[Kzyxtalk] My dreams from Sunday.

[Marco McClean]

My dreams from Sunday, 2022-01-23: Crash hand. Project VW.

First dream. I'm in a covered corridor between school buildings. It 
feels like the school I went to in the second half of fifth grade in 
Fresno, but I'm who I am, at my real age, and it's a strange rural area. 
I'm waiting for something, possibly also hiding from someone, and 
there's video playing: a demo of a new kind of personal flying vehicle. 
It's like a motorcycle with no wheels, but with a horizontal ten-foot 
propeller out in front and another in the back. I've seen video of a 
thing like this before, in Russia, that flipped over and crashed the 
first time they took it up higher than ground-effect, so I'm worried for 
the driver. He's about sixty feet up; he pulls the front up to tip the 
whole machine at a 45-degree angle and still hover in place. It seems 
really unsafe, but nothing bad happens. He tips it back level again. 
They must have solved that problem.

Now /I'm/ riding the machine at maybe five thousand feet over Midwestern 
farm and park land. I think about tipping it up to see what that's like, 
but before I can do anything the machine shakes and begins to fall. I 
can control it to stay upright but I'm falling faster and faster, 
enjoying waiting till the last moment to use my parachute. /Why? Do it 
now!/ I kick away from the machine, remember and relive folding the 
parachute into the pack. I pull the starter chute out by hand. it caches 
the air, pulls the main chute out, which opens fully just before I hit 
the ground in wet grass next to a pond for cows.

I'm fine, except... my right-hand index finger is twisted to the left. 
It doesn't hurt. I pull it and twist it back the right way, but it won't 
stay, it goes left again. And now something else is wrong: there's a 
jagged bloodless gash across the big knuckle so I see the bone of the 
knuckle moving as I try to move the finger internally. And that's not 
all. The side of the base and ball of my thumb has a hole punched in it 
that might have been made by a Bic pen; this is also bloodless. I should 
find a doctor, but it's getting dark; I need to get ready for my radio 
show. Maybe if I just go do that, some of this damage will retroactively 
not have occurred, like when you hurt yourself with a tool, a wrench 
slips or something, and you wish really hard that it isn't so bad and it 
turns out not to be so bad.

I start walking to the light of a town, looking away from my hand and 
then back to it,  then away, and then back. The damage isn't getting 
worse anymore but it won't fix itself. /Just wait longer before looking 
at it again, and wish harder./ (This is like the marshmallow test. Wait 
until you can't stand it, then wait some more.) I look again. My hand is 
still messed up. Can I still type? I /think/ I can get used to this and 
type. And it's a good thing it's my right hand. I can still play the 
guitar, and so on.

I'm cold. The town isn't getting any closer...

Next dream. Santa Monica (Southern California), but in a place that's 
like what I think of as the Mexican side (east side) of Santa Rosa 
(Northern California). Juanita's mother put her feelers out for a cheap 
or free car, and I'm going with her to try out a car that someone just 
out of the blue gave to her. We walk a long way, and there it is, in the 
parking lot of a closed shop. It's a project car, a 1960s-era VW bug 
that's been completely modified like by a really motivated genius high 
school kid. I open the back. It has a small V-6 or V-8 water-cooled 
engine tipped downward steeply to the transaxle, which is almost on the 
ground because the tires' outside diameter is only about a foot. They're 
like wheelbarrow wheels. The people told Juanita's mom that the car's 
been sitting there for months, abandoned, and they brought a good 
battery to it but it still wouldn't start so, you know, you can have it, 
and good luck to you.

Everything looks fine, besides how there's thick black sludge on every 
part of the car /but/ the motor and the passenger compartment. The 
single carburetor, in the middle, on top, is on a homemade sheet-metal 
adapter to make it level. I remember when Sandra was dying of cancer in 
1992 and she gave me her old Toyota for one dollar, and I couldn't get 
it to start, and I saw Carl in town and told him about it. He said, 
"Here's whatcha do..." and he told me the secret and it worked great. So 
I squirt WD-40 down the main jet of the carburetor to fill up the float 
bowl, and tap on it for awhile with a screwdriver handle to unstick the 
gummed-dry needle valve...

Close the cover, squinch into the driver's seat. The roof is a cloth 
sleeping bag, sagging down so my head holds it up. I unclip the roof and 
shove it all the way back to drape over the back of the car. Now I can 
see the tube-frame of the car everywhere; it's all coated with rubbery 
black oil sludge that I'm surprised I can't smell. Even with the top 
off, the car is very cramped inside. I get out and help Juanita's mother 
into the back seat; she fits fine there.

I get back in, push the clutch, put the stick in the middle, turn the 
key (already in the ignition). The motor starts right up and it's so 
smooth. Now to wait to see if it'll keep running after the WD-40 in the 
float bowl is used up.

Juanita's mother is crying. Is that happy or sad crying? Hmm, I think, 
sad. Sad crying. /Are you all right?/. She says nothing. /Why are you 
crying? Did I say something wrong? Did something happen?/ "Please just 
go. Let's go."

The motor's still running so gas must be getting where it belongs. I 
pull out onto the street. The street becomes a freeway. I get off the 
freeway and I'm looking for a gas station. It occurs to me to pull over, 
turn the phone location on and just ask the phone where a gas station 
is. But here's a thrift store built into a Vietnam-war-time giant 
Quonsett building. We go in there to look around. I love thrift stores. 
Maybe they'll have a foot-pump I can use to put some air in the VW's 
back-left little tire (which is almost flat; I forgot to tell you that 
part).

Rocking chairs, sewing machines, old record players, dishes, sports 
equipment, paperback books... I ask Juanita's mother what she was crying 
about before. She doesn't want to talk about it. There's a dish she 
likes. All the dishes are a nickel.

I woke up with the Monty Python song /Eric the Half-a-bee/ playing in my 
head:

/La-di-da, fiddle-dee-dee
Erik the Half-a-bee
A-B-C-D-E-F-G
Erik the Half-a-bee.../

/Is this wretched demi-bee
Half asleep upon my knee
Some freak! from a menagerie?
No! It's Eric the Half-a-bee./

--
Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com