Aliens.

In last night's dream, which is the first I've had the ability to remember in vivid detail in I don't know how many years, I am overcome by the presence of UFOs. The first encounter so to speak is walking through an abandoned lot somewhere in Northern Liberties in Philadelphia and I come across a group of people who are hanging out on this lot and they are all young people and I'm walking across this lot and see a two strings extending into the air, but there are clouds and there is no way of seeing where the strings are going but upon getting much closer I notice that it's a swing set with amazingly long chains and on the swing is a person who has been paralyzed in fear or awe or something worse and they get sucked up and dragged but I never am able to tell the others and so they don't understand what the hell I'm talking about since it happened and is over and is a very strange account.

Later there is a poetry reading in a building that is on a very similar lot and I don't find out it's a reading until later but I am on that lot again and I see all these people and I am now hanging out with the people and then all of a sudden I see the same thing happen again but this time I drag the people over to where it's happening while it's happening and they all come and we are able to pull two or three people off the swing set, the entire thing of which is being pulled up into the the abyss of the sky and we succeed in rescuing these victims and then all of a sudden we see the giant ship that's shaped like a trapezoid and is extremely large and close to the ground speed off into the distance and we are so frightened and everything is going crazy but we don't know what to do. The ship zooms off into the distance.

Back inside the building I don't hear the poets or see them but I know it's a poetry reading for some reason and I decide to take a smoke break (I don't remember from the dream the interactions that happened inside the building even though I know I dreamed something . . . ) and I am outside talking blankly with one of the people who assisted me and we are all dumbfounded. I think at some point I go back into the building and grab more people who had no idea about the ship and bring them outside and they are able to see it zooming over some warehouses in the distance and fading instantaneously.

The other major part of the dream that happened before I woke up and decided to stop dreaming and start writing was during the smoke break when an older couple come outside and the man introduces me (I didn't get a name) and he starts talking about how he has had experiences with spaceships like this in the past but he doesn't describe them. He merely describes my performance during the poetry reading in a nostalgic way and it's the first reading he's been to in fifteen years and loves it. I don't really know what to say and at this point there are a lot of people milling about outside and the last image I have is of all of us, maybe twenty people, looking up into the sky and seeing this gray, metallic object (that is hardly as impressive as the original ship) very far up in the sky, floating up into outer space, disappearing, and everyone sitting still in amazement.

The weather in the dream was fair.

The Desert (Excerpt)

The first thing I did was buy a big dog.

I named the big dog Kurt Gödel.  I know almost nothing about Kurt Gödel except that he formulated the incompleteness theorem and starved himself to death.

I want to meet a girl who knows the same amount about Kurt Gödel that I do.  Probably.

The second thing I did was find a desert.  David Foster Wallace said that Tuscon was one of the only places he ever felt at home in.  He hung himself on his front porch in Bloomington, IL.  His dogs were barking.  His dogs were named Drone and Jeeves.

Harold Bloom covered all of this in The Anxiety of Influence I think.

Next I found an apartment near the desert.  I lived with a couple who fought a lot.  Sometimes I would break up the fights.  I would separate the couple and tell each of them that they hated each other and the best thing to do for all parties was to end things amicably.  I told her he says these things because he loves you and is passionate.  I told him she hits you with hangers because you she knows you won’t hit her back in any serious way.  My windows faced the desert.

A window that faces the desert looks different than a television show set in the desert.  The desert in your window is one color.

The dog liked the desert.

I always imagined I would see guys in the desert with metal detectors.  I always felt that sand and metal detectors went together.  There is an episode of Pete and Pete where the dad brings a metal detector to the beach and finds a Cadillac buried in the sand.  The family spends all day digging out the Cadillac and then they drive home in the Cadillac.  How did they get to the beach though?

This was the period where I often did Yoga.  It wasn’t real Yoga because learned all the positions from a Google image search for “Yoga.”  It was stretching, with grace.  This was back when I was trying to be happy.  This also explains why I bought the dog (Kurt Gödel).

I did lots of jumping jacks too.  One time I recorded video of myself doing jumping jacks to see if I was getting the timing right.  I stopped doing jumping jacks after that.

I started waking up at 9 o’clock.  Waking up at 9 o’clock makes you want to do things like get a haircut.

I got a military style haircut.  People looked me in the eyes and said “thank you for your service” and I would say “You are welcome.  Enjoy your freedom.”  One time a boy asked me how many people I’d killed and I had to tell him none.  The boy was disappointed and his disappointment disappointed me.

My dog got pregnant by another species of dog.  She gave birth to cytoplasm-filled water-balloons.  She wept and I held her and said “poor Kurt Gödel” like two hundred times.

Reading Terminal Market

To: White Negro

You could do some serious kidnapping in that building.

From: White Negro

Yeah.  But the kids keep coming so its pointless.

The Best Part

is when she wakes up to pee
around six

wraps a towel around
exits, enters

towel drops and
she's back, wrapping your arms around

making everything the same
again