윤

For an extra-Asian sugar high, Yi Fang didn’t have anything on Tea Station, but at least it was consistent between the two Bay Area locations. The camaraderie during a miserable project must’ve sweetened the memory, that’s my lesson from our 50-mile round-trip to Rowland Heights this past weekend. No stamp cards, discounts for buying a refill cup, loyalty programs—they’re just not worth it without them. And the eggs and corn from 辛巴樂 were packed in too much water. Remember how I used to stop by the one in Arcadia for sausages? Worst of all, some dbag Chinese (from the dashcam footage of him unloading his shaved kid and the “GZ FMLY” plate, what other language uses those awful j-sounding z’s in their names) parked their thrashed Model X obscenely close to our car with two empty spaces on the other side, asshole.

I was on a plane, though the velvet decor and roomy aisles were more like a theater’s, and wandering around there were spacious corner sections with luxurious sofas reserved for VIP’s like basketball players. Upon returning to my seat for the second leg of the flight, there was a rush when more of them became available from no-shows, and the woman I had been sitting next to, a Brit named Sandy with long brown hair, got up and made for another across the way, which I took personally as I thought we had developed an amicable relationship; in fact, I had only made that trip to track down someone who had insulted her honor, big Black athlete or no. My loss was consoled by the arrival of another attractive girl.

Abed Nadir was behind the wheel of a 90’s ricer, which he drove us (myself and at least two others—I’d like to think Annie Edison was in the back seat with me) wildly through town, not sure any landmarks were there to recognize but I’m remembering Long Beach, because, he explained, he could only go for as long as he kept it “cool.” The word on an LED where the radio would be confirmed his status, but it disappeared when his breakneck charge relented, and walls of multi-colored spikes rose up before us to hinder any progress, following his desperate right turns. Eventually he realized the game was over and stopped the car, and we stepped out onto the broken pavement in the low light before dawn.

A mainstay in my 5-disc changer, the one into which I painstakingly keyed so many titles for it to display throughout the early 90’s. Talk about life’s labor lost, I wonder if its onboard memory preserved them, or like my 100% Super Metroid save, they’re all but digital ghosts in broken-down machines, the precarious memories of yet another who is himself fast approaching the same state.

…Until then, however, I’ll accelerate things by eating whatever the fuck I want, including supermarket deli lasagna and Oreo Cakesters, which take me back, too, perhaps not as far, but still to a time when there seemed more ahead than behind. Got me thinking how the Metaverse/San Junipero will recreate ancient treats like these in our minds, because I can’t recall re-experiencing them in dreams, maybe by hijacking the right areas of the brain and simulating the sensations? Could this be done in real-time, say, to disregard information your nerves are sending and fool you into thinking that your dinner smells and tastes like dessert? Might the discrepancy in the fake crunch of the delicious burnt pieces cause bite irregularities or would that be compensated for as well?

Not sure about that third one–in fact, I’m sure it’s wrong–because the second took me so long to get right, by the time I got to it I forgot the last of the three words. At the top of the stairs, led by a bikini-clad comely lass with such soft tanned skin, were two arrays of hoses wrapped in plastic, and each was labelled with names like “Strawberry.” Was my job to mate the matching ends and ensure the flow of liquid between them. The “Transhibiscus” connection (itself a corruption from something even more fictitious) kept leaking and required several tries to fasten securely, causing my memory failure afterward.

I had another dream about walking under large trees occupied by a giant bear or crocodile, most likely influenced by that much smaller one we pass on the way back from Ralphs taken up by bees, but my mind was still on that soft, soft skin…

Another recurring dream I have is coming across stashes of loose change, sometimes on the street, one coin becomes two and more, quarters are followed by larger mint I assume to be half dollars or greater, and there’s always a moment before fully waking when the reality that I can’t bring them with me hasn’t sunk in, that blissful state of delusion when somehow beautiful young women are alright with you and your wife is with them. And I don’t buy the notion that this foretells riches, unless I’m meant to understand that happiness comes in small denominations and is limited to approximately $23.50. This morning’s haul came at an arcade, where at the foot of unmanned retro games I would pick up a quarter or two, occasionally coming across coins smaller than the 10-cent one from Hong Kong I still keep in my wallet and some the size of coasters. I continued my collection upstairs but was stopped by a kid who looked like that pathetic James on Ricky Gervais’ After Life series, which is the case with all its characters, sure, but it’s still good for laughs at their expense. He explained the quarters were left as tips for the repairmen, so I felt obliged to make up for my transgression, but all I had was a single dollar bill and fives, stupid cashless post-COVID economy. It was then that it occurred to me they might have me on video pilfering all those machines, camera technology being ubiqitous nowadays.

I refuse the inevitability of contracting a virus whose spread is aided by selfish unmasked anti-vaxxer pricks and almost worse, people who know better but have accepted it, because they’re “tired.” Like those endless videogames of yore, there’s no tiring in the fight against intruder organisms.
And because I probably won’t retain any details about new dreams while I’m still holding onto this one’s, best.client.ever Wing was at odds with her management and while she argued with them behind a glass-doored meeting room, asked me to pick up her drycleaning, which consisted of a branded jacket and was marked on the tag “Very expensive.” She severed her ties and emerged, dressed in a long frilly coat and high boots, with curls like Japanese ne’er-do-wells from the 90’s. I can’t quite place the look—maybe it was one of the ガングロ-type girls the main character saves in オヤジぃ。—but it attracted immediate suitors whom I had to fend off before she got into my car, though I had no idea where to take her in DC.

I was reunited with old co-worker Laura Armijo, maybe because at the time she lived in Lakewood, where we went this weekend to cash in our Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards before they become worthless, and a roomful of Mark Malinski clones, all armed with automatic weapons, waiting for a signal to start blasting away at each other. Apparently we had the ability to restore our consciousnesses into new bodies, so death was nothing to fear, though I concentrated a few more times as if to upload the latest backup, just in case. All I had to make the best of it was to take her gun and give it a go, but before the activity began I succumbed to my doubts and backed out. I left the arena and took a seat at a student’s desk and played a holographic game on the tabletop with my hand, but Shining Knight whose presence I otherwise took entirely for granted approached and startled me by stabbing me in the gut, smirking as he retreated. For this I gave up sexy Wing?

Miserable start to this anniversary of that heinous revolt: I dreamed Six o’ One Patrick McGoohan and I were on the run and had only a small guardhouse to pass, so I let the champ sneak in and do his thing—only to find that he failed and was being held by a group of ruffians; it was Wild Wild James West who never lost a fight, after all. Their leader approached me with all the swagger his entourage afforded him and effortlessly caught my fist, mocking me. If only I could muster the strength to challenge his grip, but it would take longer than I had left, more confidence in myself to reign in my insecurities. Incompetent leadership at work got to me and my run didn’t make up for it, but by the end of the day I was chuckling at the sodium warning on Taco Bell’s new limited-time Crispy Chicken Wings (seasoned with “Mexican Queso”, for future reference).Napped during lunch and saw a passenger jet whose pilot the news said had successfully regained control of it to land intact; was more of a vertical drop out of the sky onto the runway in the near distance, but it didn’t go perfectly: as I looked closer, the plane’s body began twitching, as if it were going to explode. There were two young girls beside me and I pushed them to take cover from the blast behind a parked American sedan while the building wall kept me safe.

The library was under attack by zombies, or someone else I needed to get away from, and in the next room over Daisy told me that she hides in a makeshift cubby-hole behind a shelf of books. I cleared the mostly clothes hiding the entrance at eye level and peered inside to see a tight chamber lit green, but before I could hop in, a young Black woman with close-cropped hair showed up and sought refuge. Despite our differences and all, I wasn’t going to turn her away and helped her up; she was followed by another attractive Persian girl with long dark hair, whom I also let go before me. When it was finally my turn, I only then realized the opening between shelves was too short even for my head. (My female companions must’ve been of svelte physique, lucky for them.) Lucky for me there was another below between two others that were set further apart and I could hop in, through a long shoot like mech pilots do in anime.

There was more to the follow-up but it’s been a more eventful Sunday than I’ve been used to, which has purged my recall except for something where I bluffed a bunch of bad guys with a bomb first, a common enough tactic in person, then a second time when they thought they had me remotely and planting it on them.

First dream of the year, at least that I can recall, was about a missing girl whose suitors seemed to care less about her mental health and whereabouts than their own poor experiences with her: David Barreiro complained about being led on, and another character I felt was based upon the Terry Silver baddie in the latest season of Cobra Kai (whose six hours or so I binged in half that time by skipping the through the new kid’s subplot) continued to pursue revenge wearing special clue-gathering spectacles. Me, I was looking for a Lego car I had left in her place, which I eventually did inside a box or coat pocket; it wasn’t a set piece but built with standard gray and clear bricks and carried some sentimental significance.

In the other, I had been married previously, twice in fact, and never formalized our divorces, though my last wife was decent enough not to make it a big deal.