Feeling sick and shitty on Tuesday the 11th, I did that thing where I wake up before dawn to go to the bathroom, and on getting back to bed fall into turbosleep.  Woke up after ten, from this dream.

I was helping make a video game on a contract basis for etcn mxck, working with these other two guys, who happened to be the brothers in the band Twin Tribes.  Mostly I was working for the brothers, and they were dealing with the creep more directly.  We were doing ground work for somebody with less technical knowledge to come in and make the game – putting together assets and animation and test levels, etc.  There was an AI system for NPCs that needed tweaking – they wanted to be able to have a crowd realistically moving around a public place.  The shitty rich guy insisted on having the brothers come in for a meeting, and I got dragged along.

The building was a huge corporate thing with every level secured in a haphazard of rfid locks and poorly manned security checkpoints, escalators and elevators didn’t all get where you were supposed to be.  Architecturally inspired by the Seattle Public Library, I think.  The brothers and I got to where we were supposed to meet mxck.  We walked around the corner and boom, there dude was, and he told us to get in bed with him.  It wasn’t a very big bed, but we were able to crowd in.

So there’s four people on this bed.  Apartheid Junior, Twin Tribes, and me.  It’s shifting and awkward and our heads keep bumping into each other.  The point is, in this dream I was so close, yet again.  I could just reach out and put my fingers through his eyeballs.  I could grip his throat and push in on the larynx with my thumbs.  Pop.  I coulda got him, and I definitely thought about it.

Not sure why this dream didn’t end with me killing the bastard.  I probably woke up right before doing it.  Anyway, say hi to my coworkers in video game development.  They make goth music and probably do not make video games.

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Ejection seats are things you only ever see in older media, like cartoons from my youth, or the even older war movie genre that influenced them.  They showed up in my dream last night, which -unusually- had a punchline.  Not much of a punchline, but we’ll get there.  It began as a dream about embarrassment and titties and the usual business, but evolved into a movie of the nebulous post-apocalyptic scifi dystopia common to cheap scifi in the ’90s.  Let’s say the stars were Gary Daniels, Billy Blanks, and Shannon Tweed.

Billy and Gary are new in town, part of a quasi-military organization that took over with no resistance because there was no local government.  Shannon’s people welcomed their new overlords, and she was showing Billy around town.  She kept getting pestered because she owed her boss a debt that could never actually be paid off, company store style, but muscle boy was a good distraction in the meantime.

The invaders set up bombs all over town for reasons, and had to use them with little warning to destroy the place.  There was just barely enough time for people to evacuate, and they did.  But Billy and Gary got held up past that last second, and needed to use these experimental ejection seats.  Something manufactured by their employer, but never tested.

Billy looked Gary in the eye and said something like, “it’s been an honor working with you sarge,” and Gary is all, “at ease soldier,” you know, tender affection.  Then they looked at the sky and pulled the lever.  It shot them up and away from the city.  Did the parachute open?  Did it get enough altitude to escape the explosion, and to catch enough wind to slow their descent?

Cut to a distant shot.  The ejection seat has disappeared from sight, and two fifty dollar bills are floating on the wind, away from their presumed crash and death.  Shannon gets the money, thinks, I’m homeless now, but this’ll help with my debt.  Her boss surveys the destruction of her city and sez, “you realize you owe me for this.”

Wocka wocka wocka, roll credits.

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In terms of the queue, this post was written ten days ago?  I had trouble sleeping, then fitful and shallow sleep, then passed out real hard and had heavy, sludgy dreams for an hour before the alarm got me.  I was in a murky disgusting house with some fire damage, but stuff had just been moved in on top of it, crap like paper towels and housewares piled in the sides of halls waiting to collapse underfoot.

There were multiple tracks of things going on.  Some girl child was crawling around on the floor trying real hard to seem disgusting and insane, eating cockroaches while leering at people and such.  Mostly I ignored her.  My late old sickly cat Mochi was there and I was trying to pet him.  He was real playful, which I remembered he had been for a brief moment the day before he died, but for some reason the memory of his death didn’t stir a recognition of incongruence in the situation, of the fact I was dreaming.

Somebody had left a cat with the job of selling food services, with a little outfit and cardboard sign stuck around its head.  The cat was trying to do this job, meowing to bring in customers (from the street? thought I was in a house), until it got something caught in its throat.  It had eaten some of the food that was left with it to demo the goods – rice and eggs cooked with soft yolks – and I helped dislodge it with a kitty cat heimlich maneuver.  I doubt I did it correctly.  There is a correct way IRL to help a cat barf.

Before during or after this, I was hanging out with some guy talking about jobs and the feral child said she was giving up looking into work with my employer because she heard the job sucks.  “Why would I want to do that?”  I threw out some salary figures that could be impressive to a youth that doesn’t know better and she thought about it.  Though by this time she was a hairless sphynx cat.

I asked the guy I was hanging out with, “Why can that cat talk, when the other two can’t?” (mochi and barfy) … About this time recognition of the mixed up details and the alarm converged and I woke up.

Years ago, my husband (then boyfriend) had a dream that he woke to find I had called off work sick.  Then he realized, “You called off sick, but Momo didn’t!  Oh no!”  So we had to help our cat Momo get dressed in a little outfit and make sure she got on the bus, didn’t run away.  I was a security guard so Momo was too in this world, and the outfit was scratchy blue polyester pants and collared shirt.

Anyway, cats should obviously get jobs and pay some bills.  Skivers.

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Didn’t get enough sleep and passed out pretty hard around noon, close to an hour.  Woke from an intense dream.  Lot of weird stuff going on, but I was trying to do a followup work call in the living room when these two freaks came barging in the front door with no permission – a vampire master and his wacky minion.  Very kramerish intro.  They presumed they’d be welcome because they brought a lot of pizza.  I actually did recognize them from somewhere and presume a prior acquaintance, but have lost that info since waking.

My husband asked me to guess what we had in the oven.  I didn’t know, and he made me look.  It was a living fish, with enough water to swim in.  My husband is vegetarian with a pescatarian allowance, based on the principle he could bring himself to kill a fish, but not any other animal people use for meat.  I wanted to ask him if this was, for him, a test of that principle, but could barely speak for some reason.

Still, he understood me, said yes, and asked me how you cut off their heads.  I said you cut through the gill area starting at the bottom, and as I explained, realized I was already doing that to a fish in the living room.  Oops, he meant to kill it himself!  He was in the kitchen and I tried to ask from around the corner, is the fish still in the oven?

But I could still barely speak.  I realized my eyes were closed and tried to ask if I was imagining the fish in front of me, but in doing so, I woke up for real, crazy winter sunlight streaming in my front window.  Woof.  Hey what about the pizza?

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had a dream i had some kind of side hustle scrubbing the area around the tracks in the seattle metro bus tunnels for chump change, which involved busting up hijinks down there sometimes.  first i came across miho hatori who was putting on a concert with some other alt culture clown on the keyboards, and a pet monkey named “smeek.”  they were passing a roach back and forth while she sang a cover of bjork’s “i play dead,” with new lyrics that implied miho literally eats joints.  as the lil reefer butt dwindled she ate the ashes.  morrissey and some standup comedian who might have been seinfeld came thru causing incidental ruckus, fleeing an unknown menace like abbott and costello.  in the process any number of these people may have been disintegrated, which i had to explain to a bored metro employee.

the menace turned out to be dracula, played by some newer actor whose name i don’t recall, but in reasonably effective bela lugosi drag, with more contemporary textural elements, like vampires in 90s or 10s movies – like he was partially made out of stone.  i barely glimpsed him as i chased his bumbling sidekicks.  forget who they were.

the point is, i found drac’s victim: my husband, who had lost his wallet and possessions to the vampire.  i woke up while fruitlessly searching for his wallet.  before that i had found contracts of my husband signing over bank accounts and personal property to dracula, like a will.  this included the sale of a debt owed by lindsay lohan to him.

in case you missed it, as i lost my streak yesterday i’ve decided to go back to intermittent posting, so i may miss days at a time.  sorry y’all.

i close my eyes again now.

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Taking a day off work for reasons, might try to get some writing in on Centennial Hills.  Not sure how capable I’ll be; we’ll see.  I’m feeling odd.  Sometimes I feel inspired to create something, specific or in general, but the sauce to actually do that is a whole separate feeling that does not always coincide.  One of the last things I did before I fell asleep was randomly think of an element for a story, but didn’t write it down.  Let’s see if I can remember…

A video game where you can name your enemy, like in Pokemon, and the protagonist as a child accidentally uses their own name, playing the rest of the game opposing their own moves.  Later in life, this connects thematically to something that’s going on in the current story.

Yesterday in the morning I was having some very specific and detailed dream about machinery.  Back up, get out of the way of the guy operating the mechanical arm.  No not there, there.  Now in the back yard the red construction light got broken because the thing fell into it, and it’s your fault.  This morning I dreamed I walked into a part of my house I never use and there was a toilet spewing water like a fountain, and a few other pipe leaks, and have these been going on for months?  Calls to mind a time I dreamed the floor of my apartment was covered with moss and broken boards, and scorpions and eight-inch isopods were moving in and out of the heap at random.

The day before yesterday and the day before that I had slasher dreams.  A hillbilly family like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre was going to kill this trucker, but they were shining him on like, just a minute, gotta do this thing for your truck before we let you drive away.  Gotta chop everybody up and their trucks too.  Heaps of body parts, just another day.

Another recent dream there was some kind of deadly competition with a lady as emcee.  If we play the game right we all fight to the death, but if we defeat the emcee maybe we can leave.  Were we undead in the vein of soulsborne game protagonists?  There was a guy with dwarfism and a lot of guns, to improve his odds of defeating her I traded legs with him so he could get around faster.  Left me with short legs, waiting for somebody else to win.

The RPGs I wasted the most time with as a youth were Palladium books, which are much scorned by most of the TTRPG community these days.  Understandable, but their ads in Dragon magazine circa 1988 always worked so well on me.  I sometimes get curious what people were saying about them online and it ain’t much.  One time when I looked it up on tumblr, I found a person talking about their few meatspace RPG experiences were all with one of those games, either Rifts of the Palladium FRPG.  Whichever it was, they had memorized the rules for a “mystic” character class with a combination of psychic and magic powers.  Recently I thought of that, of the mystic character class, RPGs in general.  What is the appeal in making your own little guys in somebody else’s world?  Like a billion other dorks, I still have an embryonic fantasy RPG of my own laying in docs and on scraps of paper; maybe all of it is still chasing the weird thrill I got off of old Palladium ads.

Been listening to Maharaji’s Seward Park again.  My boyfriend said it’s a novelty song.  The casio dog bark effect?  Come on.  But I say no.  It’s incredibly dated and corny, but for its time, it was a very legit hip hop song.  So cool.  Rappin’ Duke by John Wayne was a novelty song.  Seward Park ain’t that.

Mish mash mush.  These are all things that could be converted into new art, written or visual or something else, a video game, a poem, a song.  Will it happen?  Maybe this post is the closest any of the creative slurry gets to achieving expression.  Almost certainly it will be.  But u kno, all we are is dust in the wind, and our daydreams even more so.  Take it easy.

Peace!

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