night of 6/17/2010

enormous piles of luggage are everywhere; our group is getting set to leave the island. there is a big dinner and a movie like star trek on a big screen. all the plates have been taken. i know there were enough, so that means some people have taken two. i go into the kitchen to find more plates. this is my mother's kitchen, though it looks nothing like her actual kitchen. two of the brown plates we used to use are on little display stands. these end up being the only ones i can find. i go to wash them in the sink. there is a cumbersome scrubbing and washing attachment on the kitchen sink hose, but eventually i get them scrubbed. i talk a while to the older black man who is the cook. everyone eating is seated outside on a double-decker boat in the lagoon. occasionally, just for the spectacle, a plane comes to pick up the boat and then drop it to splash back down onto the water. this splashes little and doesn't bother the other, much smaller boats in the lagoon except to surprise them.

outside snow covers everything, but nevertheless there is a golf tournament. i am walking across the green and can hear the announcers. the man at the tee hits onto the green, and the bal rolls through the snow to the base of a snowbank, where a depression indicates the hole. the announcers think it is a hole in one but obviously someone will have to go check. trudging through the bank i meet the golfer's five daughters; ranging in age from about three to nine. i say hello; they are very friendly and crowd around. the youngest is a bit distraught. the oldest explains that they've just been through a divorce. i say, hoping to comfort, my parents got divorced too. the oldest says: isn't it weird to have someone ask you how you're doing? i think she means by a new stepmother her father has recently married.

night of 6/4/2010

i am supposed to be developing a presentation on autonomous agents, to give at a company the next day. D. is on the phone. "have you got some good jokes?" i am supposed to have gotten some jokes. i haven't worked on the presentation yet.

i am driving up north to get some weed, for the pain, so i can work. i keep trying to get over to 880 but the highway splits are too successively sudden, i'd have to drive straight across the highway. i give up and stop off in the city where R. and his father live, up high in an apartment complex. R. is playing a four-necked stringed instrument that sounds exactly like an accordion. the song is beautiful. i hear steps approaching the door and know it is A.; i get behind the door to surprise him, but when he enters he sees rather easily behind the door, looking nonplussed. why would i want to surprise him? soon the apartment is filling up with persian relatives and i see it is very late, i need to go. on the way down the stairwell my anxiety mounts; i will need to go directly home; i will need to develop the jokes; i won't have time. (i do think of one joke on the spot but it is not very good.)

outside i think to impress passers by with my autonomous car. i say: "watch this!" and leap into the air, secretly pressing a button that wummons the car. i leap enormously high and peripherally see my red convertible pull out of a parking spot and zoom toward me. it overshoots, though, and circles around, and then overshoots again. i linger a while in the air and nudge myself over, but can't get the car to cooperate. finally it flips itself into some recess in the ground, and i have to sink down to earth to go after it.

night of 5/24/10

i am tortured.

i am herded through the entry to the school in Rafah from Joe Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza," forced over the ditch and barbed wire, the soldiers bearing big sticks awaiting. i am beaten.