Tag: dream designs

the song of decaying carbon

I’ve been dreaming about owning a house lately. Not as in thinking about occasionally, but in the dead of the night when I’m unconscious sort of way. It’s a small house, this nonexistent place, two floors, with a bedroom upstairs that has a skylight over the bed and a golden wood floor, and solid, as the details, once discovered, do not change. Every time I have the dream, I discover new particulars. I learn them like running my fingers over the pattern of a patchwork blanket. The washroom is a blinding white, as are the french doors that lead to the back yard. We sing in the shower, there, loud enough to be heard from the kitchen. There are trees in the flower fenced back yard and a swing and books by the stairs, and sunlight, sunlight everywhere.

Is it a symptom of getting older? The reaching shadow of thirty stretching out backward in time to tease out a genetic desire to finally settle down? I feel threatened by these dreams, by how comfortable they are, how completely satisfied, when I’ve never been anywhere in reality I’ve wanted to permanantly live. They unsettle me. I wake feeling rattled, as if somewhere in my past I missed a crucial step that would have saved me, would have placed me, grounded me, given me a life I’d like to live, as if my repeated dreams are a glimpse into some trite, polished could-have-been. I refuse to give in to such quirks of fantasy. Instead I am annoyed at the notion. Why not images of a Jan Chipchase fantastic career? Or travel or amazing adventure? Why something so banal as a sweet, tiny hypothetical house? Where’s my flying car? My deregulated smart drugs? My endless supply of ferrets or fluffy kitten love?

The moment I knew I was lost, however, that this dream was doomed to repeat, is when I gave in to the myth, and lent it credence, and tried to slueth in my sleep, peering out the phantasmic windows, attempting to guess the location of this perfect fictional place.

Yeah yeah yeah I need a music box


Roadkill redux
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Work is a cool white room with a ticking clock. The light is pale, blocked by thick curtains that look like they were whitewashed by professionals going for some industrial chic. The bars on the windows are also white, as are the lighting fixtures. The floor is scuffed cement painted pale yellow and chilly in the summer heat. Along one wall are a short row of wooden supply shelves, papers and binder books filling every nook. I sit facing a computer in an L of desks put together in a corner of the foyer, with a phone to my right and a fax machine and copier behind me on a pink trestle table. It is pleasant, familiar through the conglomerated memory of a hundred offices. There is even a tall tropical plant in dubious health and a corkboard covered in pictures cut from magazines.

This morning I was upstairs sitting cross-legged on a chest high pile of foam sheets putting slips of information paper in with packaged silk duvets with my boss, Linda. She’s a lovely young woman, only 29, and engaged to be married. She’s incredibly well traveled, growing up first in China, then New York, then Madrid, and traveling every year. We talked about photography and where she used to live, education and thinking ahead. I’m young, but I think we get along. Now we’re eating ice-cream from the Casa Gelato across the street. It’s lunch-time, and I should find my sandwich.

I want to write something real, but I’m far too tired


like those posters from WWII
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

You know what I realized today? There are no pictures of anyone in hand-cuffs. There are no pictures of me especially in hand-cuffs. This impresses me. Not only did I dance with Avery in hand-cuffs for almost an hour, I was at one point hand-cuffed to a chair. My wrists, in fact, hurt. They are circled with abrasions and badly bruised. That I didn’t notice until many hours into consciousness may be a telling sign toward my level of exhaustion. I managed just over an entire twenty four hours awake on something like four asleep and then proceeded to sleep fitfully for only another three.

Ridiculously, I am awake still and the world is turning in the direction of yet another day. I found an answering machine message on the phone when I got home. Dream Designs has called me back again. I harbor a hope that this means that I’ve landed the job I’ve been crossing my fingers for. I’ve been in for two interviews and though the second was dealt in an impromptu manner, I can’t think why else they would have phoned me a third time.

Translink has finally sent me an in-voice and it bays an ugly cry of two hundred fifty, which is approximately half as loud as I was expecting. Still a blow, but a lighter strike than I imagined. This I should be able to roll with sooner than later, though it hurts to have such an unexpected chunk torn from my budgets. The fund raising party is still under consideration, complete with colour-it-in thermometer to measure distance to goal.