Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
It was a weird dream; all i really remember was something about trying to play Peter Mulvey songs on a corn muffin, getting in the middle of a prison brawl, and Ashton Kutcher giving Clay Aiken a very sloppy blowjob.
I’m not sure if there was a causal relationship connecting one to the next, but i was as confused when i woke up as i was to see where Clay had chosen to get pierced.
by krisis
Dreams amalgamate my life and the inside of my head, suspending my disbelief by showing me what I want to happen. Sky has been a part of a lot of my dreams as of late; the Philadelphia skyline mapped in perfect three-dimensional detail.
Last night I found myself staring out from my IBC cubical view — I saw a strange dark swirling cloud dominating the distant skyline. Something struck me about that cloud — drew me to it, so out of place against the otherwise blue horizon. And, suddenly, the reinforced windows surrounding my floor were gone and I reached out my hand to meet fresh air, thirty-five floors about the ground.
Stepping up onto my desk, and then onto the window sill, I leapt out into the open expanse, the wind catching my body and propelling it upwards, ever upwards. I flew up to meet the blackness, only to find that like a passing plane it was ever higher than I thought. Half pushing against the increasingly distant ground, half pulling myself up towards its swirling vortex, I soon was close enough to see into its oily form.
Face to face with it, I found that it was not a dark cloud, but a nightmare, a nothing, a black bull hidden inside a swirling lightening storm. And I flew into its heart, striking out wildly against the air all around me, only to be driven down towards the earth by its horrible breath. Plummeting endlessly, like Gandalf and the Balrog. Unable to orient myself towards the great beast and push back against its power, slamming into the ground and whipped by sharp streams of rain, it combined unbearable pressure and swirling wind to tear the breath right out of me.
I remember it tumbling walls down around me, feeling the snap of ribs giving way against the onslaught and debris, and my last gasp for air as people shouted in the background, alarmed that I might be defeated outright. And i was.
Just because I am a superhero in my dreams does not mean I always win.
by krisis
I thought that maybe she had gotten thinner since the last time i saw her, but as i stared at her from across the room the lines on the side of her face slowly began to resolve in my vision. Clever, i suppose, even artful. Not any thinner, though. Still, i would have never thought to so carefully sketch in a smooth jawline with concealer, gracefully feline, to separate my face from my neck. Really they’re still the same, one right after another, but the girl gets points for trying.
I was made to truly shudder by someone talking about how his friends should all switch to a BA program from a BS. Sure, i’ve conducted similar conversations in my day, but his line of reasoning was so incomplete that i think he may have entirely broken his point. Still, it wasn’t my place to interrupt him so that his friends could hear what a BA of Journalism really consists of, no matter how much i might want to.
Days are very systematic, consisting of: waking up, checking rank, working, learning, and walking. There are more repetitions of each depending on the day, and the only way i’ve been able to keep track of where i am or where i’m going are the people that i encounter in between. Last night on the train two girls were talking in Creole, and one of them noticed how my eyes kept peering over my copy of Suicide whenever i could make out a few words of French. They were from Immaculata, and we spoke briefly about Classical Sociological Theory and the continuous length of Lancaster Avenue before i got off … only to find that i had de-trained a stop early. At first i was a little nervous, but i eventually found my way back to Lancaster Avenue and began my walk to the concert.
While life is slowly becoming routine again, dreams are getting more and more disparate with each passing night. At the end of last week i fell asleep with a playlist of music on, and my dream seemed to take place entirely within a single play of “Seams“, though it seemed much longer than four or five minutes. The setting was plain, just walking around in my old house talking to my mother and to Elise. However, at the onset of each chorus in the song i slowly began to unravel — literally to come apart at the seams. At first i hardly noticed, as the first chorus is quite short; the sensation was not dissimilar to stripping off wet bathing trunks. It was during the second chorus that i began to become really alarmed, as with each line some small part of me would loosen and fall to the ground. Skin came unclung from my legs, it unwound from around my midsection, it came off like fallen leaves from my chest and back. My mother and Elise did not notice, though, still blithely talking to me as we walked around inside my house. Each line now was an eternity … long enough for me to lose another part of myself to the inexorable process of coming apart at the seams, and to watch that part turn into so much dust as it hit the ground.
As the final chorus began i was so weak that i could barely support my own weight for the walk into the bathroom to check the scale, and even as i read it the pointer was get lower and lower. Suddenly i was singing too, “i wonder if anyone will notice,” and as i began to move towards the next line i found myself sprawled on out on my back, watching in horror as the last of me fell away to reveal my ribs and the beating red heart within. In just whispers now i was keeping up with the lyrics, endlessly repeating “at the seams” until i saw movement in my peripheral vision. Elise was suddenly there, crouching beside me and reaching out as if to lay a hand against my exposed ribcage.
Instead she extended a single slim finger, which slipped between two bones and allowed her to brush her fingertip gently against my heart. My insides collapsed upon themselves at her touch, unable to properly communicate the feeling i was enduring. At that moment the song resolved, and my eyes opened.
The first thing Elise asked when i told her about it was if the effects were realistic or like stop-motion animation. My eyes must have widened a little — because they were the latter, and it had been the first thing i thought when i woke up.
I do not think we will be making videos for my Songwriting class, but i can ask tomorrow afternoon. Anyhow, that concept would be entirely out of my budget… and, for that matter, so would “Under My Skin.”
Why am i awake, again?
by krisis
I try to listen to my body when it screams at me.
Earlier in the evening it seemed as though everyone suddenly needed to talk to me. Lindsay had locked herself out and needed me to let her in, our friend Chris called to leave a mysterious message about how “important” it was for me to call him, members of my music fraternity were hounding me via email and instant messenger. Just as suddenly, i needed to go to sleep. It wasn’t even midnight yet, and i didn’t feel tired; my body just didn’t want to operate. I couldn’t type, or think, just slide into a dreamy haze every time i relaxed and listened to the music i had on.
I bid everyone a farewell for the night, started a cd on tenth track, and was asleep before the end of the eleventh.
It was in that same manner that i woke up: ostensibly because i heard a noise, but really because my body needed fuel. Lately I seem to have found myself on a sort of a diet, which is to say that i’m not eating a pint of ice cream every third day and i’m not eating half a pound of chocolate as a midnight snack. I know, though, what waking up like that means: i need some sort of fuel.
Down in the kitchen my body was like a compass: milk rather than juice & two small pieces of chocolate. I was obviously a little dehydrated and a little low on sugar, though i would have never noticed it on my own. In retrospect, i had hardly drank anything yesterday – definitely not the half gallon of water that’s suggested. Similarly, i had only had sugar from a fruit salad much earlier in the day.
My body knew exactly what i needed once i was in the kitchen, but did it send me down there as well? Did i wake up with the explicit purpose of needing a drink? Was the vaguely disturbing dream i had been having my subconscious mind’s way of waking me up to refuel? The dream i had been having was definitely strange … the nearest i could come to describing it would be to say that the Borg were drugrunning from a largish warehouse that was being fronted as an Acme Supermarket that my mother and i drove into by mistake, and that our only means of survival were pretending to have been already assimilated and making sure to sell out of our small stock of vintage G.I. Joes (who would apparently inform their child owners of the distress we were in, because all of the adults were on the drugs). The overall tone of it was one of horror … knowing that the tiniest slip would make everyone aware that i wasn’t who i was pretending to be.
The birds are already trumpeting sunlight, and my body seems to be through with telling me what it needs to keep it going. If only the rest my life were so succinct.
by krisis
Sleep has the marvelous ability to make everything make sense that i wish life would learn how to use. Sleep wrapped itself around me last night in an unrelenting grip, and i don’t even remember getting up five times to turn off my alarm, although they all obviously happened. What i do remember is a dream where the green skin of my guitar was slowly unraveling, and where i found myself in Texas drinking a bottle of blue Gatorade i found in Alison‘s house.
The subconscious is obsessed with having everything in its right place, which has to make you wonder. If all of our dreams can make so much sense, despite the incredibly disparate elements therein, then why can’t our lives do the same? Obviously we are the ones in the way, because our brains (if left to their own devices) would happily resolve all of our problems into a neat narrative that would only seem unreasonable upon examination. The trouble is that we are professional examiners of life… we specialize in nitpicking and tearing apart every moment we encounter until it is just a shredded up set of possibilities lying in a mess on the floor.
Coincidence and Deja-Vu belong to dreams; they are not feelings so much as they are plot devices, meant to steer us in the fateful direction we are somehow intended to travel.