It’s been a long time since I rock ‘n’ rolled . . .

2/9/01 – A boy with hydrocephalus was written up in a glossy magazine because “his breakfast cereal told him to kill people.” He had killed a young girl named Cera or Cara because the breakfast cereal had told him to do so. He refused to stop eating the breakfast cereal because the voices would go away and he was afraid of being lonely. The picture of the boy was quite disturbing, and I remember even now.

2/1/01 – I watched a group of rowdy kids, behaving like they were in a mosh pit, assemble in the dark around the circle in front of the Summitlawn house. I called the police, saying that they were assembling without a permit. They smashed the window of a car in, and shortly thereafter I noticed two papers sitting on the front lawn. “Now they’ll think no one’s here and that we’re on vacation,” I fretted as the police did nothing. I then fell asleep (yes, I have dreams about being asleep), then woke up to the police (on the phone) asking me for my name. I refused to give to them since they didn’t help me at all and hung up.

1/27/01 – A 13th century saint became best friends with an orphaned glassblower–she was only 7, but quite skilled. The orphan died, and a gilded gravestone was placed with the words “Gentle Orphan” in an Art Nouveau script, even though she died sometime in the late 13th century. She had created a birdbath made out of blown glass, and that birdbath was placed over her grave. The saint had passed down, through the centuries, a concern that this birdbath was impeding her ascension to heaven. In the year 2001, the birdbath was removed.

1/3/01 – Dream fragments: “this is what it looks like when the birds go down for night.” People shuffling like drugged bumper cars in the street while the heavy woman in Depends cries in her bed, ashamed and upset that the critics were mean to Toni Morrison today. She then praised Dr. Woods for standing up to them. He wondered how she knew. She had matched up the anonymous email addresses, and in came a parade of sullen thirteen-year-olds wearing their email addresses around their necks. “If someone sees you watching . . .”

12/13/00 – From my other journal: “Last night’s dream included Brian H. in a wheelchair. I don’t think he had legs.”

11/28/00 – I fell asleep after watching the last part of American Beauty after dreaming about four lawsuits set into motion by Bush and Gore within one hour. Gore was suing over cheesecake, and I started saying “Yeah, let’s let the winner of the cheesecake contest win. The cheesecake that sets up first is the winner.” They both yelled at me for opening the door to check because that destroyed the results.

11/26/00 – I jumped out of a moving car just before it blew because I remembered I was in a dream and wouldn’t feel pain.

Here’s the dreams since I last updated:

10/30: We were in a little town like Red Bud, Illinois. Mojo Nixon was supposed to perform at the city hall.

***

10/31: I was with Mom in a historical museum in Williamsburg. There were cutters in the line with a Godfather’s membership card. There were creepy interstate interchanges, like the northbound access ramp being at a 90 degree angle.

I had the phrase “Japan is showing a new fearlessness in aiming” stuck in my head.

I was running around a huge Macy’s with Caryn. I went upstairs to the CD section and thought briefly about joining Ken on the couches and asking where Jeremy was, but I didn’t. I went back downstairs, found Caryn, old women in high heels, etc.

John McCain was on my thesis committee.

***

11/14: Last night’s dreams were weird, but just as I type this sentence I have forgotten them. I hate that. Last week, I dreamt that Vanilla Ice would not leave my living room. He was sitting there with some goateed friend, eating my food, watching my cable, and being completely annoying. I ended up yelling at him, even using his real name–that’s just how angry I was. “Robert Van Winkle, you get the fuck out of my house this instant.”

***

11/15: A dream fragment from last week (and perhaps the most mundane dream ever): I was picking the lint off Tucker Carlson’s navy blazer while he was asleep.

As I awoke from uneasy Nyquil sleep, I was struck with images from the night’s dreams. Leila was getting married in Wesley Medical Center to some guy named Eric: it wasn’t her boyfriend, just some guy she knew fairly well. It was, according to Leila, a “pretend marriage.” After setting up the desks in rows, I had to go to the bathroom. I wandered to where the restrooms should be, but instead I had to go into a small, dark elevator to get to the restrooms. I was incredibly claustrophobic: I couldn’t even stand up and there were boxes in the elevator, so I barely fit. After being trapped in an elevator for thirty minutes, I knew I had missed Leila’s wedding. And I was so excited that she was okay (I haven’t heard from her in years) and then I let her down. I went down one floor to where my grandfather was having surgery. I waited there, but they made him spend the night. I wanted to go home, but I also needed to have my parking lot stickers validated so I wouldn’t have to pay. One lady asked me to come back tomorrow; another said she only did that sort of thing on the weekends and wouldn’t be able to help me. I went down one floor to see if anyone could help. The lobby looked similar to the basement floor of Twin Lakes. Rev. Al Sharpton, dressed in purple and gold, was standing there. I chased after him, calling out “Reverend! Help!” He turned around, and I asked him to lead me in a prayer for patience. I got down on my knees and help out one hand, face up. He started with begging me to repeat after him, “Hey, Lord.” I did that, then my mom came up and started calling the Rev. “Pinky.”

Another dream snippet: Matt and I were getting onto I-35 from Harry heading north. We got off around downtown, which was built more like downtown KC around the Plaza than Wichita. We went up a flight of stairs around “Central & Douglas” (two streets that don’t intersect in reality) and was led into a restaurant’s welcoming area. We didn’t want to eat there, so the host was very peeved when we walked out. It wasn’t our fault that the only staircase up led right by his business’ door. Instead, we went to Dairy Queen, where I was about to get a kid’s meal because I didn’t want to get too full.

***

11/16: Last night’s dream involved me agreeing to teach for WSU again. I had an African-American student who wanted to prank call his former teacher from my office. I said he could, but he had to tell me who he was calling. He said, “Jon K.” I said that I wanted to talk to Jon after he was done. The student said something about “get that raisin off your nose,” or something to that effect. I then got on the phone, and Jon didn’t know it wasn’t his former student, so I just said, “bye,” and hung up.

Also had a dream where Mom chastised me for complaining about my old job in front of my old boss, Margaret. I asked Mom, “Who do you think is more of a bitch: Margaret or Katherine Harris (Florida Secretary of State)?” She had no comment. We were walking down an aisle of parked cars on a rainy night.

***

11/20: Last night I dreamt that I had to go on a road trip, but it was more like I had to leave the state. I didn’t want to go to Nebraska–I knew that much. I eventually decided to go to Paris, Texas. I mean, what the hell. I also decided to go ahead and pay for an oil change just to get my tires aired up.

I owned a museum of presidential weight loss memorabilia (but no Martin Van Buren stuff).

I had a Little Tykes car and I went to WSU for some reason. I drove it too near the mound of hospital ID bracelets and thumb tacks, thus getting a flat tire. I folded the thin rubber tire and put it in my pocket. Then I remembered that Little Tykes cars should have solid plastic wheels.

I was swimming in a pool with Meegan and several others. When the ringleader woman cut open an orange, it was filled with bugs. Eventually, we were surrounded by bugs.

Kathleen had moved to an 2-bed/2-bath apartment so I could move in with her. I was in Newton explaining it all to Mom; Dad was taking a long bath upstairs and Grandpa was taking a long bath downstairs. There was Hi-C and Coca Cola on the table. I decided to wait and take a long bath before I left.

Somehow I knew that the guy from Letterman who always sings “who let the dogs out” was trying to kill me. And I knew that a woman named Ann Watson was also going to be killed.

I saw that guy (Alan?) following me, so I stopped in this parking lot near a huge, glistening, mirror-covered church. I jumped out of the car and threw my Pokemon backpack at the car, but it went up instead of sideways. Alan opened his passenger side window and started screaming at me. By this time I was flat on the concrete.

I got up while Alan was backing up to run over me, and I ran into this run-down building across the street from the church. I ran down to the basement and found a note from Ann written on the door and found her inside. We then heard creaks upstairs. I left her there (she was too scared to move) and went upstairs. I didn’t find anything, so I ran outside. It was now dark and I think I was in Memphis. There were two black kids with bandanas over their mouths and black knit hats. They were coming for me, so I ran up to them and hit them with my taser. I then ran up the street and went further west, then north. I found a hollowed out, burnt version of Graceland. Some bystander told me it was going to become an orphanage. I told him Elvis would have wanted it that way.

***

I was at the Center on the concrete in front of Studio 3 talking with Anne Coffin about different ways to enroll when all the old MFA crew came out. Everyone hushed when we started talking about Elizabeth getting a new perm.

Jon wrote a book in which he called me an “uncultured gorilla” in the first chapter. I laughed about it and told Kathleen that he’d fall in love with me by the end of the book: I’ve seen enough Elvis movies to know how the story ends.

We had ants coming into the Summitlawn house in the bathroom. Mom and I watched the albino spiders trap them up in webs. I told Mom not to touch the albino spiders.

I was giving someone a note to take to the Graingers to let them know I was doing fine. The guy asked, “Do you have a birthday or something?” I said that I did, but that’s unrelated.

I was proofreading Tucker Carlson’s homework in the writing center. Then I got involved in a whole mess about turning in MFA conference sheets to the creative writing director. Some adjunct faculty were going to the conference, but needed to fill out forms and hand them to “Tina.” I kept telling them that I was MA and didn’t know anything about MFA stuff. Then Davis came up and told me that he’d be controling even more of the assigning process, including which readings to assign. I hid in my cowboy hat, then went in his office to quit. But there were only unmade beds everywhere I looked. I left.

I was going to a concert or something, but we all had to line up for the bathroom at once. Some guy pulled me into the men’s line and said it’d be quicker, even though the line was twice as long. Mom saw him with his arm around me and shot me a disapproving look.

Kathleen and I ran out of the men’s bathroom.

I got a metal Graceland lunch box. The front had the Jungle Room; the back had the Gates and estate view. Little pictures of the other rooms were around the sides of the box.

Dave Foley and a bunch of other people went to Harrison, Arkansas, and got spider/ant bites in a grid pattern.

I saw Amy, my dead siamese cat, laying on her back on a sunny day, shaded by the marble base of the square coffeetable.

Zach, Tom, and Jon were cleaning out their lockers. I immediately perked up and said, “You’re back.” They then sat in auditorium seats. I tapped Jon on the back and said, “I need to talk to you.”

I also dreamt that Meegan was having an affair with Cole. Kathleen and I went over to Meegan’s house and a sleepy Cole answered the door. We talked about the “three moods of Cole (and the two he didn’t show).”

Lael came over to my house and told me why W.S. Hathaway wasn’t a very good writer lately. Grainger came up the stairs and I threw mixed vegetables at him. Matt, watching all this, decided to leave. I was suddenly was in the old old house (my house of 18 years) in the upstairs master bedroom.

Then I was going to a Kids in the Hall live performance. They had an audience participation portion and it was set up a lot like a political convention mixed with a lecture hall. They walked onstage, did one sketch, and walked off. I thought it was part of the show and I just sat there, expecting them to come back. They sent a tired blond woman to look over everyone’s projects. She told me it was good, but I wrote my name in the wrong corner and so i’ll have to leave. I told her it was a good 10-minute encapsulation of my graduate school experience.

We (I don’t know who I was with) were trying to keep up with Kevin MacDonald, but he ducked into a grocery store or a hardware store. Since we lost him, the guy I was with found this crackhouse lookin’ place that had a warped front door. Written on it was “home of the vocal star of Powerpuff Girls: Episode Nine.” My friend just barged in, knocking on the door while opening it. He immediately began to look at the softcore porn laying around. The vocal star shrieked and took us downstairs. I looked through her books while she and my friend talked. She had three copies of Mother Goose (“One is for the pictures,” she said. “Did you color in yours this pretty? I didn’t think so.”) I also found her pulp fiction collection, featuring Earl Stanley Gardner’s “The Case of the Man who went to the Planets for Cheese-Colored Guns.” A leggy model was on the front, of course.