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.

In Manchester, we drank, we sung, we spouted poetic rants, all of us so pleased that we were on our way to see Joy Division perform at the pub down the road. Everyone was drunk. Jon the postman was there. It was rumored that Bowie would be giving an introduction at the performance—maybe even a song or two. It was late but never too late for the ruddy faced, lacquered and polished Irish in us, always ready to waltz in the moonlight if it meant a drink and a song at the end of the road.
We didn’t make it to the concert. Somewhere on the way in a heated spatter-spit wit match we decided that love had torn us apart. We had no need to see the show; we were the show. What was Joy Division if not a melancholy reverberation of our daily lives, an echo of our times.
At a party where it seemed the whole of Manchester was invited, we declared a new order of sound and experience. The only music now is improvised, from the moment and for the moment–never recorded because who would have time to listen when they would be making music of their own. Never again would we worship the dead, never again abandon our own creative impulses in reverence of another. And so it happened that on that one night all of Manchester sung as one, danced as many, and lived for the moment.

floating over a waterfall, I land abruptly on an ancient Greek pillar protruding from sea. Although, I’m not floating so much as levitating uncontrollably and the sea is strangely intersecting with downtown Seattle. The streets are foaming and flooded but everyone goes about their business as if it’s been like this forever.
My particular predicament has me a bit flustered since I need to get to work. I’m stuck about 50 meters in the air. The new government regulated Helicopter Emergency Lift service has denied picking me up and bringing me to work. I had been told that the service was intended to be free for the first 16 uses in a year–that it was paid for by my own tax money and I would see some benefit.
As cars and people passed by below, I watch and wait. Surely someone will see me.

It became habit to pick up a payphone whenever around one. We would dial zero and, quickly attached at mouth and ear to another human, recite a poem or a speech or, if feeling particularly inspired, deliver an improvisational rant, trying our best to express some lost consciousness hidden within humanity. Clearly the telephone operators were an easy target. Always available, quick to answer, confused when presented with poetry instead of requests to be connected. Certainly, as audio nomads, amidst a sea of copper static and brief interactions, we were outlaws, infecting phone networks with verbal virus.

Over the years, our repertoires have grown. Once recited Burroughs, several times Heinlein, often times Poe, a fair amount of Rives. Occasionally sung Lilium or Miserere Mei, sometimes e e cummings too–sung or spoken. The operators, constantly unprepared, continue to recite back the same response, “Do you need assistance placing a call…?”
One day, I know, some operator will respond in kind, serving back Rilke with Kafka, Ginsberg with Carrol, Oberst with Eivy.

All of my dreams last night were in Thai and PHP. I don’t speak much Thai so I exhausted it all on a woman in a restaurant. She told me all I know and some things I didn’t. While this was happening, I was coding and re-coding the experience. They say you can’t read in your dreams but I think that’s not true. I’ve read before and I distinctly remember lines of code, characters and pages, all overlain upon reality.

I’m at a basketball game, which is odd because I’m not into sports of any kind. I’m sitting out as part of the team, watching my side get humiliated. The opposition is way better and they are trying to make us look foolish and weak. I crouch down next to a teammate and express my frustration. “They’re at least 3 times better than we are. Look at the way they are attacking, they just wait with that huge guy and we can’t do anything about it. Then they play around a bit to show that we are inferior.” My teammate explains how wrong I am and tells me that we are about to win.
I don’t really follow what he’s saying. It’s sports talk and I never understood the rules well enough to follow.
There’s a very pretty girl in the crowd, next to me.
I walk out of the building and realize I’m at a University. It seems to be in some other country; the architecture is like nothing around here. The school museum has a giant circular garden in the front, raised up in a concrete cylinder. The plants in the garden are appearing and disappearing to make patterns. At one point they show a graph representing the successful implementation of a drinking fountain placed outside of the local amphitheater.
I’m fascinated by the plants existing and not existing at will and only the girl from the game breaks my concentration. She looks a little like Anne Hathaway only younger and prettier. We began walking together and she mentioned that I would get in trouble if I took her home because she was under 21. I thought that was a strange thing to say, since she was obviously over 18. I explained to her my open marriage and that it wasn’t a problem. My wife isn’t the jealous type.
She became quite strange then and started opening up all kinds of personal firewalls. She told me how her friends would hate her if she ever got involved with a married man, open or not and that she couldn’t deal with her own life. I talked her down from hysteria, explaining that her friends didn’t control her life and if she felt so insecure around them, she needed knew friends. Again she opened up more and started talking about how downloading blog themes that related to suicide was a certain equivalent to a cry for help and she had already done that. She alluded that if she were to go home and be alone, she might not be around tomorrow.
I didn’t realize she would be such a broken friend but I took her home to see my wife and brother (Silas lived with us in a large house in this world).
On the way there I tried to get the girl to use Skype. It’s wonderful, encrypted chat and phone calls, you can call me any time on it. Later in the house, I was carrying a little cup of half salt, half water. It was somehow a replacement for my phone but because of it’s lack of keys, I could only hear the other person–I couldn’t talk back…

Last night, I took a two stage release Melatonin tablet at 23:00. Melatonin, is a neural transmitter produced in the pineal gland, used by the brain to regulate sleep cycles. This particular tablet releases .25mg 30 minutes after ingestion and then dispenses the remaining .75mg 3-4 hours later. Even though I went to bed at 00:20, I didn’t fall asleep until after 03:00. Even after the initial series of tossing and turning, it seemed I didn’t sleep at all. And yet, I feel quite well rested and I remember several vivid dreams.

The Dreams

Falling from a plane is not a good time when you don’t have a parachute. This I learned with 3 other army guys who all got shot up with something and shoved in the cargo bay of a high flying helicopter. After the machine began it’s long descent, we slipped out an opening and came to consciousness just as our gear belts caught on the railing. As we screamed at one another, against the furious force of the wind, a radio began to emit the cries of a friend. A friend was telling us that we might not die. There are parachutes behind the passenger seat. We just need to climb back up into the cockpit and retrieve them. And by the way, you only have 10,000ft before you go splat.
Upon reaching the cockpit, without a moment to spare, we discover that our assailants stripped the cockpit of anything useful. No shoots. No chance. What were we to do but ride out the fall? And we did, until we landed at a peculiar angle on the freeway. Going about the pace of traffic, we slid in and started to drive with it. Even in a traffic jam though, we couldn’t shake the feeling of inertia mixed with vertigo.

I’m walking through Ballard, only it’s not Ballard but some place I’ve never been. I’m exploring since I have no way of getting home and I decide to get lunch. Our kitten, Cassiopeia, is nestled upside down in the fold of my shirt, just around my waist. She looks up at me as I walk but is not disturbed by the motions. As I round into a pizza place, I pick Cassy out of her pouch and she becomes a baby. Suddenly much heavier and clothed, I sit at a counter stool next to a fairly attractive girl who’s ordering a vegan pizza. I too order a vegan pizza, with mushrooms, olives and bell peppers. Everyone loves the baby and wants to hold it. While I’m eating, the girl next to me asks if the baby is safe with that stranger over there. The stranger in question is a makeshift midget. His legs are severed below the knee and he wears shoes to cover the stumps. He’s slowly rolling the baby toward the door every time my eyes appear not to follow him.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m watching.”
I walk over, crouched down, I extend my foot to keep the door closed, just as a patron tries to enter. That time, the door would have smacked the baby on the head. I reprimand the short man and return to the counter with the baby.

There’s quite a bit more, but I need to eat breakfast. After my shower, I half ejected a bit of morning bile. I managed to subdue it for the moment. I suspect some of my trouble sleeping last night was from dehydration. I suffered a bout of shortened breath and heat exhaustion from about 02:00-03:00. We’ll see how waking up at 06:30 works tomorrow.