There is nothing more boring than other people's dreams...

[Momò Nin]

thanks, read it, and will read it again, thanks

On Mon, 1 Jun 2020 at 13:20, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:

> ...and yet I feel compelled to share this one with you folks.
>
> LAST NIGHT'S DREAM
> Monday June 1
>
> Me and dad, dead lo these past ten years, are in an old black car. I think
> it's an Eldorado. He's driving. We pass the customs building that leads to
> a bridge across the river to Maine, USA, and watch in our mirrors as
> some ragged, bearded jackass steals a box full of valuables from the trunk
> of our car while we idle at a red light.
>
> We take chase, my father in the car, peeling out in a dangerous maneuver no
> doubt learned decades ago in the military, and myself on foot.
>
> I tend to think of every city as an extension, an extrapolation, of the
> small town where I grew up. Most differences are really just a matter of
> size. In every city where I've spent any time, I've eventually been able to
> figure out the lay by  instinctively organizing things into orders of
> magnitude.
>
> Small, half-hidden corners of rooftop tar paper, vent exhausts and rusted
> out black iron back stairways leading to lonely doorways -- home to
> wretched handfuls at most -- stand in for vast tenements, abandoned to the
> countless abandoned. The lone hilltop cathedral becomes a vast complex of
> titanic, monuments, buzzing with systolic and diastolic flows of humanity,
> a pulse of declarative worship in honor of sports, or the arts, or
> commerce, or all three, trading out one form of temporary eternity for
> another; looming and teetering nervously in more ways than one, forever
> promising a collapse impossible to avoid and still yet to take place.
>
> A beautiful girl -- whom I do not recognize and cannot conjure now -- joins
> me and we cross another bridge, this one over the hydroelectric dam that
> powers much of the city. We walk past the middle school we both attended,
> right next to the belching mill, huge in its brown and beige bulk crowned
> by silvery smokestacks, that is the cancerous heart of town. Then we walk
> up one of the streets populated by those who specialize in trade --
> clothing boutiques, restaurants, electronics, furniture, media... and
> banks, of course.
>
> We take a left turn, walk by city hall, the postal building, the fire hall
> and other civic concerns, before passing into a part of town where fewer
> people seem willing to commit to illusions. A two screen movie theater, a
> bowling alley, a tavern, a pub, a pool hall. We turn again, lest we find
> ourselves wandering the wasteland of auto dealerships, woodlots, and
> half-empty commercial parks, and find ourselves approaching what some still
> reflexively call "the old part of town".
>
> Buildings of a distinctly sour vintage hug up close to the sidewalks, and
> even closer to each other, dark burgundies, greens, the kinds of blues you
> only see in prewar neighborhoods, where the postwar dividend never quite
> sank in, somewhere beyond the limits of wealth's much-ballyhoo'd capillary
> action. Wood, gone grey, worm-eaten, half-rotten. Bricks the color of old
> blood. Windows with glass cracked, broken or so old its begun to sag and
> warp, behind which, more often than not, you can see nothing. Lights off,
> businesses closed, either for the day or permanently. We decide to double
> back before the haunted sensation we were feeling became too difficult to
> shake, and to see what was what in the center of town proper.
>
> Walking along a vaguely rainbow shaped rise and fall of a road, overpassing
> a wide strap of tracks leading to what was once a very active train yard
> visible just a couple miles distant alongside the river separating two
> nations, we reach the apex and I remark to my companion that from here,
> just beyond the wire fence keeping people off the tracks and a closed in
> yard strewn with patio furniture, sun-bleached plastic toys, months' worth
> of empty beer bottles and wildly overgrown weeds, we can see into the back
> courtyard of what was once the most populous apartment building in town. I
> even point out the window to the tiny fifth floor walk up cold water
> efficiency where my grandfather once lived -- nothing more than a bed, a
> sink and a door -- before he met the woman with whom he would sire ten
> children, the penultimate of whom would eventually become my mother.
>
> As evening turns purple, we at last find ourselves approaching the center
> of town, just a bit downhill from the cathedral. We both remark on how
> precarious a recent addition to the cathedral seems, despite its gaudy,
> square solidity; how dangerous, like some vast, ornately filigreed gold
> ingot perched atop a foundation of woven straw. We talk of its so-called
> "design failures", glib, but I am silently unable to deny the beauty of
> those few portions accidentally imbued with whatever in architecture passes
> for grace.
>
> Who knows? Maybe it's just a byproduct of having to tilt one's head
> back, and look up.
>
> As I approach a small, milling crowd congregating around the golden light
> and glass doors of a popular evening spot, I notice that my walking
> companion has disappeared. Nevertheless, I am warmly greeted by the owner,
> who looks almost exactly like Jackie Gleason in his prime. His arm
> outstretched, he pushes open the door and beckons me in, where I spot my
> father, dead lo these past ten years. I thank Jackie, and enter.
>
> Then I wake up.
> --
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>