Dream: A Skating Flamingo
Thursday, February 14th:
A man in his late 20s set up a machine the size of a large footstool on the outside shoulder where the road bends around the bottom of a hill. The man flipped a switch and a belch of white paint splashed out of the machine onto the road. His friend, discoflamingo, scowled at him, then rolled through the paint on his rollerskates, leaving trails of white in his wake.
They were both excited that the machine worked, and the man made the machine slowly pump highlighter-yellow paint onto the road while discoflamingo skated away around the corner. Instead of pooling by the machine, the flowed through the puddle and shot down the tracks left by discoflamingo, pushing the white ahead of it. I thought it had something to do with surface tension, but I couldn't figure it out.
discoflamingo skated through the neighborhood, up ramps and down alleys, passing through a busy intersection. He walked back to the machine, irritated but smiling.
"I skated down another hill to the [Olth Parkway] Bridge, went over the side, and right into the lake," he explained.
He donned his skates again and rolled in a huge oval, then wrote a message inside. I laughed as I watched him do it, and he mumbled it out loud as he wrote, but I couldn't read it from my angle on the hill above him. He signed it to gnfnrf.
They both packed up their things and left, and for the rest of the day, an unusual number of cars drove slowly around the curve, their drivers a mix between curiosity and confusion. After following the twisting path through the city, they arrived at the bottom of the hill, only to find a message written to someone else.
Later, gunn mentioned that traffic had been odd all day, and discoflamingo explained what they had done. gunn doubled over in paroxysms of laughter.
"That's AWESOME!" she exclaimed.
After spending the day together, my new girlfriend and I had dinner with her parents at the apartment where they all lived. They weren't on city power; they had a fission reactor in their dining room. The generator's pipes angled up along the high ceiling, then plunged to a small box on the far side of the room. After dinner, her father told me something or asked me to do something with the generator. I nervously tried to figure out which hatch to fill with water and which to fill with Coca-Cola.
The next morning, my girlfriend sleepily snuggled next to me while I desperately tried to remember her name. We'd met less than 24 hours ago, and the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that I'd never heard it spoken.
I saw her on the TV news the next day; she had an internship as a news anchor. In the midst of reading news about the power plant, she interrupted herself and told the audience what she'd learned about Coca-Cola and power plants the night before, gesturing to the flashing cloud in the background. The station slapped a white box over her pointing arm, but everyone already believed her. For the rest of the day, people kept looking at the cloud over the city power plant and pointing. Even a news cameraman on location got distracted and kept pointing the camera away from the reporter.
I saw erregal at a party that evening. He looked sharp in his dark three piece suit, but he sat stiffly in the armchair. His date wore a slinky brown dress that Alyssa thought was amazing, but I only liked it a litte, probably because of the empress waist. erregal checked his pocketwatch. His date leaned close to him, but he moved to the couch, not looking at her. He's waiting for someone else to show, I thought.
I left the next day; I had to drive home from her apartment in Paris. [Paris was in England, though, so it wasn't as far as you might think.] I hated driving in Paris; the narrow, one-way streets and all the canals made it hard to change directions. I got to the depot just as the bus pulled away, but it wasn't my connection. I talked with a couple of local women about navigating through the city.
At home, I explored a residential neighborhood a couple blocks south of where I usually go. I balanced on the fancy cinderblock retaining wall between one yard and another, hopping down to the next row as the wall followed the slope. I crossed to the next block without anyone noticing and followed another set of retaining walls, but the slope got steeper. When I reached the third block, it looked like it was all park; small oaks dotted a grassy hillside almost too steep to stand on.
I noticed a small shack midway down, and I heard the owner explain to a radio audience that by restoring Minnesota's natural oak savanna ecosystem, they didn't have to rake their leaves. No, I thought, that's because you live on giant slide and they all blow away. I walked along the edge of the park and looked down until vertigo made me stop; I couldn't believe I hadn't known there was such a huge gully in town. An impenetrable forest covered the bottom, and I tried to recall whether that was one of the places beltramgregor suggested one could hide bodies.
A man in his late 20s set up a machine the size of a large footstool on the outside shoulder where the road bends around the bottom of a hill. The man flipped a switch and a belch of white paint splashed out of the machine onto the road. His friend, discoflamingo, scowled at him, then rolled through the paint on his rollerskates, leaving trails of white in his wake.
They were both excited that the machine worked, and the man made the machine slowly pump highlighter-yellow paint onto the road while discoflamingo skated away around the corner. Instead of pooling by the machine, the flowed through the puddle and shot down the tracks left by discoflamingo, pushing the white ahead of it. I thought it had something to do with surface tension, but I couldn't figure it out.
discoflamingo skated through the neighborhood, up ramps and down alleys, passing through a busy intersection. He walked back to the machine, irritated but smiling.
"I skated down another hill to the [Olth Parkway] Bridge, went over the side, and right into the lake," he explained.
He donned his skates again and rolled in a huge oval, then wrote a message inside. I laughed as I watched him do it, and he mumbled it out loud as he wrote, but I couldn't read it from my angle on the hill above him. He signed it to gnfnrf.
They both packed up their things and left, and for the rest of the day, an unusual number of cars drove slowly around the curve, their drivers a mix between curiosity and confusion. After following the twisting path through the city, they arrived at the bottom of the hill, only to find a message written to someone else.
Later, gunn mentioned that traffic had been odd all day, and discoflamingo explained what they had done. gunn doubled over in paroxysms of laughter.
"That's AWESOME!" she exclaimed.
After spending the day together, my new girlfriend and I had dinner with her parents at the apartment where they all lived. They weren't on city power; they had a fission reactor in their dining room. The generator's pipes angled up along the high ceiling, then plunged to a small box on the far side of the room. After dinner, her father told me something or asked me to do something with the generator. I nervously tried to figure out which hatch to fill with water and which to fill with Coca-Cola.
The next morning, my girlfriend sleepily snuggled next to me while I desperately tried to remember her name. We'd met less than 24 hours ago, and the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that I'd never heard it spoken.
I saw her on the TV news the next day; she had an internship as a news anchor. In the midst of reading news about the power plant, she interrupted herself and told the audience what she'd learned about Coca-Cola and power plants the night before, gesturing to the flashing cloud in the background. The station slapped a white box over her pointing arm, but everyone already believed her. For the rest of the day, people kept looking at the cloud over the city power plant and pointing. Even a news cameraman on location got distracted and kept pointing the camera away from the reporter.
I saw erregal at a party that evening. He looked sharp in his dark three piece suit, but he sat stiffly in the armchair. His date wore a slinky brown dress that Alyssa thought was amazing, but I only liked it a litte, probably because of the empress waist. erregal checked his pocketwatch. His date leaned close to him, but he moved to the couch, not looking at her. He's waiting for someone else to show, I thought.
I left the next day; I had to drive home from her apartment in Paris. [Paris was in England, though, so it wasn't as far as you might think.] I hated driving in Paris; the narrow, one-way streets and all the canals made it hard to change directions. I got to the depot just as the bus pulled away, but it wasn't my connection. I talked with a couple of local women about navigating through the city.
At home, I explored a residential neighborhood a couple blocks south of where I usually go. I balanced on the fancy cinderblock retaining wall between one yard and another, hopping down to the next row as the wall followed the slope. I crossed to the next block without anyone noticing and followed another set of retaining walls, but the slope got steeper. When I reached the third block, it looked like it was all park; small oaks dotted a grassy hillside almost too steep to stand on.
I noticed a small shack midway down, and I heard the owner explain to a radio audience that by restoring Minnesota's natural oak savanna ecosystem, they didn't have to rake their leaves. No, I thought, that's because you live on giant slide and they all blow away. I walked along the edge of the park and looked down until vertigo made me stop; I couldn't believe I hadn't known there was such a huge gully in town. An impenetrable forest covered the bottom, and I tried to recall whether that was one of the places beltramgregor suggested one could hide bodies.