August 2001

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August 3, 2001

1

A lot happened but all I can remember (Good God how many times have I written that?) is something about my job being in a place that was like a college or airport, like those two really resemble one another. I recall being in a large auditorium like a theater that, I got the feeling, was in a college or high school and this was the place where you went to see the plays—it looked much like the theater in a high school in the town where I grew up but was larger. I was on the left hand side of the auditorium as you looked toward the stage and about two-thirds of the way back to the end of the seats. I was walking alongside the rows of seats. The atmosphere was gloomy and dimly lit, like a movie theater about to present its Feature Presentation. In the front of the place was a large mauve curtain that, I presumed, hid the large movie screen. I get the feeling that Lisa was with me at this point and I wanted to tell her something about the job I was at, which was apparently at this place we were in. I felt the need, however, to be on a level walking surface before telling Lisa whatever the hell it was I needed to tell her; therefore, I kept walking across the theater floor and didn’t speak because the floor sloped slightly downward toward the screen and so this was no good—I needed a flat surface. We ended up walking around in a busy airport and that was when I finally felt like I could tell Lisa what I needed to say because the floor was flat here. There were many people around us at this point, busily rushing this way and that to do their airport stuff they had to do. There was another time when I was at this vague workplace and was trying to find Lisa because I guess she worked there, too. However, I couldn’t find her as I walked around and around looking for her. Eventually she came to work later and I somehow knew the time was either 8:30 or 10:30 p.m. Apparently she had not been to work at the beginning of the shift because she had a major migraine headache and therefore had called in sick. I remember seeing her as she walked toward me after arriving at work and she looked exactly like she did when she came home from summer camp two nights ago. She had no makeup on, her eyes looked sleepy and baggy, and she just had that worn-out look upon her whole body. She explained as she walked in that she had a terrible migraine so she stayed home to get some rest first. Now feeling better, she decided to come in to work. There were a few other people around her, fellow female workers perhaps, as she walked in to go to wherever it is she does her job. In the next part of this dream I was driving home from this job, where- and whatever that may have been. I don’t know specifically where the job was but I knew it was in downtown Tacoma, maybe around 9th or 11th Streets. I was driving down those hills in Tacoma that start around Pacific Avenue and go up, and when I got near the bottom of the hills there was a car in the road in front of me preventing me from going any further. The car was a light color but I can’t remember what kind of car it was. I stopped the car and then the next thing I recall is a police car being parked in back of me. Around this time I noticed that the car in front of me was no longer there but that was unimportant as I had more pressing issues to address at this time. The cop behind me got out of his car and walked to my window. He was a young guy in his early 30s with short black hair and was wearing the usual dark blue cop guise. He talked to me through my rolled down window and indicated to me that I had run a red light the night before and that was why he stopped me. I asked what time the night before and he said it had been at 10:30. I then told him that I worked from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and, therefore, it could not have been me because I was at work. As I was saying this I wondered if I had indeed left work the night before to go out driving somewhere, stuff I actually did from time to time when I worked 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. at a job I had from 1993 to 1995. The cop didn’t have any proof but was pretty adamant about what he said, saying that he had taken down my license plate number, which turned out to actually be the license plate number of my car. He also said he had gotten a good description of my car and this is when I got a rather good look at the car I was driving. It was a late 60s, early 70s Cutlass Olds or Camaro model and was in poor shape, the body rusty and gray and not taken very well care of. I talked to this guy, trying to explain to him that he couldn’t just have spotted me at some time earlier and decide to write me a ticket now for a traffic violation that happened 9 or 10 hours before. I thought about the photo cop theory, how pictures are taken of violating commuters and therefore cops are not needed to be there to see the action, and I considered this situation to be much like that. However, the cop made it well known to me that oh yes he can do that, and he proceeded to write me out a ticket for $57, which wasn’t that bad so I didn’t think much of it, although I did contemplate my squeaky clean record and knew that would suffer. 2

I was on the bottom of South Hill, across the street from a restaurant I used to work at in the early 1980s, but a little up further up the hill, almost across from that sloping driveway that Rufus Moses, my brother Charles, and I pushed Rufus’ out-of-gas car up sometime in 1981. Looking down into the city, I was on the right hand side of the road. There on the other side of the road near the restaurant was an older woman with long scraggly gray hair that reminded me of a woman that I saw on one of those reality cop TV shows who had been lying on the floor behind a couch with a guy when the cops busted in. She was suddenly on my side of the road briefly. There were some other people walking around and for some reason we felt it necessary to go into her house, which was actually right where the restaurant was, although the restaurant wasn’t there, just her house was. This place was a dump. When inside I could see through the walls as boards and plaster hung from holes made in the past. There was one section where the severed wall zigzagged up to the left from two feet off the ground where it interfaced with the wall to the right and then went up to the left at a 45-degree angle, revealing a three feet long section of the wall from ceiling to origin. Boards like 2 x 4s stuck out from the jagged edge. Through here I saw a man walking by that was on the outside of the house but since there was a hole in the wall, I could see him. It reminded me of when I talked to Vlad Decks, the realtor, back in 1997 or so about buying a house we were in down around Portland Avenue and a man walked through the yard outside and we glanced at him as he passed by. As I walked around this house that the woman owned I looked inside a bedroom and saw a mangy, dull red-colored blanket on a bed in the back right corner of a room and it was disgusting. I felt that if anyone were to use that bed then they would surely get crabs or some other cooties on them.