This is just a cut and paste from my dreams log.
I have almost sixty dreams at this point, which I think is a pretty healthy total over about two months. I haven’t logged every dream I’ve had though because sometimes they are too fleeting, but I’d say I’ve lost probably only 1 out of every 10 nights that I slept, dreamt, and remembered them for even a second. Still, most nights I have dreams and even for naps. I found out also that if I sleep for 20 minutes sometimes I still have a dream.
From looking at the tags, I seem to dream about the things I do the most: I dream a lot about video games, which I spend a lot of time doing, and I dream quite often about television. The reason for the television dreams is pretty interesting. I do not watch television because we don’t have cable or anything, but when I go to sleep, I put on a DVD or watch streaming Netflix, and usually it’s of a television show like Law & Order or CSI.
I also dream a lot about celebrities, which is not surprising. What really surprised me was how often I dream about airplanes. I don’t really fly much, but I don’t much like it when I do. I’m pretty phobic, not that I won’t fly, but I’m always really anxious when I have to. The dream is probably more a manifestation of my anxiety rather than of actual airplanes.
Also corpses, I dream of dead bodies a lot. Probably because of the television I watch before bed (see: the shows I mentioned earlier).
I want to write a little bit about this without spoiling too much of the book/movie, but it’s kind of impossible. I’ll probably have to get at least a little specific.
A page of script is about a minute of film time, give or take, but a book page has way more content than any page in script format. Unless a story is around 80 pages long, it’s obviously going to have way too much information in it than you need or can use for a script. Usually characters are removed or plot details can be changed. That’s ok. Movies are adaptations of books. They cannot be perfectly the same.
The problem I have with Hollywood is that since the beginning of time, stories have had completely tragic endings where everyone dies, but Hollywood does not accept this. In The Ruins, a group of tourists end up in an unescapable situation and all of them die. The movie (which I haven’t seen, I’ve just read a detailed synopsis) has a person survive. It bothers me, not only because I love the tragic and fatal, but because I have seen this happen in many movies.
Sometimes it’s nice to read a story where no one is happy and everyone dies. Sometimes I want to read a story where the cycle isn’t broken, where nothing is out of the ordinary for their situation, but only for us. I see there’s no way out, and it’s comforting for me to watch them attempt it.
I don’t think Abi’s actually going to get in touch with me, so I resign myself to staying home for the night. I go to the corner store with the two dollars in quarters left over from laundry last week and I buy some candy and a little box of pasta sauce. I eat a bowl of pasta and Nutty bars and play Persona 4 for an hour and then my phone rings. Abi had to get my number from someone else, but she tells me it’s gonna be a while before they’re done with dinner. While waiting for her, I die in my video game by accidentally casting a strong spell on a bird who has a reflection shield. And then it’s a few hours later, and I put on my shoes and sit on the couch. Abi still hasn’t called me, and then I psych myself out, tell myself I don’t want to go.
Two minutes later, she calls. My shoes are still on so I decide I should meet them. While I’m waiting for the bus, a white car pulls up on the other side of the street and two people get out and yell at each other. The woman is yelling that she’s scared, but he seems to just be wanting to drop her off. I pause my iPod and try to make it seem like I’m not paying attention. He gets back in the car and starts to drive away, but she runs after him. He stops, lets her in, and I hear them screaming at each other loudly until they’re out of sight. The sun is setting. The bus comes.
There’s a thin redheaded guy sitting across from me reading a book. I want to know what he’s reading, but I can’t quite make out the title. I can tell it’s one of those Penguin classic books. A few people get off of the bus with me when I go to make the connection for the train. One of them is that guy. I walk up the stairs to the platform, get a better look at his face. He looks like a coworker from when I was working at the library in Evanston. He’s too gaunt, his teeth aren’t crooked enough, his glasses are the wrong shape.
I call Abi when I get to her stop. She comes out to meet me. Upstairs, I see our friend Thom, and a guy who I assume is her husband, Taylor. They’re playing Bubble Bobble on an NES hooked up to a HD television. Taylor talks to me about how Abi’s told him about me being a geek, about some of my youtube videos, and we start talking about Persona 4. I don’t know if he wants to impress me, or if I just want to be impressed, but he pulls out a Famicom and his copy of the board game style Mega Man game. The four of us play for a while, but the game is in Japanese so it’s just a guessing game.
Continue reading wading into the lake
There are a lot of poems inside of me lately. It sounds obnoxious, but when the words I think are part of a poem, they sound different, like I know they should be written down. They sound bigger, redder, brighter, slower, thicker. They don’t sound like words anymore, they are a command to write me down and let people hear me I am a fucking word that means something and here I am in your head in conjunction with all of these other words I need you to say me and now you’re even thinking in iambic pentameter write. Now.
It comes. It goes. When I was writing more for school, it came less, but now that I’m reading a lot of poetry and listening to people talk about it more again, the words are banging shutters with wind.
Lately, I haven’t felt like writing them down. I don’t know if they mean anything or say anything more or if they exist for a purpose other than me enjoying them.
So, in the kitchen, while putting away dishes, I put a handful of spoons in the spoon-shaped section of the utensil holder, and the words are there. I tell them to go away. I think it’s divided: the part of me that wants to write is too small right now, wasn’t eating the cake and eggs the lazy, unforgiving, self-hating part was.
I just wanted to point out here that I’ve been playing a lot of Katamari lately — I bought Katamari Forever when it came out, and on a forum I frequent, we’re doing a competition for Katamari Damacy, the first game. If you don’t know about the game, it’s a game where you have a ball and you roll up small object in order to make your ball bigger which in turn allows you roll up bigger objects, leading you to eventually roll up the moon.
The game is amazing.
Anyway, I have been getting way too serious when I’m playing this game, and it’s kind of freaking me out. When I play Grand Theft Auto, if someone shoots me, or the cops show up, I start fucking murdering bitches, which makes sense, but with Katamari games, I tend to seriously tense up when I start bumping into things and pieces of my katamari start falling off.
I was just playing a level that I died in twice (I don’t know what was up with it — just couldn’t get my rhythm in it) and a car shaped like a swan was in my way and I got stuck. I couldn’t get around it and it kept bumping into me and pushing me in bad directions and making my katamari smaller. So I finally got away, thought to myself that I was going to go get bigger to go get my revenge. I rolled up some stuff to get bigger and came back to the street where that stupid swancar was and rolled that thing up.
It made me feel so good. I might have a problem.
I was about to go to sleep when a friend linked me to this live stream of someone doing a hula hoop marathon. As of me writing this, he’s been going for thirty five hours, no breaks, and needs to make it past seventy five in order to beat the record. A quick search for his name, Aaron Hibbs, pulls up a news article about him training for this back in 2007, but I’m unsure what happened between then and now. There’s also an article here talking about what’s going on in this stream.
The audio on the stream link is horrendous so I suggest turning it off or down if you plan on watching for a while. You won’t expect to, but it’s kind of hypnotizing.
It just brings up two points to me: 1) you can see anything on the internet, and 2) people will try anything to be the best.
I want to be a writer, I guess, when ever I do actually feel like being one, because I want people to do for me what I just saw a crowd of people do for Lenelle Moïse. Even just one person and even not audibly.
I just watched a performance of Womb-Words Thirsting and I gotta say I was pretty blown away. Linelle is a Haitian-American spoken word poet who pretty much ran the gamut of queer thought tonight. She sang, encouraged audience participation, jumped around, and bellowed her way through some crazy lyrics about queerness, oppression, and rage in society. Her poems were easy for me to identify with for the most part and she really knew how to command. People were there with her instead of just watching a movie of someone still figured.
And she definitely had me thinking: she has so much to talk about as an immigrant, a lesbian, an activist, and she touches people because they feel someone they can identify with, someone who is speaking with them and for them. She says things I’ve not heard of in ways that were interesting and new to me.
That’s the kind of person who should do poetry or spoken word, a person with a special life or attitude. But it leaves me in the same place that reading or listening to any poetry leaves me. Jealousy, confusion, self depricating thoughts. I always appreciate the new outlooks that other poets have and listening to new thoughts, but it just reminds me that I’m not special, I don’t have a topic or lyric, and it’s bullshit so I’ll leave it there.
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About As a poet, I feel like any photography I do will always be a reflection of the words I use. When I think, I think in words, not images, unlike visual artists. This site houses a minimalist dream log, my poetry including poems from You May Waltz To Your Doom In Sanguine Stained Shoes, my photography, and a blog with Let's Play related entries.
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