasonable prices but I cannot get them because I am moving. I’ll get them later, I promise myself. The back half of the book store is a comic shop. I step in to kill a few minutes but it’s closed. As I open the door a short punk girl comes over and asks if she can help me.
“I was just seeing if the comic store is open.”
“Oh, no it’s closed today, didn’t you know?”
“Oh, right, it’s Sunday,” I mumble, “or, no, it’s Monday but it’s a holiday, right…”
As I’m leaving a guy is pointing to some comics on a shelf in the bookstore. It’s Elfquest and he says he has digital copies of the series on his iPhone, but he says it in a French accent so I expect his comics were in French too.

Taking the bus home, I get off later than usual. I want to head further north. I take my shirt off in the summer heat and I grab up at a Thai style tree branch. There are countless birds in the trees and they swarm away from me from tree to tree.
Soon, I realize that they are not running away but leading me. They fly closer to my head and I reach out. They land on my shoulder, my hands. They try to teach me the best way to approach them but I’m slower than they are. Suddenly, I’m looking down at someone else. He’s acting very slow, some might say moronic. He doesn’t get the birds perspective–the birds-eye-view. They try to communicate but he doesn’t understand. They show him a calendar they made and he reads it wrong, looking at the French instead of the English side. He doesn’t know any french and thinks they must have invented a new language. He reads it horribly aloud. He becomes their protectorate knight. He recruits a half dozen followers, some of which think he is insane. He stays with the birds until the great bird Armageddon, wearing a knight suit and carrying a great sword.

I’m floating down a murky marsh on an umbrella. Cranberries float on each side, amidst the brown stink of it. There are trees, strange trees with raspberry things, clean, green and red, just at arms reach. I pick them into the umbrella, safe from the water around us.

A dam breaks and the water rushes quickly out from beneath, chasing gravity down a hill. The wind catches the umbrella and sweeps it out from under me. I grab on, spilling raspberries as it carries me into the air. We are moving fast, the umbrella and I, keeping pace with the flowing river, which is now turning clear as it rolls across fresh grass.
Farmers are picking fruit on each side of the river and I realize that the water is following an intentionally mowed path between them. This water was intended to feed their patches and now that it is the right time of year, it has been unleashed.

After about a mile or so, the water runs out, the river draining into the ground. I stay for a while in the summer sunshine, playing with the umbrella. I jump into the air, extremely high, only to float down slowly until the wind resistence finally snaps the umbrella inside out and I come rushing down. In my descent I thrust the umbrella out at the ground and it turns back into a floating boat, tick-tocking me to a safe landing. Farmers children laugh and wonder at my mastery of the umbrella so I show them some more tricks. Pealing back the wireframe so that it looks like an exploded tortoise shell, I rotate it quickly and throw the umbrella into the air. It twirls and on it’s way down, it rotates upside down, snaps back into it’s normal shape and rolls once more to land in my hand.

It seems I play like this until the sun goes down and everyone leaves. Then it’s just me and my umbrella, floating down the valley with the random wind.

Running from the police, I stopped at your house to rest awhile. You don’t live far away…
Ordered a rainbow roll and the guy said he’d put chicken in it–chickenfish. I ended up with a funky peanut butter and jelly sandwich that had some kind of fish/meat mashup inside it.

I have a little hand sized crow bar and I’m prodding the door frame of a red Lamborghini. I can get a portion of the door to split away enough that I can make out the artificial looking interior. Frantically, I make my way around the car, prodding every orifice that I can cram the crow bar into, peeling back and bending the metal.
“Don’t fuck with the techno-geeks,” I’m muttering, “we’ll tear your shit up.”
The guy who owns the Italian beauty comes running out. Somehow, he thinks I’m doing him a partial service because he lost his keys and wouldn’t have been able to get in had I not twisted the door frame enough for him to reach in and unlock the door. He quickly hops into the left door and sits in the driver’s seat, which happens to be on that side of the car. He grabs a towel and crams it up to the door frame where I have bent the door into a gaping hole.
“I think it’ll be alright. Thanks for your help.” He says, handing me a tip and closing the door. The door makes a quiet padded thud against the towel and it looks almost like it will heal from the disastrous mutilation of my iron.
As the driver revs the engine, I grab the hood of the car, just next to the door and prepare to skate along-side the car. He jams it up to 60 in a blink of an eye and I’m sliding, attached with one strong arm. I try to scream a warning that the wind speed is tearing the door frame off the car, but it’s too late. The driver’s door falls slightly at the hinge, a slow-mo warning, delayed by dynamic seconds–just enough to think, “oh, no”. Then it rips off is tumbling through the air behind us at a magnificent lack of speed.
“Holy Gambler’s Fallacy!” screams the driver. He stops the car as abruptly as the door vanished and I go forward, continuing at 60. My skates have retracted and I’m sliding on the soles of my shoes to slow down. Luckily the road is covered in slick rain so the pavement doesn’t rip apart my feet and I glide to a halt with anime action hero prowess.

Later, I’m telling my high school friend, J, about the dream. He’s amused but gets worried when my visual demonstration of the slide-to-a-halt part sends me careening down a guard rail toward him and some strangers at dangerous speeds. I grab the rail and slow to a stop to alleviate his fretting.
“It was a really cool dream!” I exclaim.
We leave the museum where my friend is able to leave his embarrassment. There’s a free monthly event he knows of that has free food and drinks. He ushers me to the building and tells me to act like I’m there to get a stock analysis.
“What kind of stock analysis?” I wonder and ask.
“It doesn’t matter. Nobody will actually talk to you. Just act like that’s why you’re here.”
“OK…” Puzzled but adventuresome, I follow him up the elevator to a banquet hall where men in suits, portfolio folders outstretched, are chatting with housewives and construction workers. There is free beer, wine and cookies on a table and my friend starts to pile handfuls of desserts into his pockets. I grab a couple of beers, one open and one for the road. “It’s too bad they just have cookies. I’m going to assume they aren’t vegan and not risk an allergic death. You know of a lot of these kinds of events?”
“Hell, yeah!” He whispers in excitement, “this is how I’ve been eating for the last 3 months, bitch.”
“Oh…ok…um…don’t you have a job and get paid and whatnot…”
“Yeah, well, it’s sort of a protest to the man,” he explains. I stop the inquisition there. I don’t want to hear his tirade about starving people again. He continues back to the original topic, “I know of another fancier one. They probably have sandwiches and stuff. Let’s go check it out.”
We head uptown to this gathering, up on the top floor of some business downtown. The whole floor looks more like a large, open honeymoon suite with no furniture. The carpet is white and the people are wearing pearls and holding their drinks with classy finger poses. There’s a piano player and he’s tinkling some mellow, unrecognizable tune that stinks of a bad remake.
My friend grabs a sandwich and calls me over to the balcony where a bunch of people are talking about some kind of business issue. We start to mingle, adding in industry bull-shit as needed. Without warning an older gentleman at the balcony side pulls out a remote and presses a button, causing the balcony with all of us on it to jettison off the side of the building into the Puget Sound. When we hit the water, the balcony begins to sink and the old man curses.
“Why is it always that everyone has to come onto my boat? Why can’t it just be me. We’re sinking and it’s just because there are too many people on board!” He tries to push people off but it’s too late. The balcony has receded below the sea worthy surface and soon we are just sitting in shallow pool of clear sea water. The water is strangely warm, comfortable, and clear. We sit and watch the fish and coral, all multicolored and in total shock that we have come to invade their world. Some of the fish are trapped, scared into a corner where the balcony and people separate them from freedom. They swim back and forth looking for an exit. Mentally I join them; physically I mingle with the other unfortunate victims of the balcony catastrophe.

walking down a desolate road, we encounter a group of telephone repairmen. They are fixing up the copper as we walk by. Stopping at one of the poles, I notice that it isn’t set into the ground.
“Why isn’t this stabilized into the surface?” I ask.
“It’s just the way AT&T told us to do it.” Says one of the workers.
“What about an earthquake? This thing is just resting on the road. It’ll topple over into traffic with even a gust of wind!”
He looks back at me like nobody thought of that but as if the idea isn’t significant.
“I wonder what they did with all the millions the government gave them to do this thing right.” I ponder. Then we all cursed AT&T as we walk away.
“Down with AT&T, fascist bastards!”

In the field next to us, we notice a swarm of giant bumble bees. They are living there like a massive bee city. They are flying over to the next block and picking up things we can’t make out from here, bringing them back to their hive. We walk further toward the pick-up spot for the bees goods and realize that the next block is a miniature city with miniature people. The people are being carried away by the bees. They run and hide and plan strange defenses that seem to do no good. In the distance, we notice the next block is made of giant flowers with multiple pollen bulbs on each stalk. It looks like the garden of flowers was made for the bees, if only the city of people weren’t in the way.

We lure a few of the bees to the field of flowers. They orgasm in the flower bed for a while before returning to their hive, telling all the others, which then proceed to drop the little people and move on over the city to their proper destination. We too move on.

Later at a music store, I’m looking for a new album–something I haven’t done in years. A friend who works at the counter tells me about this new one. It’s a two disc DVD set, audio album, mini-series, comic book and novella all in one. I flip through it and as I’m reading the comic-magazine, it changes in my hands to be a DVD case or an album or a comic.
“It’s made of a new nano-polycarbonate-artificial-life material. It responds to what you want it to be at the moment you touch it. then it shifts between 3-4 forms. Neat huh?” Says my friend.
“Yeah, neat. Cool story too. There’s everything in here behemoths and gods but mixed into a modern world. I dig it. Gotta go catch a movie. Later.”
I walk out the door and the street shifts in a strange way. It’s almost like Vertigo but then I realize it’s a hill forming on the road to the right. Cars start coming down the street, shocked at the sudden drop but they all make it down safely.

At the theater, I hand the counter-girl my id and she prints out a movie ticket along with a cruise ticket. The name on the ticket says CorbinDalles (all one word) and I tell her that there are two things wrong with my ticket. First, the name should have a space in it. Second, that isn’t my name. She points to the girl next to me and indeed it’s Milla Jovovich who is holding up a multi-pass. I shrug and head into the theater. I was expecting to get the cruise ticket along with the movie stub. It’s part of my mission. I need to get on that ship and join up with my counterparts.
Half-way through the movie, just when it was getting good, the theater becomes a dock and I’m boarding the ship. I can see my mates on board—about half a dozen of them. There’s a guy who looks a lot like Bruce Willis, except he’s dressed as a goth and he’s Chinese. He also has prawns instead of fingers on both hands. There’s a seedy looking guy who I know to be the one that pulled off ‘the job’. He has our money. There are the Ukrainian brothers and the German sisters.

On the boat, we exchange our greetings and the guy who pulled the job pulls away to go below deck, fetching our money. When he returns, he has a wry grin, no money and a machine gun. Oh, the disappointment we all feel. It’s apparent in all of us. The man who was once to be our friend and who now had a gun on us goes down with a thud as the prawn fingered menace tackles him, swift as sight.

I think we all die then or, at least, they all do. I find myself in an underworld, looking at my old friends, piled up in a corner like old toys.

More later…

We are in Thailand again, this time on a ship. Muslim extremists have tampered with the engine and it’s starting to spin wildly toward a pier. We jump at just the right moment before it hits. Just like in an action movie, it happens in slow motion. There is enough time to think about how I want to land in the water. It’s far enough down that it might hurt my fingers to do a normal dive approach. I bend my fingers half way so the knuckles at the middle of my fingers will hit the water instead of the tips. It doesn’t hurt but it doesn’t feel ideal when the water finally jams up into my hands.
Upon entering the water, I regret for a second that I forgot to bring my camera on this trip. Then I realize that if I had brought it, it wouldn’t have survived the ocean. It wouldn’t have been able to capture the water, pure and clear as air, housing a shallow pool of mussels, anemone, schools of baby octopodes and strange fish, all sharing the same space, seeming to be planted in rows as if a garden. I swish up out of the water like a dolphin to get a better look at the multi-colored panorama and cut my foot on a piece of coral. I can see the blood filling up the water as red as the bright starfish around me.
I hear a guide somewhere telling us to remember this spot. This is where we would always want to enter the ocean if coming through the canal. We should note the old painted rock and the broken opening to the sea. This is the easiest entrance, he said. Across the canal, an old building is covered in some of the most beautiful graffiti in Bangkok. Again, I curse not having my camera, useless as it would have been.
We exit the water through the fjord and by the time we can walk rather than swim, night surrounds us.
At a hotel we stayed in on our previous trip, the girl at the desk asks us what district we think we are in.
“Isn’t this the Seoul district?”
“Yes, it’s not very safe. Do you have a reservation?”
“No. If you don’t have a room, we’ll find another place.”
“Oh, that would be much too dangerous. The Korean district is run by the Korean mafia. It is full of gangs at night.”
“You should come to Seattle.”
“I could give you a room but I will have to charge an extra room fee. I will have to create one for you.” I was starting not to like her fake smile. It feels like a grift. This place has changed.
“No thanks,” I say. It’s not worth the trouble.
Outside, we find ourselves in a bad neighborhood indeed. Vagrants are fighting over places to sleep, stopping only to glare at us as we pass. I suddenly become aware that my headphones are on and are connected to my iPod swinging at my hip. I tuck it into my pocket and slide my headphones around my neck. Several unsavories start following us and I realize why I’m here in Thailand. I’m on a mission. There is a gun in my pocket and I reach for it. Falling back and twisting, I fire it at one of the men following me. The gun, I realize, is a movie gun. It only fires bullets in variable slow motion. I have to plan on where people will be and how the action will impact the timing effect of the bullet in order to get a successful hit. I fire on all sides, hoping to lure the men into the place they need to be and some of the bullets mistakingly hit the outer walls of a power plant. The silos of the plant, noticing the security breach of bullet impact, activate their thrusters and begin their ascent into space. Fire spreads across the ground around us and we are all temporarily blind. I use this moment to fire again and this time I hit one of the men. Another man approaches me and fires but his gun is also a variable slow motion pistol. I dodge, he dodges, we exhaust our supply of bullets as he catches my last shot in his bare hands. Now we stand at an impasse, neither of us trained in hand to hand combat. The game is over. Nobody wins. He drops my bullet, smiles, and backs away.