3 Dreams & 2 Accidents

Erika Navarre's "Exquisite Moments" at Tugboat Gallery




Dream 1

I was half-awake listening to NPR Friday morning & they had a story of RFK's speech to a crowd just after the announcement that King had been murdered. In the dream the tears of the people around me fells as hard pieces of clear plastic. They bounced around the floor like ball bearings. The sound accumulated to sound almost like static above the speech.




Mike Hernandez-Stern's bike "Hidalgo"




Accident 1

I pulled into the Barnes & Noble parking lot Saturday just as a minivan was plowing through the windowed section to the cafe. At first my mind rejected what I'd seen. I kind of laughed to myself, thinking that it looked like a minivan had driven into the store. But as i stopped my car & looked I realized that this was just what had happened. Luckily no one was hurt. There were plenty of witnesses who saw it better than I had, so as the sirens could be heard I left.





Sherry Black's "Echo" at Tugboat Gallery




Dream 2

Friday night I dreamed that I was involved in some kind of strange installation poetry event. We were having readings in strange places, the bleachers to an olympic sized swimming pool while a practice was going on. An echoey stairwell. Zach & I were out on the street when a long line of inmates were being led into a Catholic church. For some reason, a huge crowd had gathered to watchin the inmates enter the church. Some of the inmates looked humble & frightened, some looked angry. One spit on Zach's shoe. Three small, wiry inmates were wearing hats of tanned leather. Zach was drinking a raspberry lambic beer; the bottle was hidden inside a coffee mug. I grabbed the bottle to take a sip, but he said no, there are cops everywhere. Something else happened then that I am not going to write about.




The String Demons





Accident 2

Saturday, maybe two hours after seeing the minivan drive into the bookstore I walked through the alley between my apartment & the Russ' grocery store. It smelled like dirty smoke. As I entered full view of the street I saw that a man was convulsing on a stretcher. Someone was moaning mournfully. A white guy was putting his oxford shirt back on, not sure why he would have taken it off. Two smashed cars were in the intersection. When i exited the store with some Romaine lettuce & some bread the man had been taken away in the ambulance. A crowd of people had gathered & they seemed to be looking at the spot where the man had been.




The Reinkordt-Polipnik Duo




Dream 3

Last night I dreamed that I was trying to teach a class of three students a literature course but I realized that we were inside a story & that we had nothing in our thoughts that hadn’t been written for us. Consequently it was difficult to understand literature. One of the students didn’t get it & argued with me. At one point in our argument I said that our experience was like in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern but because it hadn’t been written into the story he hadn’t read it & I realized that it had only been written into the story for me—perhaps as a character sketch. I ended up telling him that this was all part of my pedagogy. Then we were all inside a fairy tale & entered a candy house. A talking gingerbread man walked into the room. I said aloud to my students – now don’t eat him, remember the Levinas essay we read for class. The gingerbread man turned out to be a gingerbread boy & he ran to get his parents. We followed him (it didn’t occur to me that we’d broken into his house & that he might be scared) we followed him. The gingerbread dad emerged from a dark bedroom, I briefly considered what gingerbread person sex consisted of – then I was trying to explain to the gingerbread man that we were reading the story of his life, but he pointed toward a mirror & I saw that my students & I were all made of chocolate.









Tugboat & the studio complex opened on Friday. It's great to have a place be a focal point for artsy peeps in Lincoln again. I saw Anders' dad's country western band Friday. They were great. Mike is in town. He's great & his bike is great. I should have hung out with him more yesterday but I was feeling not-so-great so I watched The Conversation for the first time & it was great. Ande & Luke played music Friday night. They were great. My CV looks as great as it's going to after my final updating of it yesterday. Life lesson: don't wait 8 months to update CV. Life lesson 2: don't drive into big box bookstores.