dreams of june

5 june 2021

I’m in a little orange car, loading up the back of it and suddenly find myself at the bottom of a hill. I’ve driven through the gift shop? it doesn’t look like anyone’s hurt but there are a bunch of squashed baskets and I’m debating whether I get out of the car and apologize or continue driving, especially because I’m late. I make tentative conversation with the woman at the counter, telling her I’ve been coming here for 30 years. 

10 june 2020

in an underground station which logically should be Times Square but looks nothing like it. I got off a train because I looked up and the station read (barely legible) “78” and realized I was somehow going the wrong direction. I get on a small train - only one longish car really, like the S shuttle, and get out at the next stop. I’m walking up a street that has an elevated over it. At the corner is something that looks like Stonehenge. It looks like it reads in a guidebook or someone’s essay. 

I make my appointment. There are two men - My Dinner with Andre? - though then one of them is young, I’m his tutor. I ask if he wants to see “Stonehenge” - and the other is reading some live feed that says [some famous figure] is currently touring the museum which is close by. We rush down there, hoping to kill two birds with one stone.

But there’s also a young woman in here. I’m reading a contract for her which she has been unable to “read between the lines of”.

11 june 2019

where it ends up is this gangster? punk? displaced youth? thinks I am responsible for his problems and is going to slice my face with a knife. It was a small town? street with one side? ski lift? and a battle raged back and forth between the gentrified/gentrifiers? colonized/colonizers? young/old? jets/sharks? where everyone was finally appeased/neutralized except for this one dude. I could feel his knife blade inside my nostril. Then we were in a building that had been turned into a community center and I tried to hide by going farther and farther upstairs but it turns out they had put the temple part up there so then I thought the male/female division would keep him away from me.

[from watching Julie (1956) I think, which starts out with her running (mid-story as it were) and ends with her sitting at the controls of an airplane, basically not moving, never once resorting to Doris Day smile/laugh to put men at ease, she is doing nothing but flying a plane and even though Louis Jordan is supposedly dead we NEVER SEE THE BODY and no one trips over it on the way in. Was that a Hayes Office thing? She allows herself one at the end but it is not a dazzler.]

11 june 2020

running down 8th st - behind Seamus’ sister? she looks behind me and worries aloud about the group of people who are trying to catch up with us but I know they are just running too. Somehow, I’m on a bus (same block) - it’s packed - an older Chinese couple get on, he gestures to the bus driver asking if they can charge their phones which the driver agrees to.

Then I’m in a McDonald’s  -  I don’t want to make a fuss since everyone is obviously in mourning but it seems clear they’ve forgotten my food. Then I’m on another line, have to kick a man’s bicycle out of the way.

12 june 2021

dream of elevator doors closing but the elevator isn’t open behind so we have like 6 inches? complicated transactions; nightlight going on in something like Spaceship Canada.

Having to explain my child. A layer of stars, like fog or meringue.

13 june 2020

Bryan Ferry in the back bar of where - Milady’s? offering to switch in my name to his songs. It’s not the point Bryan, I say, when I finally get to talk to him.

Other people offering me jobs. I’m in some building, get off on the wrong floor. Someone has their door open, I can see her, with guests, on a terrace or balcony off her apartment, mourning.

There is a food store! which is weird and unexpected. It sells foreign specialties, from some Eastern European country. Also novelty t-shirts. Jessica is there, running a pre-school. I start taking pictures and they want me to help put their book together. I explain it will take them a while to develop. No, it is more like the pictures I need to take haven’t happened yet. There’s a little girl in a high chair. She’s made something and I want to photograph that. She’s wearing it as a necklace.

I’m working on (a model? or just arranging the shelves) and a politician comes over (black, where do we know each other from?) asking me about mutual friends we have in Chicago.

I have to take something out of a basket which is really located on the corner of 54th and Sixth Ave. A t-shirt I’ve wrapped something in to take it home, after. But it’s turned into my laundry basket.

Eli asked me to bring back a lobster roll, which was the most unlikely part of the dream.

16 june 2020

going to a Bryan Ferry concert which is happening on a lawn - one looks down from a path - there are a series of these, also like the lawn at Last Year at Marienbad. I can see BF rehearsing with a giant top hat - oversized but it fits on his head without falling down, so it must just be proportionately too large after the crown? 

I’m waiting to see a shrink - inside now, but also a series of open rooms or booths (like the book fair section of CAA) where someone is trying to tell me all the courses/colleges are “oversubscribed” and thus the only way to get a spot is to take them to court. In her waiting room - two of us show up at the same time but there are also two of them? I’m given a large Plexiglas panel I can start writing my story down. It’s meant to be erasable but I like the ways the writing looks when you can see through it so am determined to keep it.

Bryan - autographs? - number one fan badge is a stupid thing they offer you on FB - is it actually a chef’s hat but black?

[no, weirdly, it is just like the hat an elderly “Pet Shop Boy” is wearing in a thumbnail of a Guardian article - did I see this yesterday? it’s a “listeners digest” from 6/15 so maybe? It’s Chris Lowe, now that I click on it - they look identical aside from their accessories, Lowe and Neil Tennant. Apparently Tennant coined a phrase “imperial phase” which is about pop stars at a juncture when they can do no wrong.]

20 june 2020

on the block of Broadway that used to have Turkquaz. There was some street demo that would turn into people sitting as in booths in a restaurant. I was with one group and then another. There was a group I was left out of, even though I had brought them there (Bonnie’s?) Also waiting in a restaurant for someone to come back who did a magic trick, night after night. E wanted to see the frogs? which would empty out into a pool at the end (end of the place or end of the trick? space or time?)

[it’s no good. what bits I was able to hold onto were dashed on the rocks of S’s insistence on speaking to me the minute I try to get out of bed, even though he’s still asleep, even though he didn’t actually say good morning dear in a weirdly sing-song way that makes it seem “ironic” but this time “how are you” and then when I answer I’m fine, says he assumed I was fine and we have to argue about what he actually said, all the while he’s asleep, because - why? - he can’t bear to miss anything?]

21 june 2020

I had promised to bring our coffee table down to an African woman who was running a pop-up dress shop on Broadway. Then Tara wanted it for PND and I realized I had already promised it.  In both cases, it was to serve refreshments. I offered, instead, to read out the tax return and explain all the lines.

21 june 2021

I’m being excluded from something - art making or crime solving? There are groups making tableaux but I can’t join any of them. I bring a small kitten to one but they take the kitten instead. On my way home there’s a side street where you can see two tracks, like skis, in the snow on the sidewalk. Someone comes from the shop to say doubled back this way so it seems he is only on a single ski (going over the tracks completely is not an option). 

26 june 2020

I was on a cross-country trip alone. How was I traveling? We arrived in Denver I think, which was full of squares and down-on-their heels Santas. I had to buy an orange. There were majestic luncheonettes.

27 june 2021

Mary R wants me to come with her after a party - it turns out she’s taken a lease on a large empty space in one of the subway stations on CPW (103 or 110 which is actually at 109) to open up a gym - there are workers down there putting it together. My joke is that now I’ll have a place to box and I make air jabs at the man who’s going to teach boxing: we know each other from long ago (SN? but it’s someone I actually find attractive not someone I accidentally slept with back then). He makes a joke about it (his attention towards me)  and is fake-singing but also really singing some old radio hit loudly at me as I walk down the street because I still have to get to work. There is snow everywhere and the pitch is very steep, much more than it is currently between CPW and Broadway, like it is a hillside in Italy or maybe it is that the scale of everything is reduced to 65% so that it’s possible to see all the buildings at once.

1 july 2021