Blue_Opossum

Night of February 1, 1973. Thursday.



I am sleeping on my stomach on the carport roof of the Cubitis house, facing north, fairly close to the first trellis, not really noticing the large corrugated sections running east and west (which were very annoying and problematic to maneuver over in real life, especially barefooted), with my arms supporting my head, a bit unrealistically too far out from the edge of the roof (as if my upper body is supported by an intangible surface). It is late at night, and there is a slight odor of smoke, probably from the west though also likely underneath me in the side yard. I cannot remember when I decided to sleep up here as it is not Friday (dream logic - though I typically did not mess around on the roof on school nights in reality) though it is curiously not that cold for the winter.

Either the Virginia Dare colony or the gypsies from “The Valley of Gwangi”, or perhaps both, are camped out at the southern periphery of the orange grove. It seems like a good way to survive for awhile - in eating Harold M’s oranges. In the distance behind me (mostly southeast?), John Boy Walton is hollering (almost inaudibly from my position though) about the inferiority of strangers (and the fact that only the Waltons are actually real people) and the superiority of Walton’s Mountain. I feel like climbing down, finding him, and punching him a few times, but I mostly remain relaxed, probably because I also sense that a tyrannosaurus will soon eat him in mid-speech (or perhaps the father of Virginia Dare will shoot him - I sense he has already been shot once under similar circumstances). However, in a drastic change of mood, John Boy decides that the Virginia Dare colony belongs on Walton’s Mountain. They are possibly intangible ghosts.

It also eventually occurs to me that the Virginia Dare colony was eaten by the tyrannosaurus from “The Valley of Gwangi” and I cannot understand why that had not been widely published in the newspapers. I know there is a tyrannosaurus around, but I somehow also know that he will not be in the immediate area at any point. I hear Harold M shooting at random dinosaurs briefly with his rifle (likely from a lawn chair on his very small mostly enclosed patio where he usually shoots at foxes and crows in reality), with an odd unrealistically distant echo, and cussing about his oranges being pilfered. Meanwhile, John Boy Walton dons a fox mask, which thus (automatically) makes him the new sheriff and so he can find the rest of Virginia Dare’s relatives. I am disgusted and disturbed by Virginia Dare’s father (Ananias Dare) roasting the eohippus (from “The Valley of Gwangi”), or maybe it is not Ananias Dare but Matt Dillon (James Arness). I am angry about this, but it is too late to crawl down from the roof via the trellis and I am wary about the tough look on Matt’s (James’s) face.