May 11, 2001
Tornadoes, Kris Kross, and the peanut gallery
We were at some sort of Center retreat. I rode with Caryn and we had to park on the side of a dirt road. When we looked up, a tornado was whipping towards us. We put our heads down and walked towards the building. Inside, we learned that the tornado had hit the packing room. "That stuff's insured for $50 a shelf!" I screamed. (I don't know why I screamed that, but I did.) Then Charla greeted us and led me towards the City Arts store. I dove through a little door (think Being John Malkovich) and landed on a huge pile of Play-Doh . . . still in its containers, so it didn't soften the blow any. After making my way down the huge pile of Play-Doh, I went to a jewelry case and saw works by Melanie J. Then the tornado started to come back again, and I ducked. It went over my head (these were just little funnels, about six inches wide) and then another one came, and I ducked.
In another Center dream, I had a lot of people coming in to my office. The phone would ring and people would also walk in. I helped one lady named Minnie Pearl (I even looked at her and wondered how many people thought she was Minnie "How-DY!" Pearl) enroll for portraiture and creative writing. She asked if I taught it and I said yes, then backtracked and remembered that I wasn't teaching at all. I told her the truth. My desk was incredibly messy. The UPS guy stopped by and told me the new instructions for shipping things and gave me new labels. I took another phone call and realized that the east wall of my office was now a peanut gallery: five or six people would criticize me as I worked. "That's sexual abuse," I said at one point, "and I don't have to take that--in my own office especially." Then the peanut gallery asked me to sing Kris Kross's "Jump Jump" which I did for a while (an obvious bleed-through from Cartoon Network, which is always on while I'm sleeping, and its Ultimate Hip-Hop Party CD ad). Then I saw Jeff S., a boy who lived next door to me while growing up, and now he and his three brothers were a successful boy band. I asked them which song came first, and he said "Love Will Never Do Without You." I murmured, "of course," wondering if they ever did an original song.