Dream in which I'm in some sort of PE class. The guy is lecturing, but Jonas, who's sitting beside me, keeps talking to me in a loud voice so that eventually the teacher comes and tells him he's gonna have to "come sit up by me." It's so gradeschool. Later, we play some sort of game which no one really understands.
Class is dismissed. I'm left there looking at this stick of deodorant or something on a podium. It's branded prominently and I feel like I'm at the end of the commercial when they zoom in. I guess this company is the corporate sponsor of the PE class?
Upon closer inspection it turns out to be a digital camera. But not just any digital camera; when not in use, this one images you and tries to respond in human ways. It's lensing and moving around now, studying me. It starts mimicking what I do. I eat something, and it gobbles up this metal ball. I'm worried it will choke.
Actually it's not a humanoid digital camera, it's a girl. I show my disapproval and she spits out the ball and walks off.
I go indoors. As I walk around, I start to realize how huge this place is: everything's interconnected, from people's houses to classrooms to fields like the one we played on. Some sort of huge complex. I'm meeting up with my dad. We're going to a party at another professor's house.
He flags me down and we start walking side-by-side and talking until we reach a crowded escalator, where we separate. Looking down on the back of his head I'm shocked to see that he has added blonde highlights. There are people speaking German behind me.
We meet up with some other older people who are also going to the party. Perhaps they know the way. One of them is what you would call a "neat lady," that is to say she looks like an old hippie and is still pretty free with what she does. When we reach a room with a grand piano and a strange harp in it, she sits down at the piano and starts playing very affectedly, improvising as she goes. As she transitions to the next chord she displays extreme pleasure with her choice. In fact, her pleasure becomes so great that her moans start to drown out the music. The onlookers become embarrassed.
The piano is now a folding lap keyboard like the one Rachmaninoff supposedly practiced the 3rd on, during his trans-Atlantic flight. She finishes.
"And there's the young married couple," somebody says in a delighted tone of voice. Indeed, there's another room to the side that opens into the piano room, and I see through the doorway a young couple lounging around.
The bass part from "Lacrymosa" has been booming on repeat from an adjacent apartment for weeks now. A game I'm guessing. Should the banality of the noise you're subjected to be factored into noise complaints? I.e. should blasting "Fuer Elise" be a felony? (If so UNL's belltower is on death row.)
My options here are, as I see them: (a) change my wireless router's firewall rules, which I've done before and is your typical passive aggressive geek approach, or (b) don my Squidmaster 2043 costume and charge their door, screaming the soprano part to "Dies Irae."
Dream in which we're riding horses in the woods. I slow down, there's smoke coming from something ahead and to the left. Must proceed with caution here. I peer over the brush and see a circle inscribed in the ground. Above the circle, levitating Native American women are floating around and around ritualistically. I reveal myself and approach.
I lose track of time. How long have I been here? It's time to go. Now they are not people floating but large cartoon leaves with sleeping faces. The chief leaf is off to the side watching over them. Before leaving I make a long deep bow before him to signify my respect.
Michelle is asleep. I put her on her horse and lead it by the bridle from mine. She wakes up in time to avoid a branch in the face. We are on a muddy track with all sorts of obstacles embedded in the mud, and I'm pointing them out to her. We speed up to a gallop, but my horse's legs get tangled in a big hidden branch beneath the mud surface. Michelle rides off.
I dismount and untangle the branch with a stick. It's not a branch though, it appears to be a tightly coiled set of metal links. The links are writhing around the end of my stick. It's a giant snake, and the usual chopping of the snakes sequence ensues.
On a flyer in my mailbox today enticing me to move to Canal Station in Ballard: "This urban village was designed to remind you of a time when quality and community mattered." So wait a second...quality and community definitely don't matter anymore in this place, but at least I'll be constantly saddened by their nostalgic apparition? Someone needs to go back to marketing school. Or learn to not be so honest. Same thing I guess.
...you walk by a "community gathering place" on a wednesday night and you see, through the window, a shirtless man lifting a 5 pound weight with his nipples while a handful of people watch on, smiling and clapping in approval.
My last night in Rolla I go over to Will S.'s house and we lay down tracks on his Concertmate keyboard (80 different rhythms, 150 instruments, small drum pad) into a crappy cassette recorder until 5 am. Lyrics from the heart--word.
We sing about the fearsome hierarchy of deep sea creatures, the mighty squid with his pulpy insides like stringy pumpkin guts, the shark, the whale. The whale finds himself beached in suburbia where he gradually adapts to the bewildering landscape of department stores and white picket fences. Pimple grease and 99% papers: we sing of math nerds. Racism, because, yo, we're not afraid to throw down on that. Finally an inane pop hook road song "rollin down 63" which basically just lists the towns on highway 63 towards & beyond Jeff City, but gets more boozy as we go so that at the end Will is chanting "beer in my hand, beer in the dash, beer in the carburetor..."