윤

Was traversing a field where more than your average number of players were gathered for a soccer game, and while I laughed along with the antics of the participants, I carefully avoided any passes in my direction so as not to, er, slow the progress of the ball towards the goal. After scoring on the makeshift lines in the dirt, the Spring Break-like crowd stayed together and gathered around an individual who apparently recited a verse that stirred memories in former rapper Ice Cube. After that bit of weirdness, I continued with what turned out to be a business outing, stolling through a multi-level hotel enclosed in walls of granite, playing a non-DCUO game on my smartphone and finally arriving at the front desk to register. The clerk was taking his time looking up my reservation and the woman of the party behind me grew impatient. She had a shaved head like the (other) mother in The Walking Dead, and leaned into my ear to speak her mind as was the local custom, but uncomfortable to my touch. “Ne plus baisez moi, vous bête!” I shouted, and she retreated.

It only took twenty-plus years, but I finally got one of my favorite comic miniseries animated (the Dark Knight Returns on the horizon; Doom Patrol beyond that, in a parallel universe through the black hole), and apart from a few omissions, like the memorable line above, it was as faithful to the source material as I might have insisted upon. Each and every storyboard, so it was almost like watching those Marvel cartoons from the Sixties “come to life”, and as glad as I was that they kept the now-retro 90’s references of Princess Caroline and the Porsche 928, I miss Mazzucchelli’s art most of all.

Second night in a row I dreamed of losing control of my car, on both occasions the XTerra: the first when I chose to take a single-lane highway ramp instead of my usual wider route; my perspective was from the outside, and a numerical indicator let me know when I hit the rails and spun so many degrees, 360 then 720. And this morning I was on my way over a mountain but the angle of ascent was steep enough that I feared tipping over. (Didn’t seem to bother others on the road with me, though.) Is it possible that the events of the day were insignificant such that the weight on my mind from one dream carried onto the next?