the heat and dreams

so it turns out that my car doesn't have any air conditioning, but i already knew that. you didn't, because that is not generally a piece of information that present to people unprovoked. anyway, me and kathleen took a road trip of sorts down to san francisco and camped along the way in national park/forest/recreation area campgrounds, which are the best kind of campgrounds and i had this amazing vivid dream in our tent one night and i am going to tell you about it, but after i tell you about the heat.

red bluff, california is the fucking hottest place i have ever been. you see, we were visiting lassen volcano (which erupted may 19th and may 22nd, 1915) and we were at an elevation of over 8000' and it was hot up there (but not because it is a volcano, though that's awfully clever) and if i keep adding parenthetical asides to my sentences, i'll never get through this thought. ahem. as we drove west down toward red bluff (at 348' in elevation) the temperature, which is generally one of many components that make up what we call our experiences, began to rise. at about 97 i started to monitor the situation, because at 97 temperature became the only component of living that i was capable of paying attention to and here's one reason why: it became gradually apparent to me that my eyeballs were baking in their sockets. 

now i can tolerate physical discomfort generally well, but heat will be the death of me. so with that in mind, and the fact that there was no air conditioning, so our windows were open, picture this scene: one large bearded man of northern european ancestry and a fair freckled lady of irish descent were barreling down a northern california highway at 75 miles an hour with the windows wide open, unable to talk or listen to music for all the buffeting wind noise pulsing in our heads. the bearded man at the wheel was monitoring the thermometer with a sense of foreboding as it the numbers rose and rose. the only communication in the car was every couple of minutes when the man would yell "99...100...101..." over the constant throbbing of the wind. (oh, i think i should mention that the bearded man was me, because i don't want to talk in the third person anymore.) at 105, i started to notice that i didn't seem to be sweating. then i realized that that wasn't true at all, my backside was drenched and i seemed to be stuck to the leather car seat, but everywhere the hot wind hit me was bone dry. my sweat was evaporating before i could feel it. my eyes dried out if i kept them open for more than a second. at 107 we decided to take a picture of the dashboard, where the temperature readout was. if you're all like "that doesn't sound hot", then try sitting in a sauna for two hours. 

whenever one part of my body touched another part, there was an instant wetness. (and to steer this story toward the inappropriate, there are instances where that is desirable, but alas this wasn't one. and for the most part though, this drive wasn't hot and wet, just hot and dry.) when the thermometer topped out at 112, sitting in traffic in red bluff (and know that we were the only car with its windows open), i couldn't even bear the electrical attraction between my subatomic particles. i so desperately wanted a dark matter breeze to blow through my being (haha! what a convenient and ill-defined explanation for the real mass of the universe being so much greater than the observable mass. and also, if there was a dark matter breeze blowing through my body, and there might have been, it sure didn't help.) think of this too, we had been driving in that temperature for long enough that all of our water was 107.

but if you don't feel sympathetic to our plight, well then you're right. there was so much good on the trip, that having to reconstitute our eyeballs was just an unpleasant aside. and anyway, san francisco was in the low-60s when we got there later that night.

now to shift gears completely to a dream i had while camping (and the dream i had last night that reminded me that i had the dream that i had while camping)...

look, i have this friend greg and we all lived on this farm, all of my friends and me. so greg fell for this chicken that lived on the farm, like followed it around all day. he named it grubwalker. and you know how chickens move, sometimes running and flapping and jumping all zig-zaggy, well greg would just shuffle along behind the chicken, to the exclusion of everything else. he wasn't even interested in human contact. he just loved grubwalker, he loved that chicken.

now this was a dream, right, so there was no narrative involved. i was just shown briefly this magical relationship between my friend and a chicken. i was sort of sad that greg didn't want to interact with humans anymore, but i was happy that he had found fulfillment (although it was slightly codependent). now i can see three separate aspects of the dream that relate to my life at the moment, the first is this youtube video i saw about a dog and an elephant who are best friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBtFTF2ii7U), the second is the fact that i have been entertaining the idea of raising some chickens in my backyard, and third is that my friends are getting married and i am happy for them, but there is also this realization (or maybe a misconception) that marriage will somehow change the dynamic of my relationship with them. 

i have no idea why it was greg who fell for the chicken, that part doesn't make any sense. (i would also say that greg probably eats more chickens than any of my other friends, so that adds another layer of strangeness to this dream. he is at least in the top three...) dreams are so awesome.

and last night i was a speed-skate cross racer, which, as far as i know is a sport that i just made up. it is like motocross or snowboard cross (boardercross, bro!), but on speed skates. bonnie blair eat your heart out (tony blair eat your heart out too). it takes place in an arena on this crazy topographical ice. it is totally nuts. i was decent, but not great. my dream centered on this race where i had my best lifetime finish, so that was encouraging. i think i got second or third, but there were some serious competitors. and anyway, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

(and who needs cohesion? who needs narrative or punctuation? this isn't a novel, this is a blog for crying out loud! you want a story, be my editor. sheesh.)

kfc double down sandwich

why do you mention this you ask? because the bread is replaced with fried chicken. then what is inside the sandwich you ask? bacon and cheese and special sauce. where can i get one you ask? only in rhode island and nebraska. have we finally figured out how to create food products with no redeeming nutritional value you ask? we figured that out a while ago. then what does this sandwich represent you ask? taken in conjunction with "my humps", the direction our political discourse has headed in this country, and the fascination with the sordid details of michael jackson's life (including the fact that his death was ruled a homicide), this sandwich represents the downfall of human civilization. it was a pretty good run though, wasn't it?

oh mythology

i don't want to assign any mystical powers to myself, and actually i have none, but there was an instance two weekends ago where i was exposed simultaneously to my past and a (the?) future and i was lucky in that i immediately recognized the difference. and it is a rare occasion to feel so privy, to feel as though you understand the choices you have and to understand why you are making decisions you are making. and if you're yearning for more specifics, well then i can't help you. (but you know it has to do with love, right? only love is capable of seeping into the otherwise neatly compartmentalized aspects of our lives). 

and i bring this up only because it is on my mind right now. there is a costume party tomorrow, the theme of which is gods and goddesses, and in determining which deity i wanted to emulate, i realized that i couldn't be anyone but janus (and oh, i just learned about him today!). the god of new beginnings. he has two faces, one looking to the past and one looking toward the future. 

and my future is this and not forever, but friday, a goddess will fall asleep with me and kiss me on both faces when i am waking up.

pause, sit with your breath or: from russia with love

the term "mouth-breather" is in the collective consciousness these days and the first time i ever heard it was in a woody allen stand-up routine, but it wasn't live. it was recorded and i was in a car with amy and jill and we were driving from garmisch-partenkirchen down to cinque terre, which is a fun thing to do if you ever find yourself in europe with amy and jill and a woody allen cd. and i don't think it is fair to call it a coincidence that the first time i have ever felt comfortable applying the label of mouth-breather to a person was when i was riding on a chinatown bus from new york to boston two fridays ago. it is not fair to call that a coincidence because one incident involved listening to woody allen in a car with two girls i like and the other incident involved sitting next to a loud russian on a chinatown bus and they are such unrelated incidents that they cannot be considered a coincidence.

now i'm sure you've ridden a chinatown bus. i like the lucky star, mostly because of the dragon wearing a backpack that adorns the sides. and also i like stopping at arby's where there always seem to be other lucky star busses parked letting people stretch out and get cheap beef sandwiches and use a bathroom that isn't quaking and braking and accelerating and decelerating and heaving you around. and it takes some figuring to determine which lucky star is the one you just got off of and which one would take you back to where you just came from if you got on it by accident.

so i was heading up to boston for mike's wedding and it was friday afternoon and i think everyone in new york was heading up to boston for mike's wedding, because the bus was full and so was the highway. it took six and a half hours. but i was waiting in line to board the bus behind this pretty girl and maybe she had tattoos somewhere, i don't know, but she was pretty. i thought to myself "this bus is going to be full, look at all these people in line" and also "i should sit next to this pretty girl and wouldn't that make the time on the bus go by faster?" so i didn't. i sat two rows behind her on the other side of the bus because maybe i would get both seats to myself if i looked gruff enough to scare people away. but the bus was full, like i knew it was going to be. so the last person on the bus was this behemoth of a russian man with a blackberry and a tight t-shirt and a baseball cap on and where else was he supposed to sit? 

so he plunked down beside me, all elbows and hanging over the armrest and he immediately launched into a heated discussion with another russian or maybe someone didn't speak russian, but who he wanted to bellow at regardless. he probably didn't need to use the phone, if the person on the other end was anywhere in connecticut i'm sure they could hear him if the wnd was blowing in the right direction and they tilted their head just so. as abruptly as the conversation started, ten minutes later it ended and by the time his hand, still grasping his phone descended to his lap, he was asleep. and he slept like he talked, bellicosely, but instead of some unseen recipient of his energies, the recipient was sitting exactly in my seat and shared all my fears and aspirations. in case that wasn't clear, the snoring mass of russian was piled onto me. his head was on my shoulder, bicep to my bicep, hand on my thigh.

"now this is interesting," i thought and "i can't believe we're only in cos cob."

we rode like that for a while and at least the air conditioning was on this time. then his phone rang and he launched into such another boisterous conversation that i almost forgot he had been asleep seconds before. ten minutes later, conversation over and i had my snoring russian blanket again. once his phone rang again i took the opportunity to get up and spread myself out under the pretenses of heading to the bathroom. not that i didn't have to pee, because i did, but mostly i wanted air around my body and not flesh. so i made it to the bathroom and shut the door and took some deep breaths (unadvisable) and got ready to start peeing and the driver decided to accelerate and switch lanes and brake, all in a span of three or four seconds. so i wedged myself in the tiny bathroom, elbows on walls, feet on the rim the toilet, anything i could do to keep from getting jostled and sending an errant stream trickling down my shorts and out under the door. but i couldn't bring myself to do it. i felt like some drunk in a cartoon, looking down at the bowl meandering it's way through my field of vision. finally, i looked at myself in the scratched up mirror, looked away, sighed and sat down on the toilet seat. i felt so defeated, sitting there peeing while connecticut heaved past me in fits and starts.

and stepped out of the bathroom, four or five minutes later  and made my way down the aisle. when i got to my row, the russian was dead asleep, hanging over the armrest, but i didn't need to wake him up. his phone rang...