11 February 2009
Last night's dream

On one of the music mailing lists I'm on, the guy who runs Scat Records announced that he was going away for a few weeks and he needed a house-sitter, but Steelers fans would be preferred. I wrote him back and said I would love to spend a few weeks in Columbus. Then I went back to my endless activity - tracing over the coastlines of all Northern European countries in an atlas, using a mechanical pencil. I noticed some weird fjords in Norway that looked like rifles or something. Then I went there, and saw that on this mountain cliff there were three giant telescopes mounted, which is what looked like rifles in the coastline. I walked inland a bit, along a wooded path, and came to a fence. Mounted on top of the fence were four wicker baskets, where local farmers were encouraged to place extra crops to freely exchange. The four baskets were for blueberries, blackberries, eggplant, and squash. All of them were full, but the fruit/veg inside were somewhat misshapen (though huge). I took a few blueberries that were the side of golfballs, some bigger, and strangely elongated and ugly. I knew my partner would be excited at free blueberries, and huge ones too. Before I could see her again I had to fly home to see my parents. I left the blueberries with a note. and then suddenly was at my parents' house. I was sitting on the front porch and my Dad's two sisters had come over to visit. My one aunt was showing me her passport, which she had modified to include a big fold-out section with photos of the entire family at different points in our lives, though badly photoshopped for comedic effect. My aunt had an afro in her own photo, and the pictures of me from high school were altered in some strange way that I wasn't very comfortable with. She had spent a lot of money to do this. I reached for my own passport and then realised that it had not been stamped or even checked at any point in the journey between Norway and the US. I became panicked at this but my mother laughed and handed me the phone. It was her friend, who needed help with her broadband setup. I was not in the mood to do this, and felt it would be impossible to explain over the phone anyway. I told her I would come over some time to see it, a bit rudely, and hung up. In the meantime my father and his side of the family were spraying water around the yard with the garden hose, and everyone was lounging around in pools of soapy water in the grass. I felt disgusted at them all, and started to go up to my old room. My mother stopped me to say we were all going out to eat but I told her I had too much work to do at my day job and i wasn't hungry anyway. In my room, there were still some dirty clothes on the floor from when I had last visited over a year ago.