all-too-true-dream
I had such a dream of exagerrated yet realistic types--
The earliest part that I can remember was taking a bus in front of my old high school with a newer friend of mine who lives in Toronto. We were discussing how beautiful one of my friends is and I was agreeing a little too whole-heartedly.
Later, I had walked to some small town, maybe Russell, Ontario, to buy some junk food with my friends? (A true feature of my childhood, my parents wouldn't buy junk food for me, but I could bike to town and buy it.) It being a holiday, the stores were closed, except for the post office/train station, where a very bored friend was standing behind the counter. Typical bored functionary in a sleepy town.. She would read magazines behind her desk as the light played over her desk through the horizontal blinds.
I realized as I was leaving with my friends, that I still needed to find something in my little black sidebag (I am endlessly searching through scraps of paper in it). Suddenly I became so tired on the train-station waiting-room chair, that I slumped backwards and could hardly keep my eyes open. Rushed to see some sort of Bon Jovi (or possibly Weird Al) concert in nearby Metcalfe, Ontario, my friends deserted me. A police officer walked through the waiting room and prodded me, seeing if I was homeless. Just resting my eyes, I told him.
Abandoned by my friends, I started walking home to Ormond. I saw my parent's (true, sadly) giant pickup truck parked and decided to drive it, instead. Soon I was puttering along the highway while searching through my little black bag again. To be honest, I was so negligent that I was actually sitting in the passenger seat with the car driving on "Cruise Control", and I wasn't even paying attention to the road as I looked down. It was only a matter of time before I encountered trouble. True example of today's distractable driver, a menace to themself and others.
Unfortunately, the Ontario Provincial Police had set up a roadblock for negligent drivers, on one of the bridges over the few small rivers that crisscross Eastern Ontario. Somehow, while still driving, a police officer, a tall man, opened the door and got in, lording over me, and made a screwed-up face.
"Not even in the driver's seat, eh? Typical! This is how it always is. I bet you stole this truck, taking it for a joyride eh? That's how they always do it! But you've gone far enough.."
(This mirrors an actual situation where four police cycle-officers were preying on me and accusing me of having stolen my obviously ratty, old bike. Similarly I was fumbling to prove that I owned it while they made sarcastic disbelieving comments.)
"I swear, it's my parent's truck!" I said. "I have the little pink insurance slip in my black bag here somewhere," I said, "that proves I can drive it." I was feeling repentant for my obviously wrong action of not paying attention to the road, but determined to prove that this was the extent of my criminality. Naturally, I couldn't find it among my mass of papers, but I kept producing other actual things from my bag to show him, in an effort to prove that I was simply a respectable, clean-living boyo.
I showed him all sorts of receipts and leftover pamphlets that he would not even conceivably be interested in, and he just looked on and made more jeering comments, ever more assured of my criminality. He reached in and pulled out a city-of-Ottawa ID card, but a generic one from when I used to volunteer. Instead of my picture, it had a silhouette with a question mark. (It serves me right, I was drawing these before I went to bed.) This assured him even more that I wasn't who I said I was. I tried to mollify him by producing my true ID card, I muttered suggestions that I was merely an honest municipal worker like him, with a steady income and no need to put it all at risk by stealing a truck.
He was not sympathetic. But, he soon realized that I probably was just some dumb kid out with his parent's pickup truck, so he rounded up his examination. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out the "Joy of Cooking" or some such 50s cookbook, which was of course just sitting there.
"Take this," he said, "Go home, and cook up a nice steak and some potatoes. And next time, pay attention to the road." I suppose that seemed the most wholesome and proper resolution to him, a punishment that would mould me into a better and less delinquent child for my parents. I hardly wanted to extend this farewell lecture by interrupting to say that I was a vegetarian.
But then I truly was criminal. In a surreal interlude I was a lex-luthor like trickster who could assume any guise. I was a politician and the crowd had turned against me. Assured of my super powers, I laughed as they beat their fists upon me and took swings at me. I realized that I was only as weak as the old-man-in-a-suit appearance I had taken on, so I ran out of the place.
Back to myself, I arrived at a family gathering of my mother's side of the family--all engineers and professors and high-tech workers--strangely, at a sort of dank beerhall with picnic tables. I squeezed into a seat beside my younger brother and some cousins, in face of my uncle who works for the military as a civilian. (I was visiting with him yesterday.) I started to retell my experience with the police, how they were judging me without even having the facts. Of course, as they do, my relatives all filtered it through their own experiences. They searched for a like situation in their mind, skeptical, and finally just gave me a condescending rough pat on the back, a glimmer of that same police officer in their eye, looking at me with a bit of paternalistic pity.
Uncharacteristically both nerdy and gloomy, my younger brother turned to me and said, "In Batman: Nightmare," (or some such title, as he pointed to his comic book), "when people face disgrace in front of the law, they commit suicide." My relatives and I chuckled nervously at this dark and unhelpful reference.
Soon I was away, walking through the dark and cluttered streets of my apparant Gotham-like home. Although it was night, I saw a skinny black-haired teenage girl who was just coming home from work to face her strict parents. (Sorry Tasha.) For some reason I stood by their door and listened in as they berated her a bit even though she had been working as they demanded, typical overworked child, dead to the joyful world in a sense, overly calm and without spirit. Her younger lookalike sister danced around, mocking a bit, making sly comments.
Pretending to have some sort of purpose on their staircase, I walked farther up and saw a gloomy accordion store, which was of course closed, since it was after midnight. I cleared my throat and knocked on the door, and, trying to seem quite official, said to the youngest girl, "Excuse me, do you know when this accordion store opens?"
"You idiot," she said, the cruel younger sister, "Obviously it's not open now." She mocked me for hanging about on staircases at this hour and chased me out of the place.
Cut to a different interlude. Sparse forest, some sort of unseen horror. It was me! I could assume any guise, my breath was poison. Federal officers roamed around, under the trees, trying to find me, and I would spit poison on them and feel nothing as they dropped like flies. But I soon realized that I had a greater purpose.
I stumbled onto a commercial strip and into this or that store. I could assume any guise. I saw the cruel younger daughter. I begged for her help, and she looked disapprovingly and knowingly at me. "Only if you free her," she said, referring to her sister trapped by the cruel life of never having a childhood. In my trickster ways I was supposed to secret her away and deliver her to the free younger sister.
Determined, I ran and ran, across highway strips and through back alleys, through hallways of factories shooting steam out of pipes. But finally I got lost in a maze of these corridors and I ended up in a bizarre assembly-line. It was so dangerous and poisonous to its workers, so 19th-century (or 21st-century) in its disregard for their well-being, that many of the workers sat along the wall with entire limbs long-amputated in accidents, their eyes dead because of all the poison they had inhaled, in this sort House of Butterflies*.
(This was actually my greatest terror as a child, after I watched a show about the bleak future where someone from the "present" was walking around a new-dark-ages Britain where they found everyone was feral and illiterate. They were burning books for fire because they didn't know or care what they were. For some reason I actually found this coldly terrifying, that people would turn into dead-eyed animals one day, completely unrelated to any sort of book-preservation message.)
I had actually assumed the guise of the little girl, so that no one would stop me from approaching her house, but now some 25-year-old female workers at this factory, apparantly young and still "Conscious" and "whole", looked upon me in a matronizing manner, as if to say "What are you doing here, foolish little black-haired girl with pigtails?"
"I need to get past," I said with some sense of urgency, "Why is that door to outside blocked?"
"Oh," they said, eerily moronically, "It stays closed for a few more hours, until we're finished this load. Don't worry, there's no reason for us to go out until then, I mean, we have to finish this."
..Horrified, I looked at the bank-vault-like door with junk piled in front of it and said, "But what if there's a fire? How will you escape?"
They looked at me pityingly as if to say "Little girl.." and "It doesn't matter..", fake reassuring since they were obviously not all there. Just then the smaller of the two threw a carpet around me from behind and wrapped me in it to shut me up. Like being inside a cigar. I struggled and surprised them by assuming the guise of a giant man, which burst the carpet open, but before I had time to register their reactions, my alarm was going off and I was thrust into the waking world..
*The House of Butterflies was what people used to call (I believe) factories that used a lot of lead to make their products. Some of the older workers who had been there since before protective norms were established had long inhaled a fatally damaging amount of lead fumes and would see hallucinations while working. In later life, as their number dwindled, they would keep to themselves on breaktime and say little. I have tried to search for this on google but all the results are just literal butterfly-houses, which is vaguely horrifying in a sense, that they don't realize the original meaning of the phrasing and use it unaware of the horrifying irony..
The earliest part that I can remember was taking a bus in front of my old high school with a newer friend of mine who lives in Toronto. We were discussing how beautiful one of my friends is and I was agreeing a little too whole-heartedly.
Later, I had walked to some small town, maybe Russell, Ontario, to buy some junk food with my friends? (A true feature of my childhood, my parents wouldn't buy junk food for me, but I could bike to town and buy it.) It being a holiday, the stores were closed, except for the post office/train station, where a very bored friend was standing behind the counter. Typical bored functionary in a sleepy town.. She would read magazines behind her desk as the light played over her desk through the horizontal blinds.
I realized as I was leaving with my friends, that I still needed to find something in my little black sidebag (I am endlessly searching through scraps of paper in it). Suddenly I became so tired on the train-station waiting-room chair, that I slumped backwards and could hardly keep my eyes open. Rushed to see some sort of Bon Jovi (or possibly Weird Al) concert in nearby Metcalfe, Ontario, my friends deserted me. A police officer walked through the waiting room and prodded me, seeing if I was homeless. Just resting my eyes, I told him.
Abandoned by my friends, I started walking home to Ormond. I saw my parent's (true, sadly) giant pickup truck parked and decided to drive it, instead. Soon I was puttering along the highway while searching through my little black bag again. To be honest, I was so negligent that I was actually sitting in the passenger seat with the car driving on "Cruise Control", and I wasn't even paying attention to the road as I looked down. It was only a matter of time before I encountered trouble. True example of today's distractable driver, a menace to themself and others.
Unfortunately, the Ontario Provincial Police had set up a roadblock for negligent drivers, on one of the bridges over the few small rivers that crisscross Eastern Ontario. Somehow, while still driving, a police officer, a tall man, opened the door and got in, lording over me, and made a screwed-up face.
"Not even in the driver's seat, eh? Typical! This is how it always is. I bet you stole this truck, taking it for a joyride eh? That's how they always do it! But you've gone far enough.."
(This mirrors an actual situation where four police cycle-officers were preying on me and accusing me of having stolen my obviously ratty, old bike. Similarly I was fumbling to prove that I owned it while they made sarcastic disbelieving comments.)
"I swear, it's my parent's truck!" I said. "I have the little pink insurance slip in my black bag here somewhere," I said, "that proves I can drive it." I was feeling repentant for my obviously wrong action of not paying attention to the road, but determined to prove that this was the extent of my criminality. Naturally, I couldn't find it among my mass of papers, but I kept producing other actual things from my bag to show him, in an effort to prove that I was simply a respectable, clean-living boyo.
I showed him all sorts of receipts and leftover pamphlets that he would not even conceivably be interested in, and he just looked on and made more jeering comments, ever more assured of my criminality. He reached in and pulled out a city-of-Ottawa ID card, but a generic one from when I used to volunteer. Instead of my picture, it had a silhouette with a question mark. (It serves me right, I was drawing these before I went to bed.) This assured him even more that I wasn't who I said I was. I tried to mollify him by producing my true ID card, I muttered suggestions that I was merely an honest municipal worker like him, with a steady income and no need to put it all at risk by stealing a truck.
He was not sympathetic. But, he soon realized that I probably was just some dumb kid out with his parent's pickup truck, so he rounded up his examination. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out the "Joy of Cooking" or some such 50s cookbook, which was of course just sitting there.
"Take this," he said, "Go home, and cook up a nice steak and some potatoes. And next time, pay attention to the road." I suppose that seemed the most wholesome and proper resolution to him, a punishment that would mould me into a better and less delinquent child for my parents. I hardly wanted to extend this farewell lecture by interrupting to say that I was a vegetarian.
But then I truly was criminal. In a surreal interlude I was a lex-luthor like trickster who could assume any guise. I was a politician and the crowd had turned against me. Assured of my super powers, I laughed as they beat their fists upon me and took swings at me. I realized that I was only as weak as the old-man-in-a-suit appearance I had taken on, so I ran out of the place.
Back to myself, I arrived at a family gathering of my mother's side of the family--all engineers and professors and high-tech workers--strangely, at a sort of dank beerhall with picnic tables. I squeezed into a seat beside my younger brother and some cousins, in face of my uncle who works for the military as a civilian. (I was visiting with him yesterday.) I started to retell my experience with the police, how they were judging me without even having the facts. Of course, as they do, my relatives all filtered it through their own experiences. They searched for a like situation in their mind, skeptical, and finally just gave me a condescending rough pat on the back, a glimmer of that same police officer in their eye, looking at me with a bit of paternalistic pity.
Uncharacteristically both nerdy and gloomy, my younger brother turned to me and said, "In Batman: Nightmare," (or some such title, as he pointed to his comic book), "when people face disgrace in front of the law, they commit suicide." My relatives and I chuckled nervously at this dark and unhelpful reference.
Soon I was away, walking through the dark and cluttered streets of my apparant Gotham-like home. Although it was night, I saw a skinny black-haired teenage girl who was just coming home from work to face her strict parents. (Sorry Tasha.) For some reason I stood by their door and listened in as they berated her a bit even though she had been working as they demanded, typical overworked child, dead to the joyful world in a sense, overly calm and without spirit. Her younger lookalike sister danced around, mocking a bit, making sly comments.
Pretending to have some sort of purpose on their staircase, I walked farther up and saw a gloomy accordion store, which was of course closed, since it was after midnight. I cleared my throat and knocked on the door, and, trying to seem quite official, said to the youngest girl, "Excuse me, do you know when this accordion store opens?"
"You idiot," she said, the cruel younger sister, "Obviously it's not open now." She mocked me for hanging about on staircases at this hour and chased me out of the place.
Cut to a different interlude. Sparse forest, some sort of unseen horror. It was me! I could assume any guise, my breath was poison. Federal officers roamed around, under the trees, trying to find me, and I would spit poison on them and feel nothing as they dropped like flies. But I soon realized that I had a greater purpose.
I stumbled onto a commercial strip and into this or that store. I could assume any guise. I saw the cruel younger daughter. I begged for her help, and she looked disapprovingly and knowingly at me. "Only if you free her," she said, referring to her sister trapped by the cruel life of never having a childhood. In my trickster ways I was supposed to secret her away and deliver her to the free younger sister.
Determined, I ran and ran, across highway strips and through back alleys, through hallways of factories shooting steam out of pipes. But finally I got lost in a maze of these corridors and I ended up in a bizarre assembly-line. It was so dangerous and poisonous to its workers, so 19th-century (or 21st-century) in its disregard for their well-being, that many of the workers sat along the wall with entire limbs long-amputated in accidents, their eyes dead because of all the poison they had inhaled, in this sort House of Butterflies*.
(This was actually my greatest terror as a child, after I watched a show about the bleak future where someone from the "present" was walking around a new-dark-ages Britain where they found everyone was feral and illiterate. They were burning books for fire because they didn't know or care what they were. For some reason I actually found this coldly terrifying, that people would turn into dead-eyed animals one day, completely unrelated to any sort of book-preservation message.)
I had actually assumed the guise of the little girl, so that no one would stop me from approaching her house, but now some 25-year-old female workers at this factory, apparantly young and still "Conscious" and "whole", looked upon me in a matronizing manner, as if to say "What are you doing here, foolish little black-haired girl with pigtails?"
"I need to get past," I said with some sense of urgency, "Why is that door to outside blocked?"
"Oh," they said, eerily moronically, "It stays closed for a few more hours, until we're finished this load. Don't worry, there's no reason for us to go out until then, I mean, we have to finish this."
..Horrified, I looked at the bank-vault-like door with junk piled in front of it and said, "But what if there's a fire? How will you escape?"
They looked at me pityingly as if to say "Little girl.." and "It doesn't matter..", fake reassuring since they were obviously not all there. Just then the smaller of the two threw a carpet around me from behind and wrapped me in it to shut me up. Like being inside a cigar. I struggled and surprised them by assuming the guise of a giant man, which burst the carpet open, but before I had time to register their reactions, my alarm was going off and I was thrust into the waking world..
*The House of Butterflies was what people used to call (I believe) factories that used a lot of lead to make their products. Some of the older workers who had been there since before protective norms were established had long inhaled a fatally damaging amount of lead fumes and would see hallucinations while working. In later life, as their number dwindled, they would keep to themselves on breaktime and say little. I have tried to search for this on google but all the results are just literal butterfly-houses, which is vaguely horrifying in a sense, that they don't realize the original meaning of the phrasing and use it unaware of the horrifying irony..