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Has it really been that long since my last post? So many viable topics that came and went, too, like Pokémon Go representing the last vestige of my interest in videogames, an administration change threatening the absurdity barrier, Iron Fist utterly disappointing, realizing that relying on running as an escape is a race I’m destined not to win, and almost logged in the other day to bitch about tampering with Claudia Cardinale’s perfection, but it’s a dream, as usual, that brings me back. Two attempts to preserve my recollection on the recording app were dreams themselves. It was a first-person flying shooter where the goal of each level was to find the exit tunnel, hindered by the psychedelic lights and color filters, not to mention the two-planed controllers like a Wii’s. The last one led to the player opening his eyes to the crooked sight of an ultramodern white door, and it took several tries to orient my perspective to approach and let it slide open. A hospital corridor stretched outside, and a nurse composed of decent CG, though the obvious product of an in-game engine, smiled as she walked by. Turns out the game had been a simulation of recovery from mental illness [see “Loving the Alien”], and the rousing score transitioned a black screen to credits like the end of a Nolan film. Five of us gathered around a coffee table sat stunned by the revelation; one said he was inspired to run for office.

Dreamed I had made it through the mountains on foot and reached some exclusive vacation destination by myself. Others were there, but not alone. So I returned to retrieve the wife, whom I had to leave at the point where the crossing had become perilous: small platforms hung by ropes over a thousand-foot drop to the ocean, and the challenge was to make it from one to the next with your physically-less capable partner. I thought maybe the safest way was to secure the line to one tied to a basket, swing her across, then have her help with my turn; considering how many of times we’d have to do this, I wondered why no one thought of just building a bridge. With the assistance of a man the impressive size of Gerard Butler, this film ended, the damsel saved and the couple together; after the titles, it returned to the moment they split up, and she was left helpless and naked, alone on a pier. She fainted and her attractive figure laid there in public. An older inspector, also unclothed, for this was a pre-industrial society, came by and retrieved her to keep her for himself and his Gerard Butler-like penis, but when she came to in his small home, she thanked them and left with some supplies on her back, and sunglasses, to set off on her own. The name of the movie changed to “Little Miss Avenue Nonsense” (it was sense before, and had road or smaller street) to celebrate her self-reliance.

Was catching up with Dangerous Minds recently, and they themselves had just gotten around to video posted almost ten years ago of McGoohan in LA that really is the stuff of my dreams, especially his new bit with the hanger motif.

Thursday night we “took advantage” of Disneyland’s failure to scan our third and last ticket use, so we went in for another miserable wonderful few hours, most of them spent in line for annual passes for the family fan and her companion; it was finally our turn for the next window, and a Black fellow about a foot taller than me whose name tag read ERIN, Grand Marshall, demonstrated a glaring breach of queue etiquette by pulling us to continue waiting at newly-opened kiosks on the other side, behind at least four more groups of people. I held myself back from going Larry David on him for fear of getting us banned from the park for life, at least until our transaction was settled, but by then they stopped accepting customers, and I just wanted out of there.

The next night when the boy got the first of what’s sure to be a lifetime of stitches, his ER doctor was the almost too-good-to-be-true-sounding Erin Prince, M.D. And so conscious was I of this coincidence going into my slumber Sunday, I dreamed of being reunited with old 大姐 Ellen (close enough) Liao.

My sad long weekend came to a close with Yahoo! Screen’s Other Space, which I can’t tell is meant to be centered around the MST3K reunion or Milana Vayntrub’s tight uniform, but either way isn’t sustaining the programming once Community’s done, not with jokes like this, where the robot doesn’t get Karen’s name right:

I was in a waiting area for the Meereen Fighting Pits, volunteers all of us, and no one seemed much of a challenge, to my relief. Most looked like college-aged kids, and at least one was there to get the free sandwich, complete with choice of dressing on the side, then leave. I had four lacquered chopsticks at my disposal, but because better weapons might be tossed to us, thought I’d better be prepared to make a run at them.

At a table tennis exhibition a young Asian boy received unfair calls by the ref, then proceeded to make a lucky shot off the edge that had some in disbelief of his skills. So dismissive was I of this prodigy that I booted him off my perch, but he got back up with no reaction otherwise, like a robot. Underneath a black T-shirt that read “I’M ON IT” a compartment opened up, revealing itself as indeed an action figure-shaped mechanism, which emitted a piercing distorted message that only I could hear, informing me that it was from 20 years in the future.

Three dreams last night: the first I had a clear memory of when I woke at 3am, having resumed my slumber after getting off X’s floor, but lost since; the second took place in first-person MMO (perhaps in anticipation of GW2’s imminent perspective changes), where a sizeable group of my fellow players were exploring a new area and had come upon a map under a covered open structure, like a bus stop. I was impressed that approaching it, the details became more visible. An event alert appeared above us indicating the direction to a boss named DIM, and we followed it to a catapult. The idea was to use it on ourselves (or respective avatars) to traverse some distance gap, but I was more interested by its design: little more than a black version of the Lego prop that came in X’s Batman set, with a single additional crank, which when turned once would generate enough force to launch its basket. Maybe influenced by this:

Was fifty degrees inside last night, so my sleep must’ve been especially deep, because the story went on for longer than usual, and even picked up after waking once. I was visiting a new company, not necessarily interviewing with any intent of being hired, but there in a group assisting them with their procedural deficiencies. Vera and I walked off and found an exhibit or something, then an indoor stadium in a full hall painted white where the Houston Rockets were playing the “Run”, a new franchise from Louisiana or Lemonade-Land. My explanation for our unauthorized tour would be getting lost going from one place led to another; our last stop was the cafeteria. I told the suspicious woman from the register that I misplaced my employee ID card, and though she took a ten dollar bill for my plate of meat, she probably alerted others, because just then the CEO’s voice appeared on the PA. We were already on our way out but split up at the restrooms. Mine, as usual, went from a single door into a series of antechambers with four more, with only one leading to the next. Inside I could hear her flushing through the wall, so I produced my phone (thinner than the 6 Plus, with the touchscreen obstructed at the bottom) and messaged her to time our exits so we can leave together. At this point I got up, and for lack of any visual aid, I’ll include a screencap from the Doctor Who Christmas special, which really wasn’t much better than any of their recent stuff, but did have a nice scene with his aged companion, about whom I had a whopper of a dream about, too:

Later I was back in a room with other applicants, as we were, mostly young models, and I insisted on leaving. Apparently this made me a fugitive, so when the elevator stopped abruptly, I told the speaker to let the rest go and I’d turn myself in. Their security interviewed several of us separately, but while I waited on my turn, I prepared a false imprisonment accusation from a legal text I found on a chair. Interestingly I thought, pertinent pages had been torn from it, and others seem to be duplicates rather than leave in support for my case.

At least, this was my version of it. Somehow we were taken 50 years into the future to downtown Los Angeles, where empty stone buildings were warm to the touch and the snow felt like that fake sand at Brookstone. I guessed that it was radiation, and that we were already doomed from our exposure to it. Our phones had no service, as one might expect, and things were too alien for any hope of contacting relatives. There were cloaked strangers around, who seemed not to understand us too well; when we asked one local representative how to reach our families in this time, he said nobody was left, without explanation. Maybe a nuclear holocaust had wiped them all out? A mutant with two heads talked to me next, supporting that theory. The girls in the bar responded to my Japanese, but had little in the way of faces under their hair. And Marcelo managed to find a Mandarin-speaking fellow who brought in some ancient equipment for our iPhones, but they were only chargers. We then traveled out of the city, into more green than I remember, but the only landmark I had to indicate our general direction was a long-lasting Chinese restaurant.

What a great movie. I had to get this in here before I put it aside for my recent acquisition of the entire Unsub series, because yeah, my pace lately isn’t likely to keep up. It’s a Boorman, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but he did seem more focused here, even if it was Marvin’s influence, and I especially loved the dream-y quality of that moment when his character just hides while a pursuer is caught by the police. This is a perfect example of taking source material to new creative heights; I’m ashamed to remember having only been entertained by Payback.

Of the two I do remember from my recent week off in Boston, or rather, wrote to my ever-shrinking or corrupted RAM, the first was likely fueled by my paranoia about us all leaving the house and the usual kind where I’d stare out the window into the night to spot intruders. These I’d almost always debunk as dreams, and this time because my view of the backyard shifted to overhead and my assailants converged into a huge old school shooting videogame boss. Gun still in hand, I saw a younger version of my son appear at the top of a wide flight of stairs in white robes, mouth agape but silent, and certain it was only a ghost (last year it was The Raid, and now Chris kept insisting we watch The Conjuring), I pulled the trigger, but that, too, was a fake.

The other involved Ben’s father Evan, who apparently had a duplicate of himself or the ability to create one, and I wondered how both could hold separate conversations. Would his perspective switch back and forth like changing TV channels? We had to somehow defeat this genius, and my plan was to let him know that we knew, but be subtle about it, by inserting the message only in the background of one of his fields of view, like on a small sign in a crowd.

The other night I watched a child interview Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—truly the worst possible title for a film due on the 75th anniversary of the first issue of World’s Finest—director Zack Snyder and he was surprisingly generous with the information he revealed: a look at a new character who at first resembled Green Arrow, but a bug was visible on the side of his mask, and the narrator screamed, “The Zipper!” embarrassing me for not making the connection.