lucyoncolorado

In which C and B are building extension houses in my back yard...

I'm calculating how much it's going to cost me. At 26 dollars an hour for a 5 hour work day (because they start late) for 5 days a week for the next six months, it will cost me 250 dollars. This is dream math. I look at the figure on my calculator and am very surprised how cheap it is. I feel that we must be ripping C off.

I show him the figure. 250 dollars? Yes, that's accurate, he nods.

Suddenly I feel like a benevolent patron. I tell him that I'll double it. I tell him that I'll pay his assistant, B, 250 dollars also, that way he doesn't have to take B's wages out of his own pay. Then I think to myself, gosh I still haven't even broken a grand. I tell him there will even be a bonus if the work is complete on time.

They are building two guest houses in my backyard. They are both under the square footage required to necessitate a permit, so they've just started on the construction without much planning. I'm a little nervous, but I trust them. They've done this before many times.

The first tiny house is one open timber frame room. The woodwork will be seen from the inside, and they've chosen some beautiful red cedar logs. I'm really impressed with their craftsmanship. They've even been clever enough to extend a patio beyond the allowed square footage so that the outdoor space will increase our living area. I think of how I'll landscape a walking path and fire pit area between the extension patio and my main back deck.

The second house turns out to be a giant purple RV. I think that it looks tacky to have this monstrosity sitting in my backyard. They are building a cover over it so that it lasts longer and won't deteriorate after constant exposure to the elements. They tell me not to worry, that I will be pleased with the final results.

I board the RV to look around, but as soon as I enter, I'm faced with a tall climbing wall. Since it is still under construction, it is covered with a tarp. I forced to find my footings through the cover. To my relief, about half way up, there is a slight metal ladder, and I grab the cold rungs and travel vertically up the wall. I know the trick is to just keep my attention focused on each step that I take but not to hyper focus or over think either. I need to just stay calm, make a steady pace, and don't look around too much. I take a deep breath and continue. The horizontal rungs are actually small round metal bars, about the diameter of a standard piece of construction rebar but without the texture grooves. They are iced and muddy, and I think how easily my foot could slip. I grab the front rails tighter, but I cut my hand on a rusty part. I notice that the area where the rungs are welded to the front rails is starting to rust apart. I try not to think about it.

When I reach the top, I realize that I'm standing on a narrow ledge encircling the deck of a ship, and I look down to see I've just climbed a magnificently tall gangway. I must hold on to some ropes and make my way around to an entrance, and then I'm standing on the deck.

The ship is a school. There is a mess hall in front of me and two passages of classroom quarters off to my right and left. It's an excellent idea, I tell C. We need a private school here in my town, and in the warmer months, we can take the school sailing, a semester at sea.

A pigeon-sized white bird lands on a rail next to my hand. It has a red breast with red streaks radiating out and circling around its back and wings. "It's a Japanese Imperial Bird," a child tells me.

The bird begins to strut up and down the ship railings, chirping and clicking out a dance beat. The child who identified the bird adds a bassline and I throw in a melody. "We're ready for lyrics now," the child tells me, but I argue that we must practice the tune longer. He says he's got it, but I respond that I need to really focus on it or else I won't remember it when I wake up. It's a great tune, and I try really hard to keep it in mind.

Then we work on the wordplay, but for some reason the words come out as nonsense. The child is delighted with the nonsense song, but I am hoping for something that feels less forced. We rhyme "Japanese Imperial" with "breakfast cereal". The child laughs.


In which I meet some conservative news pundits...

I'm standing at the side of a stage near the curtain, out of view from a loud audience. I must make a speech. I must address an assembly gathered in an auditorium. I can't remember why. Have I won an award? It seems this is likely.

Then I see Bill O'Reilly, and he is wearing a form-fitting sleeveless and low-cut green dress with some tacky costume jewelry and a delicate lace half jacket over his shoulders. I panic. I'm in a play with Bill O'Reilly, and I've forgotten my part.

But he is casual. He shakes my hand. He tells me he likes my work. He is being professional and polite. I decide I must be mature. I smile, thank him, then return my attention to the crowd just outside the curtain. I hope that he will leave me alone. He persists. He tells me specifically what he likes, and I recognize the sincerity. I'm a little disappointed that he's a fan and annoyed that I must talk to him.

I turn to face him and instead look at the V-neck of his dress. It reveals the wrinkled and loose skin between his sagging pectorals and a spot of wild gray chest hair. I reach up and touch the edge of lace between my pointer finger and thumb, and I gently pull it over his chest. I smile at him ironically and tell him that a man such as himself should be more modest.

Somehow, I expected that he would laugh, but he did not. He is crestfallen. Right away, I see my mistake. He's not dressing a part. Bill O'Reilly, in his private life, is a transvestite. I feel like a bully. I tell him it's a very pretty dress. I'm not very convincing.

Then Ann Coulter arrives, and I start to think I'm in the wrong place. It's sometimes difficult to hate a human, especially one that is standing right in front of you, even though it is very easy to hate a personality. I consider Bill O'Reilly's vulnerability in that moment, but it is already gone. They are jovial together. He is loud; she is mean. I want to leave.

He asks me if I know her. I say I do not, and then I tell her that she is a liar. I felt a lot of things that I would like to say, but as usually happens when I'm upset, I am not able to say any of them very well. I verbally attack her. I say some pretty mean things, and again I think to myself, I feel like a bully. I justify it to myself: she deserves it.

She responds that she will write a limerick about me and scribble it on a bathroom wall for all to see. This actually intrigues me, and I ask her for the first line. She gives me, "There once was a woman from Texas" and I'm immediately disappointed. I start to be distracted by the crowd once again. They are chanting Bill O'Reilly's name. Surely I must be in the wrong place? Surely there is no reason for me to be there. I start to walk off backstage.

Ann Coulter calls me back. She is saying something, but I can't hear her. I think she is asking for a rhyme. "Nexus," I shout at her. "Solar plexus!" I start composing the limerick in my mind. "Drives a lexus". "Likes to sex us". "Welds a Czech truss".

Welds a Czech truss.

I remember the backyard construction. I run backstage. Ann Coulter runs behind me. She chases me into the locker room. I must open my combination lock, but I can't remember the digits.

Ann Coulter recites her limerick. "There once was a blonde girl. She made me hurl. She is a fat girl."

I'm staring at the lock, but I can't remember how to turn it. Is it left first and then right? When do you go around and pass zero?

Ann Coulter keeps laughing and taunting me with her limerick. "There once was a blonde girl. She made me hurl. She is a fat girl." She sings it over and over again, shaking her hips and pointing at me.

I can't concentrate with her there. I slam the lock into the locker door and sit down on a wooden bench with Ann Coulter. I tell her that it's not a limerick.

She throws her head back and laughs. She sweeps her hair from her face. She leans back on her arms and crosses her legs like a bad impersonation of a supermodel. She is not at all attractive. I think that I will tell her this, but then I realize how unfair that is. Why am I so petty and mean today?

I tell her that her song is not a limerick. She laughs some more and thinks that she has insulted me. She thinks that my feelings are sore.

I explain that, no, I don't care what she says about me. But that it's just not a limerick. And it's not particularly funny.

But she doesn't get it. She laughs again and says that I'm a big baby. I think about hitting her.

Instead, I pick up my keys and begin to carve a limerick into the bench. To show her that I'm not sore about it, I use all three of her lines- but I leave space in the middle for the third and fourth line and make her third line the fifth. I explain to her that she needs another rhyme for the two missing line, and I ask her for a suggestion. She suggests "dork" and when I ask for a rhyme, she suggests "dumb". I sigh and get that sinking feeling - this lesson is not working. I write her dork line and explain that we need a rhyme with a similar ending. Can she think of any words that end in "ork" sounds?

But she has stopped trying to understand. She's back to laughing at me and saying that I'm butt hurt about her insults. I tell her that I'm not offended, I'm just trying to point out that she has not written a limerick. It's a simple fact, but she says that I can't dismiss things just because they hurt my feelings. I tell her that it's also not witty, not amusing, that she used the word "girl" twice and that I'm not fat. I'm not even overweight. Also, I'm not even blonde. Then she tells me I'm being a snob. She touches her finger to her nose, pushes it up in the air, and says "look at me! I'm a snob!"

Suddenly I realize that my combination is the terrible Ann Coulter taunt. I enter it into the lock. Girl, Hurl, Girl. It opens. I crawl inside and wake up.

In which there are snakes in my yard, again...

I'm in my backyard. There is a long, fat snake slithering around near my wood pile. It is bright green and yellow with a conical head. It's at least 8 inches in diameter. I know what sort of snake it is (in the dream) and I know it is not venomous. I'm not afraid of it; I'm just amazed at how fat it is.

My mother is standing near the deck spraying dirt away with the water hose. I shout at her to come see the snake but she can't hear me. For some reason, I can't shout at her loudly enough for her to hear what I'm saying. She looks at me confused.

I point to the snake. It is starting to move into the wood pile, and I'm afraid she'll miss it. I wave my hands and shout at her to come over and see. I move my arm in a slithering sort of way to represent the snake and I gesture towards the wood pile. She just stares at me in a way that shows she does not understand.

I take a deep breath and scream as loudly as I can for her to come over there. My voice is booming, but still she can't hear. I wave her over, but she just stands there.

So I abandon the snake to the wood pile and walk over to her. She's only a few feet away so I'm astounded that she can't understand me. I tell her that there is a huge brightly colored snake near the wood pile and that she should come see it. Then I turn and run back to the wood pile. She sets the hose on the grass, and there is an extremely small coral snake nearby.

She points to the coral snake and says it's not so tiny. From the wood pile I shout at her to not pick it up! That's not the snake I mean! I wonder that she could be so reckless as to pick up a coral snake! But I watch helplessly as she bends down towards it, reaches out for it and picks it up.

Luckily, it doesn't bite her because it's mouth is so tiny that it can't get a good grip. By the time I run over to her, she has already dropped it.

Are you crazy? I shout at her. You picked up a coral snake! That's insane!

She responds that she wanted to see if it was red touch yellow or red touch black. Only the red touch yellow is the venomous coral snake. Red touch black is just a harmless king snake.

I know this of course. I tell her I know this. I tell her that the point is that she can't bend down and pick one up first and try to identify it second as it would be too late by then. And anyway, the particular snake in question is a coral snake. It's red and black.

She answers that she had no way of knowing it was a coral snake until she looked at it carefully. I start to get very frustrated. I respond that this is my point exactly. She needs to err on the side of caution. She argues that it didn't matter. It was too small to bite her anyway.

I decide to let it go. I turn the conversation back around to the fat brightly colored snake in the wood pile and ask her if she wants to see it. She says yes, and as we turn to walk towards it, we see another red, black and yellow banded snake. This one is bigger.

Mom asks if it is red and black or red and yellow, and she bends over to pick it up. I grab her by the arm and stop her. I start screaming at her. Doesn't she understand that she needs to stand back and assume it is dangerous? This one is big enough to bite her. A coral snake can kill you!

She laughs at me, but she relents. We walk towards the wood pile. The snake is already gone. I tell her how brightly colored it was and how big it was. She says probably I saw the same banded snake we just left in the grass. I tell her it looked nothing at all like that one. She laughs at me some more and tells me that probably my phobia of snakes just made it look different in my mind. This is not true, I argue. I'm not even particularly afraid of snakes. I just believe in being cautious around potentially deadly ones.

By then I'm just a big mess of frustration.

In which C almost drowns in a flood...

I'm in a food court with H's daughter, C. We are sitting at a high table with bar stools near a concrete pillar. The floors and walls are concrete also. There are huge rectangular windows lining the walls similar to the old roller rink, only they are enclosed with glass. We are waiting for food. I'm holding my swimsuit for some reason, and I nail it to the concrete pillar near our table.

Our number is called. I walk to a counter to retrieve our food when suddenly we are hit with the force of a giant wave. The entire food court is immediately submerged under water. I hang on to the counter and hold my breath while the wave passes. Then I'm able to get my head above the water and look around. The water is still now, but nearly touches the ceiling. I swim over to the windows and open them. The water rushes out.

I look for C and find her on the ground near our table. She is a reddish blue color, still and slightly bloated, her wet hair spread out on the ground around her head. It's H at the viewing, of course. This doesn't make sense to me, so I shake her by the shoulders, and it's C again. She sits up and vomits water.

Suddenly she's herself again but she retains the reddish blue skin color. She's laughing, nonchalant about what just happened. I tell her that we need to get out and see if everyone is OK. The force of the water was unbelievable, and I'm worried others might need help. She's laughing and unconcerned. She's talking about how she thinks her new skin color is punk rock. She says she's just like Mystique from X-Men. She wants to take selfies and put them on FB. I'm annoyed with her, but I can't leave her there alone.

I need to remove my swimsuit from the pillar. The area around the food court is covered in water still, and to swim around helping people, for some reason I must have my swimsuit. I'm trying to pry the nail out with my hands, but it won't budge. I go back to the food court counter and ask the employees for a hammer, but they say it was pulled away with the receding wave.


In which I have an argument with my mom, visit a waterpark and cannot kill a boy...

I'm riding with my mom in the car. She asks me if I ever hear a chiming sound from inside my head. I know exactly what she's talking about. (In the dream), I had just posted on an online medical discussion board about hearing this sound. It's a common symptom of a disease that I'm worried I have. I don't want to discuss it with my mom.

No, I tell her. I have no idea what you are talking about. I hope this will end the conversation.

Instead, she glares at me. Oh really? You've never heard that sound? I guess you never have a trembling sensation in your neck right before the sound either?

She's being passive aggressive, and I hate that. I just repeated my answer. I have no idea what you are talking about. I want her to shut up about it. It's none of her business what I search for online.

I happen to know that you are lying to me. I happen to know that you go online discussing these symptoms with people.

At least now she's being openly confrontational. I start to see red. How do you know what I discuss online?

You logged into that discussion board on my phone and I saw it there.

I know this is a lie. I would never use her phone to do anything I wanted to remain private. I told her she was lying.

I know exactly how you really found out. You looked at my phone while I was using the restroom.

She admitted it. She's angry. She wants an explanation for what I'm discussing online.

I tell her she has no right to snoop. I tell her that it's abnormal and unhealthy for her to snoop around like that. I tell her that if she's angry, it's her own fault. It was none of her business in the first place.

She argues that, as my mother, she has every right to snoop on me. I respond that this might have been true when I was a child, but it is certainly not true now that I'm an adult. As an adult, I can discuss whatever I want online, and she has no right to snoop around in my life and that I do not have to explain anything to her.

Then, I lose it. The emotions that came up were intense. I tell her that even when I was child, the way she snooped around and never directly confronted me about anything and the way she showed my personal items to other people and all of that made me hate her. I told her that it was damaging and shameful and that it made me rage.

She responds by throwing some of my adolescent behavior up in my face. Some of it is really embarrassing, and I'm not sure why I did the things she mentions. It makes me feel ashamed, and for a moment I'm terrified and guilty and exposed. But then I remember that I'm not a child anymore and that none of this stuff matters anymore and that I can just leave.

So I do. I walk off. I walk into a waterpark. There are no other people there. At the center of the waterpark is a 30 floor high tower from which five or six waterslides descend. I run up the stairs as fast as I can. I'm so angry that I want to smash things and destroy something. I'm stomping and shouting the whole way up, and it feels good to feel my heart pounding and my blood pumping. I'm crying with rage. I get to the top and immediately jump down the slide. It is a very good waterslide- very fast with lots of turns and thrills, but I hardly even notice where I am or what I'm doing because I'm so angry. I pass under the camera that takes pictures of riders, and I scowl. I think how stupid it is going to look later.

I land in the pool of water at the base of the slide and immediately run up the stairs and do the ride again. Since there is no one else at the park, I do not have to wait.

Then, I run up the stairs a third time. The stairs are very steep, and there are 30 flights of them. I take them two or three at a time. I can feel my body working efficiently now. I'm in a zone. I think of how good it feels to be alive, to be in shape, to get your body to the point that you can nearly effortlessly achieve an athletic feat. I wonder why I let depression knock me down when it feels so good to be so strong. I shouldn't be lazy. I'm a badass when I want to be.

I get to the top of the slide a third time, but the ride is closed. I'm calm now. I stand there and look out over the park. I count how long it takes my heart to return to its resting rate, and I'm satisfied with how efficient it is. I turn around to go back down, but I somehow take the wrong stairwell. I'm now standing at the back of a huge auditorium. There is a ramp descending from the doorway with rows of auditorium seats on either side. In the central main seating area, there are a dozen or so middle school aged kids. An adult sits on the stage in front of them. He is sitting casually on his bottom with his legs dangling over the stage. He has a water bottle nearby and some papers in his hands. A few lights are shining on him. He is obviously some sort of theater teacher.

The teacher looks up at me and smiles. He waves me towards him. The kids all turn around and watch me walk down to the stage. The teacher stands up and shakes my hand. He's about my age. He's very calm. He explains that the stairs I was looking for disappear when the water park closes, and I'll have to spend some time in the theater now. He smiles at me again, and I realize it is a trap. All the kids smile at me as if they are expecting some sort of show.

I turn and run backstage. I climb the ladder up to the catwalks and sit up there trying to figure out what to do. I start to rage again. I'm frustrated at how quickly a day can go bad. I don't know how I'm going to get out of the theater.

The teacher calmly climbs up towards me. He doesn't completely ascend; he stands on the ladder but leans his elbows on the catwalks and casually addresses me. I'm screaming in a rage about all sorts of things.

He asks me what the anger feels like. I tell him it feels like I want to destroy things. I want to smash the theater with a sledgehammer. I feel like I could tear open someone's stomach with my hands and pull out their entrails or grab them by the back of their hair and repeatedly pound their skull into the pavement. I tell him in detail how angry I am and how much I want to rage and tell him to leave me alone. But he is very calm and just tells me to come down. He says he'll give me a sledgehammer or a victim or whatever else I want. I look at him and think he is disturbed.

I come down to the stage. The kids are all watching attentively now. The teacher and I are in the middle of the stage and the spotlight is on us. The teacher calls one of the middle schoolers, a 13 year old boy, onto stage with us. The boy lies down on the wooden stage floor at my feet. The teacher tells me to go ahead and rage on him.

I just stand there and stare at him. Come again?

Beat the kid up. Kick him.

OK. I pull my foot back to kick him, but I can't bring myself to hit him with any real force. I can feel his ribs against my feet. I think how easily they would break. I can't do it.

I sit down on top of the boy and wrap my hands around his neck to strangle him. He starts to gasp and turn colors, but he does not struggle or act disturbed. He just lies there and looks at me. I can feel the blood pulsing through his neck and he starts to turn purple. I think of how long it would take to cause brain damage.

I let him go and look at his neck. There are finger marks where I was holding him. I realize that I was not squeezing in a way that would efficiently block his trachea, so I reposition my hands so that one thumb is pressing firmly into his tracheal airway and the other is pushing in his tracheal cartilage. I have a good grip on him now. The teacher is now squatting down next to us, watching. He seems to approve of my repositioning. The boys' cartilage feels bumpy and fragile under my thumb. I can't make myself apply any pressure at all.

I tell the teacher that I can't intentionally damage someone like that. The teacher asks me how I feel. I tell him that I feel pretty calm.

He takes me out the exit of the theater from backstage. I have to take another waterslide back down, but because the park is closed, the water is not running. I try to slide down the slide, but I keep getting stuck in the turns. Finally I stand up and try to walk down, but the slides are shallow and turn at sharp angles. I have to sort of crawl and crouch my way down on my knees with my hands holding the edge of the slide.