윤

Not so much the fear of seeing rocks, feeling them, petting them nor even being pelted or crushed by them, but walking across them, as we saw this morning: I was part of a team that seemed to consist of co-workers from both current and previous jobs wrapping up an onsite client visit to a warehouse. The manager there offered me one of their uniforms for me to wear next time, so I waited for him to fetch it for me while my party left for the car, and surprisingly through all the commotion at the end of day (as well as typical disappointment from my dreams), he came back with a new green/navy reversible down vest. It was cold outside and I put it on over my own coat, which was probably the hooded Uniqlo one I’ve been wearing around the house this month. My wallet and phone were in my back pockets, too, also unexpected since I usually lose them. The parking lot was way off in the distance from the building exit, past a ravine-like field which had to be crossed by rock formations along the edges. People were still coming and going, and to avoid one oncoming fellow I opted for a lower path to his left that I soon realized wasn’t going to get me to the other side as all the jagged boulders ran out and sank into the dark pool below. I leaped to an abutment to the side but it wasn’t stable enough to support my weight, gave way like rock shouldn’t and I had to grab hold of one flimsy attachment after another. Onlookers gasped while I relied on my pull-up strength to stay above water, but as I inevitably felt my butt submerge—no wonder I was left with my things—the lesson of this short segment dawned upon me, always to take the high road.

After the bathroom break, I was driving the XTerra again and exited off a freeway intersection into an elongated entrance to one of our gated communities. (Last I swear I saw Sylvilagus was along this path to CPE on an early lockdown run before the Asics mask, but surely my two signature bandanas was a giveaway…?) I asked John Chen if he wanted to be picked up, but he wasn’t interested, no surprise.

Update: Rained like it does here once a year today and during whatever is the opposite of sleight of hand that happens getting into the car (namely, the transfer of the contents of my back pockets to my front rather than sit on them, hindered by anything I’m already carrying, in this case a wet umbrella mid-collapse), my wallet fell into a puddle as premonitioned earlier. I picked it up out of the water quickly enough that the last of the paper inside would be unscathed, maybe because I knew I was better off it dropping than my phone, there was no pause for misery. It was almost comical, too, the first time ever in the drought-stricken Southland when I remember driving through Texas torrents that made the windshield look like aquarium glass, like the surfeit of silly storylines on this season of Curb that required suspension of disbelief in our annual precipitation.

My “Bits and Pieces” post was growing a tad unwieldy, which presented itself as an opportunity to organize my dreams, even the ones with little in the way of context, much less length, and make them searchable for future reference, but then what’d be the difference writing them up as they occur in their own posts? The other night I was walking down an empty city street with an acoustic guitar playing “Wish You Were Here” (hopefully doing it at least as much justice as the kid once did) and crying through the lyrics. On the roof of one of the brick residential buildings was a floating sorting hat decoration.At an unlikely gathering of neighborhood moms—its likelihood naught due to my participation—one told the group at a table outside a restaurant in a local shopping center about her car being replaced with another model by the manufacturer without her knowledge. Despite the real world legal ramifications, I actually found this plausible after my experience back in college when Jeanette’s MR2 was impounded out of their gated condo parking garage by police for title impropriety during my watch. And wouldn’t you know it, it happened again before our very eyes: her dark gray Scion hatchback (didn’t L&L BBQ girl Kristen have one of those) disappeared and in its place was parked a big blue pickup with a matching belt holding down its running hood, like one of John Steed’s Bentleys. Update: I forgot the epilogue where I realized I left my wallet on the table and ran back to see a short Latina receive it and everyone else’s from her even smaller child, trained to collect them deftly from underneath, while the waitress watched.

A legitimate phenomenon back in 2016, I doubt we’ll see another one like it again where a thousand people moved like zombies along the dark Long Beach shore upon a Lapras sighting, but new technology debuted that greatly enhanced the AR experience and the line to enter a tournament taking place inside a huge brightly-lit convention center was long, and when I reached the front, I was paired with a young Asian woman with short hair and tight black jeans. We didn’t even have our own Pokémon yet, which was probably for the best, since those on most the other teams were being demolished by headstarters throwing down powerhouses like Mewtwo, who’d appear behind the players and transform into an unrecognizable weapon-laden form two stories tall to do its damage. There was an exploratory area downstairs where we could pick up a starter, but in the spirit of partnership, a sign showed that one of us was to carry the other on his back when returning. In keeping with her FOB origin, she didn’t notice the position of the characters and began mounting me from the front, which I normally wouldn’t correct, but the immediate priority was to get out. Barry, who recently messaged the local LINE group from Hawaii, asked me if we’d like to battle, but I told him we were too low level, and I learned too late from another group of guys sitting at a table that we could’ve grinded on NPC mobs first while I gathered equipment for our laptops from an assortment of adapters.

One of my favorite Korean words, with the more nuanced “what the fuck” meaning than is often translated. It’s what I look for, at least when really warranted in the dialogue, from creators whose ideas may not come from the same old places (like the Doom Patrol going outside the box instead of relying on Morrison—whose own early influence I miss), and for most K-content nowadays that’s the webtoon. Not that 지리산 was ever going to be Twin Peaks, and while Hellbound and Dr. Brain aren’t high art, either, they’ve got Netflix and Apple money to go crazy with. One of them just might veer off into The Wailing.

Meanwhile the WTF that Kara Wai‘s family went through in Tracey does seem to have had some effect, or I’m grasping for the kind of correlation that’ll lead me to nightcapping with hardcore gay porn, spurring a dream I was taking a sex ed class led by an Emma Stone-looking goddess who put me on the spot by getting in my face, revealing a bikini under her regalia and asking where I’d make my mounting deposit. Her left eye opened beyond its lid as if to invite the option. Below, I still told her. Fellow student Charlie Hunnam from Queer as Folk passed by afterward, removed his shirt and revealed that his went into a condom, tactic of choice by strip club goers of old. I wondered if our instructor had office hours.

It was time for a spin-off as Grady accepted a job at Rolls-Royce in England and was splitting up the gang or introducing new cast members who would join him. My blonde fiancée Laura and I were among them, but one of the remaining team, an otherwise awkward White fellow who looked like the bumbling police officer on Monk, took me to the side and professed his love, reaching his hand under my shirt and around my waist. I backed off and reminded him of my impending marital status, then began packing my things, which consisted only of two pairs of pants and a Black short-sleeved shirt. He didn’t give up, however, kneeling to my side and producing a ring. The episode ended with a joke about policemen being there for us, then a few of them sitting down to eat in a dining room that was completely empty; the audience applauded, I grabbed my things and hurried off the set to meet with the others at the airport.

Following a harrowing hearing in front of the Supreme Court, I was returning home on a train dogged by two detectives who suspected me of being the masked vigilante. They tried outing me by watching my reaction to the last page of a nondescript graphic novel where the Bat symbol appears, but I didn’t flinch and kept up my identity hunching over as I walked. I could take them all, I thought, but decided to play it out until we arrived at a London station. There I would meet and greet my neighbor Madonna with a baby in pram, then tried ditching my pursuers by a dirt path into the park. A sting in my left leg as I mounted a knee-high mound alerted me that I had stepped into an ant hill, and though most of them seemed inert when I kicked it open, many had climbed onto me and left bites as far as my right forearm. However, as Batman, I was unfazed.

Back in the real world, the closest thing we have is a knob with the Wayne family fortune and none of the drive for justice. God, would one of them at least bankroll another decent live-action portrayal to keep us restless masses opiated? Because boy, was he terrible in this past season of Titans, blasphemously bad. Now the plan is to bring back Keaton? And Pattinson’s “I’m vengeance” line is pretty hard to take seriously in a society that abandons a mentally-ill loner and treats him like trash. For as frightening as he tries to make himself to the superstitious cowardly lot, how much more effective are clowns on the rest of us?

My habit of reaching for the phone upon waking and checking my latest messages, even with nothing more to them than the daily spam that’s swiped to the trash, seems to be affecting my recall of any richer narrative from the streaming service of my subconscious, but because there must be something to the lingering remnants, please indulge me tracking them here:

As often as I’m getting up for it in the middle of the night, I’m now peeing in my dreams, and the directions I got to where I could go in the office I was in led me to a plain plastic waste basket at the end of a desk in an open room. No one else seemed to mind, so I started with a small stream, then released it at full pressure, only for it to be reflected from the growing puddle inside with similar strength. The spray reached my pants, and wouldn’t be abated even after I dropped some paper over it. Finishing up, I heard a toilet flushing and regretted not having looked harder for proper facilities. I walked out of the building and could see in the daylight that there were still spots I’d better wait to dry before returning to my fiancée. My dark slacks originally had the same houndstooth pattern to match my jacket, but had changed to light brown.

Update: First title for this post was Archie Comics-like “Urination Tribulation”, but I thought I’d work in the boy’s fascination with KISS, strangely deviating from the anime path to follow in his father’s footsteps. Except instead of just playing up memories of action figures, blood-inked comics and made-for-TV movies for kitsch value, at least he might play “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” on the guitar?

…And no, it wasn’t another new Netflix series. After my first two hours I woke and remembered seeing George Costanza as the host of his own radio show, since that was before streaming, talking about sports in an admirably competent manner, before he and Jerry conspired to remove precious photos others had taken from them and contributed to a display: his was proof, he angrily directed at his absent parents, of his “social interaction” and Jerry’s a shot from a talk show appearance. They had been printed onto rectangular blocks and when they tried moving them, became loose and jumbled like puzzle pieces.
Nasty stuff happened in the morning stretch, when I’d find under the covers a willing lass of unremarkable topography. In spite of my ability to satisfy her no more than a surfer asleep on his board, she agreed to accompany me to another destination, with an older consort in tow; the latter seemed unvexed by my hanky-panky and when we got so far into the parking lot, still in my red plaid pajamas, to realize that I had left the car keys inside, knew it was pointless to expect me to make the return trip for them and called a rideshare for us instead.