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.)