Thursday, September 11, 2003
I think that, no matter how one feels about Bush and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, or kneejerk patriotism, or the steady erosion of our civil liberties in the wake of September 11th, it's impossible to face this date without a sense of dread and sorrow. And that particular I-was-right-there-when-I-first-heard-the-news sensation that attends certain infamous days. That it has been two years seems inconceivable.
I don't know if I've ever recorded one of my dreams in this journal before. Dreams fall into the class of things that I generally reserve for my "old-fashioned" paper journal. My dreams are usually unpleasantly vivid experiences, thanks to my Klonopin use, and they tend to linger in my head for hours after I awake. Anyway, this one, from this morning, just seemed like something that belonged here. I don't know why, why this one and not the others. It doesn't seem that remarkable.
I may have been this me, and I may have been one of those countless alternate me's that populate my subsconscious mind. I had found a strange little creature lying on the floor. It was small enough to almost fit into my palm, but sort of more substantial than it's size would have led me to expect. I can only describe it was a cross between a manta ray and a very large moth. It was on the floor, gasping for breath, like a fish out of water. I think it had gills, but I'm not sure. In my hand, its smooth skin had a distinctly rubbery texture. The mouth was much like a manta rays and, I discovered by probing with a finger, lined with very fine, very sharp teeth. When I picked it up it was white, and I understood that this meant it was dehydrated, that it was supposed to be in water, and I immediately ran water over it from the tap. This restored it to a brilliant yellow-green, and there may have been darker speckles across its back. I knew it had to be returned to a lake, a particular lake that I knew of in the dream. I put the creature in a thing that was neither a shoebox nor a cloth bag, but somewhat like both.
And the dream goes on and on and on. Me carrying the box-bag, walking across a city I've never visited, looking for the lake, which I knew lay somewhere to the west. There were people, none of whom I've ever met in my waking life. Some of them were helpful and some were not.
At one point, I found myself in a congressman's office and while talking with him realized that the manta ray-moth had become a snake, and that it had really been a snake all along. A long green water snake, of a species I'm familiar with in my waking life. In the congressman's office, it escaped from the box-bag and his secretary helped me try to recapture it. At one point, it slithered away into a largish hole in the wall and almost got away from me, but I caught it at the last moment and returned it to the box-bag.
And later I was in a kitchen of a house, and, in the dream, I knew the people who owned the house. The snake was no longer a snake, but a strange child with slightly greenish skin and large black eyes. I understood that it was hungry and I was searching for something it might eat. I found a box of cheese-flavoured crackers and gave it one. It took a bite and then spit it out, and I continued looking for something it could eat.
And finally, I was approaching the lake, by way of a paved country road. It lay on both sides of a broad curve in the road, fringed by hardwood trees and marshes, the silverblack water reflecting the foliage and the sky. The child had become a green water snake again and was in the box-bag. I began descending the steep, right (north?) bank leading down to the shore of the lake. The bank was quite weathered, exposing a flinty, cherty sort of gray sedimentary rock that had weathered to orange. I guessed its age was Ordovician, and that it might be fossiliferous, but I didn't stop to examine the stones closer.
Having reached the bottom of the bank, I realized, as I'd known all along but forgotten, that most of the lake had been drained years ago and two hideous brick apartment complexes had been built there. A policeman guarded them and eyed me suspiciously. Not wanting to draw attention to myself, and fearing for the safety of the snake, I kept my eyes on the ground, as I walked around to the back of the nearest of the two apartment buildings, where I hoped a bit of the lake might remain. There was no grass. Only the cherty stone. At regular intervals, largish blackblue fish were stretched out across the ground. They were bizarre, grotesque things, which I thought must all be strange deepsea sharks, frill sharks, mostly, but, on waking, I knew they were hybrids of frill sharks and black swallowers and anglerfish and viperfish. They stared skyward with dead eyes, their bodies desiccating beneath the sun.
And that's the last of it I can recall. I woke shortly thereafter.
Yesterday, I wrote 1,350 words on Chapter Nine of Murder of Angels. The novel keeps amazing me. There were pirates yesterday, and will be again tomorrow.
This is already a very, very long entry, but I wanted to thank Jean M., for taking time to write me an fan letter typed on actual paper and mailed with a stamp. To me, each of these is worth at least fifty e-mails. I also wanted to include the following e-mail from Loren (Lomer), a theatre student and fellow Nebari costumer whom I first met at Dragon*Con year before last. It refers back to my blog entry of August 25th:
Hey, I was playing a wonderous game of "follow the link" and once again found your blog and had fun reading entry after entry.
I just wanted to thank you for your post on role playing. I recently joined a Vampire LARP and despite being a theatre student, I scoffed at the idea of LARPing... that's what freaks do, not respectable little actor-wannabes. I was so incredibly wrong though. After finally letting go of my hang ups about what society told me to think about LARPing and LARPers, I discovered it's incredibly fun! Most of the people there are great, and I get to actively choose what my character says and does as opposed to stage work where there are clearly set boundries in most cases (unless I'm doing improv, which even then the longest improv I've ever done was an hour long set of connecting scenes). There is an amazing sense of power in getting inside a characters head, carefully choosing what to wear for the evening, then showing up and speaking and interacting with people as that character... it's exactly what I do on stage, but with so much more freedom.
Actually that freedom can be damn intimidating. When you're used to being given a bunch of lines and having someone tell you where to go and what to do, to suddenly have every door open and every page blank...that's kinda scary. I've been doing this Vampire game for four months now and I've only recently begun to really let myself play without worrying so much about the list of rules I subconciously set for myself. For that alone I'm happy I found LARPing...
Anyway, just wanted to say nifty blog. *g*
-Loren (Chiana from DragonCon)
And, while I'm at it, here's a photo of Loren and me from the SaveFarscape party at The Chamber last October, in our Nebari personae (I so rarely include photos, so what the frell). Loren's the one on the left. Please do not ask why we appear to be in a broom closet:
And now, having prattled on for the better part of an hour, I must go write for real.
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