윤

Except, of course, I dreamed it: the gang was caught up in World Cup fever, and Thirteen, with a balloon in her hand hid away into a large labcoat with House himself. After the opening credits, this romantic shocker was amplified when Cuddy uncovered that Chase, too, was part of this tryst. 老婆 and I looked at each other with uncomfortable disbelief. The remainder of the episode was a montage of scenes of House returning to his debilitating ways, sporting a thicker do, horn-rimmed glasses, and delivering an impassioned speech about his recent lack of stimulation, close-ups of OTC medication, then regaining some therapeutic karma by helping a fellow patient back at the loony bin.

Now I’m making up my own words. I was in a buffet-style cafeteria (and always without enough money for what I want), and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it meant. Later I’d learn that it was French, and related to “criminal”?

Have I mentioned already how I’ve been dreaming so much that I wake up like I’ve walked out of the Dark Knight? Well, a version of Dark Knight where the perspective switches between Batman’s and mine, all sorts of details are wrong and the story unravels in a direction somewhat if not completely unlike that of the original. This weekend I came up with no less than three episodes of House and an alternate ending to the Prisoner, apparently filmed later in the Seventies—must be my mind blurring those two decades again, from memories of reunion shows like this one—where No. Six is shot dead by the shopkeeper!

So Sunday afternoon I multi-tasked in the six-episode universally-panned miniseries from last year, and yes, I hated it. Bad enough they’d even hint that the “93” character was Patrick McGoohan’s (I get it, 9-3=6), but there were so many of them, who could keep track, much less care? Life in the twenty-first century is so far one long jail sentence imposed to keep us free from terrorism, and another Matrix is the best they could come up with? I’ve mellowed, though, and might actually agree to the suggestion that the series be remade every now and then, if only to shake things up, to remind us the world hasn’t changed, much, and if we’re to measure progress with a penny-farthing, it’s gotten worse.

Had not one, but two dreams over the weekend recommending I be more frightened of heights. (My midnight screenings have been positively exhausting for a week now, and while only a layman might psychoanalyze them as compensation for lack of real-world stimuli, I’m tempted to seek some seasonal or otherwise environmental pattern.) It was stairs again in the first, 老婆 having gone ahead at an unfamiliar airport and a thousand-foot almost vertical flight taking me out of the terminal. At the top a moving walkway ramped down to an attached shopping mall, but I didn’t think I’d find her in the mostly empty high-end stores. This morning I was participating in another Indiana Jones movie—which, interestingly enough, would be in the news I read afterward—where a cargo truck was stored on a platform high above the ground. Being inside it and seeing the heroes on their horses far below was quite an intimidating sight, perhaps because of my precarious position. Parked there also was a late-model white Dodge Avenger or the like, which struck me as an anachronism but I explained away by the modern setting of this latest sequel. Not correct, of course.

I really must dream of Walden Pond or something to that effect, because these action movies are wreaking havoc on my ocular muscles. This morning I was a prisoner of Korean gangsters, and for their amusement they cuffed me and another woman to a single car on an indoor roller coaster. (Must be from the park in the movie 老婆 Netflixed last night.) She wasn’t in on it and expected a mere thrill ride; I knew different. It was a death machine, a spectacle being filmed for their perverse pleasure, so leaned into her lap to avoid the saw blades that surely decapitated her after the last dip. They must’ve assumed I suffered the same fate because they let down their guard while releasing us, and I sprung into action, making a run for it while incapacitating any of them in my path. My cries for help were meant to reach someone in the audience, perhaps, but I knocked their heads quite ably until I was gunned down by the boss hiding in a children’s tower.

But it wasn’t over for me. Or for them, I was determined. My “soul” rose and made its way through the crowd. I could tell living from dead (the many whom I left in that state) by whether or not they were hovering off the ground—and promptly turned black and vanished into the ether, as was their fate—and of course, if they could see me. One person with her feet planted could, a young girl with curly blonde hair. Apparently this meant that she was of a kind who was also receptive to possession, so I entered her body and took over. A quick peek to confirm, then I would use her to get close to my killer and exact revenge, but thought it was much too qualified as a keeper for a satisfying lesbian life to risk damage and left to find another, disposable host.

Woke up with terrible eye strain, no doubt the result of dreaming what felt like all night long. USA’s obligatory SVU marathon would erase most of my memory of the various episodes, but in the first I recall, I was spotted below from the balcony of a two-story apartment by a fellow who accused me of peeping on his girlfriend inside and informed me that he was coming down for me. I continued around the front, indifferent of meeting him, not so much because he was justified to render punishment, but rather, it was unlikely he’d be able to since—you guessed it—I had super-powers. Our confrontation never occurred, and I flew away. Flight again was hard to control except too high straight up, but I managed to maintain enough altitude off the ground when I leaped from the top of the building to distinguish it from a suicide jump. The rest I lost but my search for the password to an old AOL account… something like PPW306R, which, as it turns out, was instead the license plate of James Bond’s Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me (and my Corgi replica of it).

Had a dream we were by the ocean, overlooking it as we did at that stop in 宜蘭, and there was a giant turtle near the shore. It swam behind a smaller one, and when it got close enough, gobbled it up. 老婆 was preoccupied with her relatives and wasn’t listening to me when I told her about it, and wandered into the water …only to be swallowed whole herself. I was horrified, and yelled something to the effect of give me back my wife, but stopped short of throwing myself at the creature, as little as I could conceivably do without a weapon against its rock-like hide. Upon waking I re-considered; I probably should have. After all, not everyone gets a trial run at the life (albeit a lonely one, as a practical-minded coward)-or-certain death decision when faced with a giant turtle who’s just eaten your loved one.

China Airlines is as uncomfortable as I remember it; there’s just something about the seats that have me trying to bend metal by the end of the flight. Nice selection of media, however, including the 30 Rock 3rd season premiere (with Chinese subtitles) and enough movies to put together a a summer science-fiction marathon: Moon, which I liked a lot, seeing as how I actually had to put on the headset to follow—which certainly wasn’t the case with Transformers 2. I had to again for Will Ferrel’s Land of the Lost because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing had been released as a major motion picture. What a shame that they revisited this show without the awesome end theme.

Taipei’s TV lineup doesn’t seem to have changed much; in under a week I’ve seen every Bruce Lee movie and more than my share of Jackie Chan and Tony Leungs—had the time, being laid up with what we first feared was the H1N1, but turned out to be more akin to stomach flu or Traveler’s diarrhea. (I suspect the sushi my in-laws always insist on treating us with.) My experience with the health care here is, nevertheless, one for Michael Moore’s films: seeing a doctor and a bag full o’ drugs cost half my insurance co-pay back home.

Dreams, had a bunch, thanks to the mild fever.  In one, Ron and his whore planned to drive me to the ocean and throw me in, so I broke his neck from the back seat without so much as an emotional farewell.  The same night my then ex-wife, our child, another woman and I were registering at some Taiwanese agency, and the only word I understood from her responses was the state of her new relationship: “lesbian” …still, our breakup apparently was amicable.  Then there was the Star Trek movie which had me feeling was worth a revisit, where original cast featured alongside Next Generation, Deanna Troi traveled the corridors in a floating seat and Kirk showed heroic vigor by placing a vital dumbbell-shaped part on his thick head of hair and running off to engineering to save the day with it.

The apartment 老婆 arranged for us reminds me of Blade Runner, except all the flying cars have descended onto the damp streets as scooters. From our eighth floor window I can hear all the noise from below, where shops repeat recordings through megaphones so distorted that even she can’t make them out, and I have to resist the urge to smash. One that played all night sounded like 發燒 (fāshāo), but instead of mocking my temperature, it’s 肉粽 in Taiwanese (バッチャン, because I’m not learning Pe̍h-ōe-jī just for the sake of this post).

That was the name of a giant department store in whatever fancy part of town we were. (I guess it makes some sense, although “caesura” really was mining my vocabulary.) I met back up with 老婆 after walking off on my own to another and we walked together towards this one on the hill. There were two sharp-dressed Orange-haired Black women, twins, smoking in front of us and she told them it was disgusting. They replied with some remark about Confucius and went on their merry way. I tried to get back at them with a similar historical figure, but Nelson Mandela was all I could think of. We boarded a moving sidewalk, the kind in Vegas, taking us up at a sharp angle then leveling off at with an even sharper one and a sign warning me to watch the low overhead. When we entered there were quite a few people with us, so I had little time to look around, noticing only a deep pit with a giant Garfield-like decoration at the bottom. No means of descending was visible to me, but 老婆 grabbed a shopping cart and pushed it down, seemingly on an invisible stairway. All the others proceeded like her. I could not. Then a fellow passed me and with each step he took, blue cushions folded forward, so I carefully followed him.