A door full of sand, a forbidden book, and onion rings.

We go to a meeting in Russia. No car. No money. Grey and dusty. Is this Chernobyl?

I manage to get a car I found running. I have to hide it (and us) in an old concrete plant.

The first place I find, we access by taking an elevator. Sarah Tvedt is there, bitchily snooping. She doesn't want us to have a car. She wants us to suffer like she does.

Bitch.

I hide it deeper, under this iris thing. It's cool, like the Batcave. Rusty and industrial.

Now that I have a car, I go out adventuring.

I find a bookstore or library. The sign is garbled, like it was designed by the same AI that made spaghetti-eating Will Smith.

It's an upstairs-downstairs situation. Upstairs, you sit, eat, and read your books. I notice everyone has big, glorious stacks of books, but I only have my one.

I ask another patron, and she tells me there is another level, but it's only for Chinese.

“Not for you,” she says, eating pizza and gesturing at her eyes.

I go down the stairs.

It's yellow and wood, with shag carpet, like the '70s.

The clerks downstairs are helping another customer, and I approach the door in the small room as if I belong there.

When I turn the handle, it's firm and refuses to turn. I try to turn it with my mind, visualizing the parts inside the lock, but all I can see are rocks and sand.

The clerk gets my attention and tells me the door is for employees only.

I ask for a different color book, and she says I cannot read it.

And I tell her how hungry I am.

“You want onion rings?” she asks.

I answer in the affirmative.

Then a little man comes out and gives me the biggest plate of onion rings I've ever seen.

They are glistening and warm, fresh out of the fryer.

As I carry them up the stairs, I'm back in the garage of the concrete plant where the car is stored.

Then I wake up to the sun making the room glow a golden yellow.

#dream

excerpt from a diary entry a few days ago

Dreamed about Paris. The Eiffel Tower. I had a special invite that let me spend the night. I had access to Gustav's private room at the top.

There were a dozen young people there that I've known over the years. AD, KH, DH, C, Cnd, Z… and some longtime friends.

Somehow, because I had a ticket, they all got to stay. But everyone had to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor.

At night we danced and laughed and tried to make the tower sway. I explained how the sideways elevator worked.

I felt like a genius as I described some kind of mechanical scissor device that pushed the car along a train track. It didn't make any physical sense.

Except in dream language.

When I woke up in the dream, we had moved in the night down to a platform at rooftop height. The view was of a red brick neighborhood like you see in New York.

There was a cat that jumped back and forth from the tower to building tops. If you were nice, it would let you ride on its back.

I sat and drew in my book. Quiet and unassuming. Minding my own business.

I drew elaborate plans to make some kind of mechanical thing. Beams and girders and elevators.

I rode the elevator. I was worried I wouldn't get all of my thinking done before the tourists arrived.

I went to ground level. It was wide open, but nothing at all like reality. It was more like the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

AD was photographing everyone with some kind of special camera that let you go into the photo later.

Since I was the host, I asked to be in the photo.

Everyone resisted because they had forgotten who I was or why I was there.

AD agreed, thinking she was being kind to some old homeless guy.

But in the photo, I was glowing gold and everyone could see that they had underappreciated my generosity.

I rode the car back to the observation deck and heard someone shout:

“The sun is coming up! The sun is coming up!”

#dream