Friday, July 27, 2012

Rot and kingfisher disease

Chilling out, sitting on the shore of a small island, not very beachy, not built up, not too woodsy either. At least Prifs and Brittany B from college are there. A younger guy I hadn't met was with us too.

We asked him what his major was in college, and he said it was something technically useless that gave him a wide range of useless knowledge, like "The leading causes of death in humans are rot and kingfisher disease."

Since we asked, he explained that "kingfisher crabs" cause the disease, and they live in the forest. I mentioned that, though I had never seen a kingfisher crab in the forest, I had caught crayfish out of a creek once [yes, that happened in real life].

Also, I had caught some fish earlier way down the coast to our right (actually on a very close separate island, where apparently our academy-like monolithic dorms were located).

Friday, July 20, 2012

I'm so mad at you, you could live for everyone in June.

I was in the back seat of a car; a wife and husband in their forties were in front, the wife driving. Someone else was in the back, to my left.

For some reason, the husband was brandishing a revolver, pointing it at the wife to compel her to drive somewhere. Stranger, though, was that he held the gun up around the same height as his neck and angled it down towards her. I advised lowering it so that people outside wouldn't see what was going on, but he continued holding it up.

The wife, frustrated, said: "I'm so mad at you, you could live for everyone in June."

"Try August!" I said. Somehow I think she was wishing all the summer heat upon him.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Blew their minds with a song about bears

There was a battle-of-the-bands type contest going on between a rock band of Metallica-grade self-importance, and us (me and Kevin S and maybe Ray).

The Metallickesque band had just made an earnest, rocky song, and it was our turn to create a song to challenge it. We ended up copping the song structure from their song and changing it into an inane lounge song.

Kevin S wrote the words, and as we played the song for the other band, in like a backstage hangout room, written lyrics magically unfurled on one side of my field of vision, as though it were on TV.

The other band was dumbfounded as we played. I worked out some kind of chord/bass progression on the left (chordy) side of an accordion (though the sound coming out sounded like a perc/rotary organ).

It was in B flat. The words were kind of like:
1 Prose. x . . . . . . . 3b 3b 3b 2 1 Rock music history, Who-knows. x . . . . . . . It's such a mystery. Bears. [Something about bears..] Bears. [etc.]

Of course I probably did some random post-awakening edits while trying to piece it back together, but it was to that effect.

House party, boozed and bruised car, awkward ninja girl

A bunch of folks were partying in the left-side (i.e. port side) driveway of the house I lived in. I was sitting in the driver seat of my car, with the car facing the side of the house next door, only a few feet away. It was nighttime.

Among the party guests was someone I identified with Zach W, who was standing between the hood of my car and the side wall of the next door house. There was loud electronic dance music playing, and he was fiddling with a stage lighting device, which was strobing and brightly shining various colors.

Even though a strip of the lights were placed on the hood in front of me, and facing me, something managed to block it from shining straight in my eyes.

There was a 24-pack of beer on the floor in front of the passenger seat, more than half of which had been emptied out/consumed. I reached and grabbed another, mentioning to Ray (who was standing outside the driver side window) that we had to finish all the beer before we could go driving anywhere. (Ray seemed skeptical.)

Later, after having spent some time inside the house, I came back out, and found (as I had already heard from others) that my car had been badly trashed (vandalized perhaps, or abused by partygoers). I looked at the rear bumper, seeing that it had been replaced by a really cheap looking, mint-green bumper that was all the wrong dimensions, and wasn't well attached, either.

I walked around the port side of the house and into the back yard, which had a tall (10+ feet) wooden fence along the back, with perhaps a small street behind it. It was mid- to late afternoon now.

As I walked into the back yard, out of nowhere a young woman comes flying over the fence and lands upright, just in front of me. She's wearing a white, decorated t-shirt or the like, and has reddish, dirty blond, somewhat poofy long hair.

Despite her grand entrance (which might have really been intended to have gone unnoticed), we don't really say much to each other, but I think she looks familiar and ask if we met once before, a while back, around this same place.

She says it's unlikely we've met before, because she lives "at Milwaukee, WI near Largo" (or something weird like that, maybe referring to a street or a metro stop in the DC area).

Spying on the castle-mansion, foiled by pitbulls

I was perhaps a spy or something, and had walked up an outdoor walkway in the woods to the outside entrance to the top (third?) story of a castle/mansion of grand proportions (maybe football-field sized).

The door was open, looking into a roomy stone hallway. Before I could really step in, a pair of pretty evil-looking brown pitbull-like dogs came up to me and began to menace.

On and off, they went from baring their teeth and looking ready to pounce, to zoning out and looking nonchalant. I decided, though, that I better not take chances, so I strolled back down into the woods. The dogs followed me for a ways, still switching between evil and docile.

The last stretch out of the woods was a neatly delimited steep slope, covered in fallen leaves, with a railing all the way up the left side. As I climbed the slope, holding onto the railing, I noticed that the entire railing was covered with a very thick layer of whipped cream.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Apartment life in post-apocalyptia

In post-apocalyptia, I and a few friends (one male and one female, I think), had just returned to our apartment. We were arguing about what to do with our paper money (probably because it wasn't currently worth anything). The guy was trying to show how we could use the paper money to make our rides more aerodynamic.

(Our rides were little battery-powered boxes on wheels, perhaps two feet cubed, barely big enough for our butts to rest on. He unlatched the top of his, and was folding the edge of a multi-dollar bill and slipping it in and over the battery to demonstrate what he meant.)

We then did some mental exercise, imagining what to do in case of a zombie attack. In our imagination, a woman was walking down a sidewalk while fending off a not-so-clever male zombie who had been bitten in the arm.

Our apartment building was surprisingly well-maintained, and well lit by daylight, though completely empty of furniture. It looked like a building that had just barely finished being constructed before the apocalypse.

I was sitting in the hallway outside our apartment, with a young girl (maybe 10 years old) sitting next to me. Our neighbors, a young Spanish-speaking couple (and possibly a child), walked by us in the hallway on their way out somewhere.

The wife chatted a little with us in pseudo-Spanish about the zombie; I was mentioning how the zombie had been bitten in the arm but I couldn't quite work out the phrasing. She said something like "ha estado [verb]ado en el armada". The world "voller" was in there somewhere too.

The girl next to me was looking up words on a handheld digital dictionary device, but wasn't sure if she was spelling them right. I was a little suspicious of "armada" meaning "arm". We couldn't work out what "voller" was.

At some point, the girl changed (imperceptibly) into Joan D (adult), and we were eating oreos. She was mentioning how it was interesting that the words "dedo" in Spanish and "doigt" in French (both meaning "finger") looked so similar. So I said, oh, yeah, well, "digitus" -- pointing out that another word for "finger" in English was "digit", and all three words came from Latin.

Joan looked astonished, and told me what a rush she felt when she figured out stuff like that. :D And then we ate more oreos.

(But I wanted to save a few oreos for Ray, who apparently had furnished them for us.)

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Christmas party on an aircraft carrier

I was with a large, somewhat familiar crowd on the top deck of a cargo ship or small aircraft carrier, presumably on the water far from land. People had gathered there for a Christmas celebration.

One smallish propeller plane had just landed on deck, and the airplane's crew was coming out and joining the crowd. They hailed from the Netherlands, and there were about 12 of them, mostly middle-aged men. They had some weird tradition where they had large ropes (such as would be used to secure a boat to a dock, or slightly narrower than that) hanging all over them, so that they could still move about but they hobbled in weird ways, leaning to one side, hunched over, or crabwalking.

The crowd cheered as they came off the plane one by one and walked over -- reminiscent of a sports team's introduction at an important game. Nancy M was amongst the crew, too.

My part of the crowd started moving off toward a covered area on the deck, where tables had been set up. On my way over, I noticed someone who looked a lot like Sarah O from high school, except she looked taller, and was wearing a deep purple dress; and the irises of her eyes were the same deep purple as her dress. Quite striking.

I sat at a table with four other guys, the two at the opposite end seemed familiar but I don't remember who they were; in the middle was a guy who reminded me of Moe W. Music was playing: Happy Xmas (War Is Over). Where they were singing "A very merry Christmas", everyone raised their... goblets?, and said "Happy Christmas!" And when they sang "and a happy new year", everyone toasted again right away, saying "Happy New Year!"

I clinked goblets with the two guys closest to me, then we started passing our cups around the table to clink with people we couldn't reach.