joeseph

1. grandma's coming to dinner
2. getting ready to highline/falling into the oakland harbor

We are going to have a huge family dinner at my grandparent's house. My grandma is dead, in real life, and she has been for 3 years. The most interesting thing is that she still shows up in my dreams, yet her physical body in my dreams tends to reflect the psychic attitudes we have about her spirit nowadays. She gets more decrepit and old-looking in my dreams as she fades further away from memory. Before, when she was recently passed, she would still show up in my dreams as a fully alive, talkative character, but she would fade in and out like a ghost. "Oh, I must be dreaming because there she is, and I know she is really gone."

So we are taking my grandma home from the retirement home. She is very, very old. My whole family has decided to gather at the Palos Verdes house. We make tons of preparations---one family member is bringing the potatoes, another the meat, another the sauces and garnishes, etc. MY friends are also coming. This is gonna be great. So the dinner happens, and we have to split up into two groups to eat because there are too many people. One is in the kitchen, the other in the dining room/garden room. I am waiting. Everything is dull. My grandma comes in the room, and my grandpa (who has actually now just moved into a retirement home) says that her conditions is very, very fragile. We shouldn't even talk to her for more than four or five words at a time. Family feelings. I feel kind of suffocated and bored. This is something that usually tends to happen around my family....

All my friends are here, where the hell is ADAM??? I go to the other room---there's my guy. Feelings of recognition and relief. He's got a fresh new haircut. Erik G. is there too. We have smash setups, but it's "really not appropriate" so they turn them both off again. A time and a place for everything, I suppose. I'm feeling too morose and stuffy to play smash, to let my excitement out. We end up getting out of there, me, Adam, and another friend. We make our way to a small, kind of dingy apartment. Then the WHOLE THING starts to move. What the hell?!? Is this safe? "Yeah dude, it's a people-mover." The whole complex starts sliding around, running through piles of garbage, crossing streets and charging through chain-link fences on what I assume is a pre-determined track. I'm standing on top of a fence or an awning of a porch, wondering if I should be wearing a seatbelt or at least be inside somewhere. "Oh well," I think. Safe is a relative term. I will probably be fine. More intimations of what is "safe" and what's not. It comes from wondering if this area is safe, or ghetto/shady. I'm pretty sensitive about that kind of stuff, for whatever reason. I'm way afraid of other people lashing out than I am the environment, or my body failing me. At least in those instances you have control over yourself, and it's not another will imposing upon you.

We reach the destination and the dust settles. Here's the smash. I whip out my controller. We're going to play for a bit. Adam introduces me to his hispanic friend. Turns out they live together, and are now in a relationship. Whaaaaaat....? This is alienating to me. It's always kind of a blow (in real life) to me whenever someone who seems to be hopeless or otherwise sexually confused turns out to be just "gay." Well, good for them I guess. It seems like there's a sort of comfort in adopting that label, and I've definitely wondered before "Am I just gay?"---but the answer is a resounding no. Anyways, Adam is such a friend to me that it feels like a betrayal of sorts. The dream ends.

(another dream: getting really mad at an asian fratbro because he wants to score a pingpong game differently)

Other dream: We are setting up a highline in a construction yard. Someone has brought music along, and it lends the scene a nice atmosphere. We have two lines doubled up, really loosely. I suggest that we should make it a highline, and everyone else is down. There's like a hippie group commune sitting around. One guy has these AMAZING leather socks kind of things---not quite Vibrams, but more like socks that are maneuverable and give you some extra traction. We get the highline set up and I climb up the crane, ready to do it. (While i'm waiting I'm sitting on a brick wall. Everything is rusted, cracked, kind of sketchy and unstable. But such is the life. I'm sure it will be fine.) And here come THE COPS. Police cars roll up, and their mere appearance is enough to make everybody leave. The line gets taken down, most of the hippies leave, and I'm left there high and dry. Damn it all. I do some more climbing around out of boredom before I decide that it's time to go. I gather up my stuff, take off the cool leather booties and leave them by a bunch of sleeping bags. I trip over one of the sleeping bags and find that there are people inside. They giggle and two voices come out. Presumably they're doing some hanky-panky. "Oh shit, my bad." I pack everything up into my suitcase and start rolling on back to Alameda.

I'm actually DRIVING the suitcase. The traffic is kind of crazy, and there are a few close calls where I have to brake really really hard and swerve around in different lanes to avoid hitting stopped cars (with my little pink suitcase). Finally I come to the bridge leading into Alameda. It's a retractable bridge.
http://www.acgov.org/pwa/images/mo_b...ark_street.jpg

There's a huge hurdle I have to clear, a really big swell in the road that I have to push my suitcase up and over to get ready to cross the bridge. I can't ROLL it up, so I decide to PUSH it up and over. With a great heave-ho, I overhead press it and try to roll it up... and no dice. It falls back down. I try again, still no luck. A bum on the side of the bridge offers to take it--he's on a platform that's higher up, a pedestrian path, and so i hand it to him. When I go over the side, I find that there's a whole group of people underneath the bridge. "You can just walk underneath it on this path," he says. It's a bit of sketchy scaffolding, but perfectly fine and stable. A nice metal walkway. So this is the underside, the seedy side of the area. There are a bunch of (semi-dirty) people, who actually seem to be REALLY enjoying themselves. They are waiting on either side of the bridge to cross, or otherwise just hanging out. They seem really good natured. I take my suitcase to the other side, being wary of the bridge alarms (which sound when it's about to retract). Aaaand I'm across. But I stay there, as I want to see it go up. After a little while I do a double check of all my pockets, my suitcase, and OH SHIT---I forgot my backpack on the other side! The bridge alarms have just started to sound, but I act anyways. I try to jump over the gap as it appears, and SWOOSH, I fall into the water. The current sweeps me away; it's much stronger than I expected. Thoughts of Alcatraz prisoners being swept out to sea flood me, and I know it's time to act. I trail behind a ferry for awhile, and then the current pushes me up against a wooden wall. The wall is made out of planks arranged vertically, and with all my strength I grab onto it, making a hard pinch on either side and holding on. I'm safe.

I wait for a little while for the current to die down, and then let go and wade over to shallower area. It's pretty scummy and full of algae. Everything I've heard tells me that the water in the Bay Area is unsanitary, and you can contract a rash from swimming in it. Oh well, nothing to do about it now. Meanwhile, I get a "flashback" of a news report. This is how I've made my entrance into the community... somehow there's a bit of longing that is fulfilled here, one rung down the ladder of wealth (and hygiene??) on the social ladder. "A brave soul gets swept away by the current! Footage captured from the back of a dinghy." There's me, along with a lot of other people, struggling to keep my head above water in the current. My face wavers in and out of the frame. I look mad, restless, fierce. I break away from the rest of the people holding on, and there's another shot of me in the third-person holding onto the wall. "One thing is for certain, we know he is strong. At least 6 foot 1, he uses his strength to hold onto a tiny fence! ....." sensationalist reporting like that. Here is my ego well at work in the dream world. Interesting that I take so much pride in being strong, especially when it comes to first impressions.

I walk around the edge of the water now that things have calmed down. The light is coming down in a different way. Another person walks up to me. We get to chatting. There are oysters all around the tidepools here, yet everything is still scummy and green. I'm not sure if I want to eat these oysters, but we start collecting them anyway. Well shit.


Analyses: Feelings of fitting in are important. I feel alienated by my family. I dislike how focused on the past they are, especially when it comes to keeping my grandmother's ghost alive. I also feel very cloistered and unable to express myself. Practically, this means to just act a little crazier any time the family comes to town. It sucks, because there's a lot of hurt in my family, but it's gotta be done.

As far as the second dream goes, it's really starting to bug me that the way I was "introduced" to this community of people, which appeared really vibrant and open, was a standalone act of physicality. But in a sense I guess that's all that I reduce myself to in daily life. I was in the third-person, and let someone else (a newscaster, at that) make the introduction for me. Personally I've been aloof. Time to get out of the comfort zone and be more genuine while doing it.