Monday, May 21, 2007

I just had a dream about Michel, and leapt from bed to write it before I forgot

Michel and I were moving together to some giant city, only we were in some sort of alternate present or creepy future; a post-industrial, post-digital, industrial city on a raging ocean shore. Everything- the buildings, the roads, the streets, and all the machines were colossal reformations of our machines of today. Only the machines were stacked and connected to become fifty times larger than the scale of today, almost like Transformers. At the same time, the wild animals were far greater in number, which I found to be an unexpected detail of such a gnarly, dirty and mechanic landscape, and everyone was careful not to disturb the giant elephant seals lounging on the coast among the mechanical detritus, or the serene plains animals criss-crossing the busy boulevards.
Michel found a job in a grocery shipping factory, which stretched 600 delapitated stories into the clouds, and only had exterior walls on three sides of the building. They made new people work on the uncovered side and sometimes during our shift we would see a silent body slip into the clouds and disappear.
She worked the giant machines like a pro, especially one in which she climbed into and operated with a small joystick that extended her arms to become enormous yellow iron ones that scooped up handfuls of melons and corn and dumped them into pallets. I remember towards the end of the dream watching her work swiftly, seeing her fragile skin brush past rusty rotating gears so dangerously, and feeling sick, looking up at her smiling down at me.
At the end of the dream, Michel and I made a trip to the ocean side. You had to climb these long rickety ladders to reach the sand, and the waves themselves were crazy and crashed in every direction instead of just toward the land. Some of the waves rose stories high and then just collapsed on themselves in an explosion of mist. Perhaps the huge sea wall we climbed down was built to protect the strange city from the schizophrenic ocean, but the fall of the waves never hit further than the wet sand at their edge.
The elephant seals lifted their heads and watched us half-interested as we approached the water. Giant albatross the size of airplanes glided above, blocking the sun, and in whose shadow ice boulders would grow in just a second. Just before I woke, Michel turned to me and smiled, squeezing my hand, and the giant albatross dipped low to pick us up, and carried us into the grey clouds.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

goodness gracious

I haven't written here in almost exactly two years. Welcome back, terribleshy; older and wiser, albeit a fraction of a second less optimistic, with a touch of broken heart.