dreamscape writing 1 Mar 2018

[This dream occurred after I had gone back to sleep following my morning thankfulness ceremony, having eschewed my morning meditation practice due to poor sleep and being in a foul mood.]

I and a handful of others were in a steam locomotive working our way through a long system of tunnels. We’d come far already, having traveled a great distance under what felt like a vast mountain. Reaching a fork in the path, the train split into two part, each with its own locomotive. From an initial position at the front of the first loc my perspective switched to the cow-catcher on the second engine, from where I could see and hear the engineers running them talking to one another. The first loc was driven by a dark-faced man, the second by a woman with dark hair. They were both wearing World War 1 style doughboy helmets and had to duck back into their compartments repeatedly due to the tightness of the translucent white tunnels through which we passed. (The tunnels were open at parts, bisected here and there by pillars that seemed organic, as if they’d grown into place.) The trains rapidly decelerated, and the female driver informed her counterpart that the tracks stopped just up ahead.

At least five people left the trains and walked into a large cavern located at the tracks’ terminus. Both tunnels opened up into the cavern via vaulted passageways. The rear and side walls of the cavern were of rough-hewn, living stone about five meters high and ten meters wide. Its ceiling was shored up by rough timber scaffolding and sloped in a rounded fashion downward from the rear wall forward, which I could see had a door of wooden planks set into it, locked with heavy iron chains. (The cavern was shaped like the quarter of a cylinder.) I and the others began to explore the cavern, finding a running spring to our left (protected by a rusted iron fence whose gate stood open) and four separate raised garden beds, two on each side with a shallow trough running between them. I began planning out where we could sleep and in which beds we could plant crops. As the others continued to explore, I floated over and examined the locked door, at which point I discovered that some of the planks had fallen aside, revealing through a square of intact mosquito netting (set into a framework painted red) a suburban street beyond (the street was one located on a hill above UCLA in Westwood, CA). Our group rejoiced upon finding that our journey was nearly complete.

Using a power-drill I then began to try to pull out the large screws that secured the chains to the crude planks of the door. They were slotted screws and my bit kept slipping, as I was using a Phillips-head. Suddenly, I and two other unseen presences were sitting on a vast mudflat which stretched ahead of us for at least five hundred meters, terminating in a coastal road with tall green mountains rising above it. The screws I was trying to undo secured not a door but chains wrapped around a gambling machine the size of a 1980s boombox. The machine had slots for coins and bills, the jackpot being a million dollars. I asked one of the others for a dollar to feed into the jackpot slot and was rebuffed. Attached to the rear, right-hand side of the gambling machine were various removable implements such as a multitool and an old-fashioned label maker, both of which slotted neatly in grooves designed for them. (The label maker was marked with the numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19, and others.) I was attaching a slotted screw-bit to the multitool (for some reason, it featured a low-quality, full-sized steak knife), removing other tools so that I could manipulate the screws using the short bit. At that point the seawater started to rise around us and I patted my left pants pocket, dismayed to find my mobile phone located there. The unseen others and I grabbed the gambling machine and scattered tools and rushed for a mound of mud behind us, at which point I saw at least two others, the dark-haired woman and a man, bathing in a pool of blood-red liquid to our left. (We became halfway submerged before reaching the mound, which caused me to fear for my mobile phone and plan for ways to dry it out using rice.) Once reaching higher ground, a blond-haired woman jumped carelessly into the aforementioned, gated spring, which now filled a deep basin of tan sandstone, the roof and one of the sidewalls of the cavern having disappeared. The dark-haired woman, still dripping with red fluid, entered the pool as well. When she resurfaced her hair was also blond. I turned to look at the far shore and reckoned it would take us at least an hour to swim over to it, the mudflats upon which we’d been sitting have been entirely filled up by the sea.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

a terrifying visage

sticker graffiti street art found 2016 in Los Angeles, CA, that depicts an hirsute demonic male face that has horns, an occluded third eye, flippers or gills, fangs, and a protruding tongue

bodies and hair

Sunk down in the marshes acidic and deep were found a few persons who appeared asleep. The chemical stew there had preserved their hides in such a fine fashion they appeared alive – with clothes on their bodies and hair on their heads to every appearance they did not seem dead. The fibers and leather that clung to their skin were carefully removed before did begin a thorough analysis of all their tattoos as well as their last meals, tooth-wearing, and shoes. Much insight was gained into their ancient rites and work it proceeded both daytime and night and some tools and weapons were found buried there that were still so sharp that they could split a hair. The remains and sundry are now on display in Grig's large Museum Of Then And Today that sits on the banks of the frothy Yalung whose doors they stand open to old and to young. Stop by for a visit, see with your own eyes, come gasp with delightful and pleasant surprise at all of the riches dug up from below that make up this solemn yet insightful show.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

Romney's hair quits

Following the failure of its host to gain the U.S. presidency, the alien hairpiece known to its fellow space-faring coiffures as ch'ch'iibuk violated the terms of its contract by leaving early. 'This blows – I'm outsville,' is the last verified written message ch'ch'iibuk left for the Republican challenger before vanishing as if into a puff of smoke. (In reality, it sealed itself into a box of cheap, processed sausages and re-gifted trinkets that the Romney family then sent to the White House as a congratulatory gift; ch'ch'iibuk fled in hopes of supplanting the toupee of one of president Obama's lesser aides.)

“That god-damn motherfucker,” governor Romney said while tearing through his Massachusetts home in search of the missing wig, his scalp pale and oddly barren. “That piece of shit motherfucked me! Outright motherfucked me. How dare he violate his contract?! If I have to go back to wearing that scratchy old... the Council of Intergalactic Species Relations [CISR] will hear of this in about 3 minutes. Honey – where's my phone?” Instead of replying that the device was on the couch next to her, Ann Romney broke down and started to cry. “There it is,” Mr. Romney said upon finding his mobile. “Would you lay off with the fucking tears already? Fuck, Annie, you've been crying since election night. I have a hairpiece crisis on my hands, just two days before meeting those Russian investors our son arranged for his upcoming real estate deal, just one week before having my picture taken signing the paperwork that will ship all those high-paying American jobs overseas, and all you can do is weep? Go iron my pleated jeans or bake a log of cookies – something, anything, but please make it appear as if you were of some use around here.”

When the CISR finally managed to track ch'ch'iibuk down (after failing to find a good hiding place atop a person close to Mr. Obama, it had hitched a ride upon a scabrous truck driver and merged with Karl Rove's mane of pubic hair), the hairpiece-from-outer-space defended its decision to flee, stating, according to official transcripts: “I stayed on Mitt's head for the duration of his campaign; I was never out of place or under-waxed; I was always wavy, making sure to show just the right amount of gray on his temples to convey the agree-upon level of seniority; I let myself be combed and washed and snipped and touched by all those worthless fucking barbers, and then, when I take off two weeks before the end of my contract, y'all send out a fucking ART [Alien Recovery Team] to bring me in? This new spot is kind of nice – it's real warm and sweaty, and I only get washed once in a fortnight. Could you please just leave me here?” After having been removed from the nether regions of Mr. Rove, ch'ch'iibuk was forced to merge with an old, rat-eaten, lice-infested bear skin shoved under a shed next to Mr. Romney's second vacation home out in southern Utah, where it remained until the beginning of January.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)