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Used to be SoCal was a haven for those of us with a history of mosquito saliva intolerance, but seems we have the Chinese to thank again for an end to that. (Alright, globalization, climate change, whatever.) Still, for all our vaunted advances, we’re no less at their mercy: one fucker ambushed me in the car footwell this afternoon and the viral load was so overwhelming I had to stop and get out. Lucky for me I had just vacuumed the carpet so it was easy to spot and drunk on my range-exceeding blood that vengeance could be exacted, and while I’m no longer susceptible to the kind of hideous swelling I experienced until college or the kind of bubbling that might be even worse en masse, I’d like to think we’re not too far from developing dragonfly-sized drones to dogfight them.

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?

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.

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.

Damn Marxists on r/antiwork, bless their hearts, call for a boycott during McRib season? I suppose just the mention of it in this context has disqualified me from their ranks, fucking wannabe leftist that I am, knowing full well the plight of labor but availing myself of its fruits. It’s too bad, too, because I’ve recently gotten into the habit of walking or biking there with a smug sense of self-satisfaction that doing so somehow offsets their insalubrious menu; by not eating in I can do my part to stave off breakthrough infection and disparage the Lexus-driving Koreans who have moved back inside from their makeshift camps in the parking lot; and ogling the occasional black-clad employee who hands me extra BBQ sauce without the least concern for an adequate wage to be objectified by old pervs.