Accident

 

I had a nasty accident in the subway, pitching down a flight of stone steps and landing at the landing. I must have tripped, I guess, or had a shoe issue. Maybe I was wearing reading glasses and getting a false picture of things a ilttle under six feet away. I didn't exaxtly see it happen, though I did know it was happening (oh shit), and definitely lost consciousness for a good instant there.

I opened my eyes under rhe eyes of cops doing the things they are supposed to do, making an appraisal of the situation and a plan to get me out of there and noticing that I was screaming whenever they touched my left leg (fracture in the femur, right by the knee). They got me into an ambulance which got me to Bellevue, once the fabled East Side lunatic asylum, but a very civilized place nowadays, and I'm not about to make any complaints except maybe on the subject of Mayor Eric Adams, thanks to whom all my meals are mostly plant-based and entirely vegetarian, which is fine with me—far better than any hospital food I've had before, which is not to say good, exactly, but edible enough to ensure I don't starve—but maybe not the best political move Adams could have made.

At night, the hospital becomes a symphony of irritating electronic noises, from the random bleep or bleat to the occasional full-scale melodty. This became the subject for me of a non-lucid dream on the first bight. "Methought", as dream reporters used to say, I had the computer on and was following all those sounds as notifications. I actually told the  night nurse about this in the morning: "All those noises are on the imternet!" "You were dreaming," she said, correctly.

Dream Piece, 2018

An early lucid dream, originally posted on July 4, 2018, re-upped.

Statue of Wilson in Tirana, Albania, via wikimpia.

Upstate, kept waking up before dawn to some extraordinary bird call, and then ended up sleeping until 8:00. Dreamed Trump decided to name Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court.

I was on 84th Street, at PS 9, only in the middle of a vast and empty parking lot with a statue of Wilson—you couldn't see anything else, not even the school itself, it was as big as Kansas—waiting for my wife, who was in there applying for a job, which is in itself bizarre, if she were looking for a job it wouldn't be at an elementary school. I had my phone and was looking at Twitter and gradually began to realize it was trending that Trump had picked Wilson.

My first thought was spitefully noting that he'd gone back on his pledge to stick to the Federalist Society list. The man never keeps his promises! Only then did I realize it was much worse than that. "But he's been dead since 1919!"

It may have been making this error or realizing it was an error—his stroke was in 1919 but he stayed alive till 1924—that woke me up. Happy Independence Day.

 

Dream Piece

Not a dream, skydiving over Bogotá, via.

As it happens, I'm getting rid of a cataract in my right eye today, and they've scheduled it for afternoon, adding injury to insult as it were, meaning I have to spend the whole morning maintaining a fast begun last night, not just no breakfast but no lunch until past 3:00, which would be making me crabby enough, but also no liquids, even water, so I'm just altogether on strike, lying on the couch with the radio on, while famous TV lawyer and Brooklyn-Manhattan congressman Daniel Goldman holding forth on the Trump indictment when I fall asleep but Goldman continues to speak, and I'm annoyed in the usual way by that lawyerly way of focusing on the technical aspect of engineering a conviction rather than the narratology of finding out what happened, but I also want to tell him about the possibility of additional indictments in the document theft case, that could be filed in DC, not necessarily more charges against Trump but some of the guilty others I've been thinking about, like Nunes and Meadows.

It's at some kind of party, somewhere on Long Island for some reason, and in the noise I can't make myself heard—as some of you know, I lost my larynx a few years back and speak by forcing air past what's left of my arytenoid cartilage to make it vibrate, while using a finger to stop air from leaking out of the airhole in my trachea, a clumsy process but it works pretty well except if I need to get loud,  and this plays an important plot role in some of my dreams, though not the good ones.

I try people other than Goldman, but they're not listening either, and then I'm in a car with him, and I realize I've got a bigger problem than the details of the Trump charges, because I need to get to Manhattan and the surgery center (this is the first acknowledgment of reality), and my ID is in a backpack I seem to have abandoned in the place we just left. Then the car sort of opens up, revealing a whole social set up behind Goldman, of people sitting on risers, wearing headphones and carrying clipboards and iPads and the like (this seems like the second acknowledgment of reality, when I figure out I'm in a radio program), and I'm able to check my pocket and see I've got my ID (the third acknowledgment), and I start looking for other people I might be able to communicate with, and there's a young Black woman, and I tell myself, "She'll listen to me, Black people always do," and indeed she's listening as I start my explanation, and that's how I wake up.

That's a lucid nightmare where you have agency, and you escape from it by solving the problem as if it were a puzzle, to which the answer is, "Ah, it's only a dream." I've been having them once in a while for a couple of years now, and that's the format.

Hi it's Stupid: Four Little Children

 

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images via Women's Health.

Hi, it's Stupid to say we need to keep responding to this bullshit as if there were a chance that it would make a difference in the world—Kevin Kruse and Imani Gandy are both practically weeping with fatigue at the thought of having to push that filthy stone another half an inch up the hill, and you really can't blame them, because they've been struggling for a lifetime and the opponents NEVER LEARN ONE SINGLE THING, but I thought of a slightly new line of argument I"d like to preserve for the record—

Namely, that when Dr. King said he had a dream that one day his four little children would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, he meant something by it, and in particular he had a reason for using the word "dream": because he knew when he woke up it wasn't going to be true. And he knew it wasn't going to come true in 1964, and in spite of all the ungratifying work he'd put in to elect a Southern Democrat to the presidency to build on the Civil Rights Act and prevent Republican Barry Goldwater from getting the opportunity to destroy it it wasn't going to come true in 1965 either, or 1967. It was going to take more than his own shortened lifespan to get there, and maybe more than those of his children as well, because the problem of racial injustice was so deeply ingrained into the fabric of American society—because it was, as we now call it, systemic. He was a master of critical race studies before they existed:

Dream Piece

 

Photo via Hilgersom Landscaping.

Woke up before 5:00 with this ridiculously bloggy dream, giving me unusual time to structure it in my mind before the alarm rang. It features a character I actually don't know at all except online, the blogger known as Thers (of the the very funny old Whiskey Fire, defunct two or three years ago, but still a welcome presence on Twitter, and, this may be relevant, an English lit instructor in the CUNY system with a specialty in Irish writers); but I'm somehow at his house, in an improbably ritzy suburb, socially distanced in a driveway lined with a flagstone wall and a little round lantern faintly glowing on the pavement. There are women around, but in the background.

I'm there to show him a thing I've written, in a magazine that he's holding, but neither of us has a clear sense of why I'm doing it—I 'm under the impression he invited me for some reason, but he's confused and asking, very courteously, what I'm expecting him to do. A sudden inspiration: what I want is for him to submit something, a "critical essay", I suggest, to the magazine, which I'm apparently the editor of. He smiles.

I'm looking at the lantern, and it's the head of the newscaster Dan Rather, with a green growth on the top like a Chia pet. I'm perturbed by the apparent violence of this, but reassured when Rather himself looks completely comfortable, and he's smiling too. And then that's about it, I'm awake.

Dream Piece

Today I seem to have gone on strike against the whole "work from home" concept, though I wasn't aware of this until around 5:30 this afternoon, when I started waking up from a nap on the couch, laptop on my lap, trying to reconstruct the tail end of a wondrous dream in which Joe Biden figured, probably as the dentist I was visiting and as the author of a bunch of posters, or postcards, that I was in charge of, with slogans some of which dealt with the phrase "another mouth to feed." I didn't get to see the dentist, but was spending some time with a kind hygienist, most directly based on my surgeon's lovely Russian nurse Natalya, a woman of inordinate compassion combined with courageous fatalism (she used to say she had experienced all the conditions the boss treated, which was certainly not true, even if she only meant it in the hypochondriac sense, which I'm sure she did), who presumably got into the dream on account of our own String (hi, String!) and a nurse in my Twitter feed called @RNSnark. She'd called me in as a special thing in spite of the fact that the office was temporarily closed (my real dentist called around noon to say the office was closed), for a job for which the dentist wasn't even going to be needed, fitting me with a kind of palate plate in opaque wax that she held in her palm, I mean in the shape of the front part of the palate, like the upper denture I had for a few months while my implants were getting done, but white rather than pink, and it didn't have a tooth, so it must have had some other function. It had been done all wrong, she said, and she was going to have to fix it for me, I think maybe by grinding it down somehow to make it fit better. The office was very dark, and there was nobody else around, but I think then there was somebody, while I was waiting for her to do whatever it was, to whom I spoke, probably a man, but I don't know what he said except that it left me curiously comforted, about the phrase "another mouth to feed," as a suggestion that that was a way Biden had referred to his children, and grandchildren, when they were infants, in a gruffly affectionate tone. With a warm smile, "Well, here's another mouth to feed."

I am feeling better, and the nap probably helped, not that I've been having any trouble sleeping, but so did Biden's primary victory speech on TV last night, the strangest political victory speech I've ever heard, and certainly the best. He hardly even mentioned the victory part, but for a brief mention in the middle—

Biden thanked poll workers and public health experts for allowing the polls to remain open in Illinois, Florida and Arizona, and said that, “today it looks like once again … our campaign has had a very good night.”

—but spoke mostly, in very somber and measured terms, about the pandemic, and what we all need to do in our different roles and in confidence in our poor old America, criticizing only Trump as he promised to restore dignity to the White House, and addressing the nation's suspicious youth with affection and hope:

“To the young voters” who have gravitated toward Sanders, Biden said, “I hear you, I know what’s at stake.”

“Senator Sanders and I may disagree on tactics, but we share a common vision,” Biden said, before listing off several policy priorities he said he shared with Sanders, including “affordable health care” and “tackling the existential challenge of climate change.”

I think that's right. It's not one old white guy or another who has to win this election, but the party, with the desperately important goals we all share. The speech is hardly getting any coverage today, but if you missed it, it's posted at the top here.

Dream piece

Statue of Wilson in Tirana, Albania, via wikimpia.

Upstate, kept waking up before dawn to some extraordinary bird call, and then ended up sleeping until 8:00. Dreamed Trump decided to name Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court.

I was on 84th Street, at PS 9, only in the middle of a vast and empty parking lot with a statue of Wilson—you couldn't see anything else, not even the school itself, it was as big as Kansas—waiting for my wife, who was in there applying for a job, which is in itself bizarre, if she were looking for a job it wouldn't be at an elementary school. I had my phone and was looking at Twitter and gradually began to realize it was trending that Trump had picked Wilson.

My first thought was spitefully noting that he'd gone back on his pledge to stick to the Federalist Society list. The man never keeps his promises! Only then did I realize it was much worse than that. "But he's been dead since 1919!"

It may have been making this error or realizing it was an error—his stroke was in 1919 but he stayed alive till 1924—that woke me up. Happy Independence Day.

Cuomo un huracán

Image via.

We're upstate for a family function this weekend, and my seven-month-old grandnephew Mikey was there in spectacular form, this is relevant. We're using a bed that can fairly be described as difficult, and I woke up from a stupid blogging dream in which I was writing a post about some annoying New York state education policy.

The great thing about the dream was that the policy wasn't, at least not directly, Andrew Cuomo's fault, because he had resigned from the governorship and been replaced by his infant son.

No, there is no such child, as far as I know. Presumably he was inspired by Mikey. I was aware that this was a dream, and looking forward to blogging it in the morning. I'd just have to add the infant governor to the post.

Unfortunately I was not aware that the post was also part of the dream and not part of reality, so I don't know what the policy was, so this is all you'll get.