maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was looking through some kind of magazine like the New Yorker, although a lot of the formatting for the magazine seemed like it was for a popular men's magazine like Maxim.

There were three articles by Joyce Carol Oates in this magazine. I wanted to write Oates a letter to tell her how much I'd appreciated her articles. But I realized that I hadn't actually read the articles, and that I'd look like just some kind of "autograph hunter" if I wrote the letter, expecting a response, without having read the articles.

So I flipped through the magazine to find the articles. I found one of the articles, which seemed like a two-pager, on the front and back side of one sheet of paper. The article was all in some kind of grey text box. I figured this article would be the easiest to read, since it was so short. But even it seemed too long.

I got a little confused as to whether the article was one pages or two pages. I then came to the conclusion that the article was written on both sides of the page, but that the second page was partly taken up by an advertisement. So the whole article was less than two pages long.

The article, I could probably tell, was about Oates and her "new husband" taking their honeymoon in Italy. But the place they'd rented for their honeymoon seemed to me more like a place they'd just bought or rented for the long term.

The first paragraph mentioned something about how the apartment was just perfect "for allowing us to tatertater (an expression which means very much the same thing for us adults as it did when we were children)."

I couldn't figure out what tatertater meant. I just figured it had something to do with making tater tots "out of the can" (?).

So Oates was apparently pleased at first glance with the place. But she said that there ended up being a lot of faults. Mostly the place hadn't been very well cleaned after the previous occupants left. There were plenty of signs of their still having lived here.

One was that, "For close-drivers, a guard rail had been put right up against the edge." I couldn't quite figure out what close drivers would be doing in a house, or what kind of edge Oates was talking about.

But there was a picture, a kind of half-impressionist oil or pastel painting of the place. I looked at it and saw that there was some kind of babmboo fencing, still green, fastened all around the breakfast bar.

I realized that the "close-drivers" were people who pushed their babies in strollers everywhere and had the habit of bashing into everything with the strollers. The bamboo fencing was put up to protect the wood of the breakfast bar. The apartment seemed to be a living room with the kitchen inside of it. The breakfast bar and the kitchen counter seemed to be the biggest parts of this room of the apartment.

I was kind of worried. I didn't think I'd be able to get through this article. There was so much new language in it, so much current speech that I couldn't follow. I also felt bad because Oates, a few decades my senior, knew all this current vernacular, while I had no idea what it meant.

I continued reading the article and looking at the painting. Oates complaints were then that there were empty food cans strewn all over the place, as well as newspapers. I looked at the drawing again. There were newspapers and cans strewn on both the kitchen counters and the floor.

I thought, Did the landlords here bother to clean this place up at all when the last people left?