God knows I’ve slept with a large kitchen knife under my pillow many sleepless nights. There cannot be enough said for weeping during a shower. I had been working long, tedious hours on a new vital form of technology I aptly named the Static-Positive Photon Processor: a computing device unyielding in eternal memory and calculations-per-second as fast, if not faster than the speed of light.
I was feeling relatively sane and exhausted in the aftermath of an unyielding depression, when on one particular evening I happened to sleep into vivid dream. I am driving a motorcycle in the nighttime dream-world I named for sanity’s sake: Omnigog. When I sleep, it is this base-recurrent, program-platform in my head through which all dream information is processed. This synapsed micro-universe is a conglomeration of my first impressions of San Francisco’s vast empire grid of victorian houses row upon row, smashed dirty against each other, and the sterile-plastic sprawls of gilded, Dallas, Texas. In the Omnigog all streets are paved super-black asphalt with bright orange and yellow lines meandering in smooth-constant curvatures. Streetlights spill amber cones straddling golden circles against sidewalks, down the long streets and over rising hills. Humming electric towers loftily string their slick-gray wires, falling proudly into and rising out of the darkened, wind-brooding treetops. Leaning my motorcycle into the turns, I am like an electron travelling in a precise summer-night three-turn circuit, and can feel the mathematics of the architect’s road-layout program calling its functions to produce this constant-smooth curvature. In this dream scenario I am driving with two of my buddies who also only exist in this dream world.
“You can call me Cali.” is what she first said to me as she struck out her strong porcelain hand. “Calliope Zoroaster, hi.” I later found out that I was the only one who she allowed to call her by the nickname Cali. No one else was to ever abbreviate her name due to her excessive, compulsive, egotistical mania. “I’m a hard stuntin’ mutha’ like Evil Keneval.” She later said when Jord asked about her extreme mental states. “...Well, I am static flowing over existence.” is what Jord sarcastically answered.
When I first met Jord, I did not think much of him except our names were similar beginning on the whole with J and ending in X. “Rex? ...Yorx.” He said as he gave his firm handshake. (Yes, it all begins very excessively formal in this dream world of mine.) Jord is the quiet shoegazer type who warmly warns you and the doctors three weeks in advance before he climbs some tower with a high-power rifle and a good scope to shoot people dead. He can go for hours not saying anything and then suddenly blurt-out some fact about the cosmos and animation. This annoys the hell out of Calliope, who has heard it all the time from him, even when they were in bed together. And she has no reservations on screaming at him to “Fuck off!” They both call me “Damn-bitch,” I suppose because that’s what I very well can be.
So in this monumental dream, Jord Yorx, Calliope Zoroaster and I, are riding motorcycles through late, late, unending night, running blinking red and yellow lights and fast turning on dimes. It’s dewy-humid wind through my tangling hair and knuckles tight-aching-white on handlebars as I nearly lose my balance off this purring, vibratory crotch-contraption.
We end up in a frequently visited, yet quickly forgotten warehouse where we keep an array of musical instruments, dusty fragments of junk and various knick-knacks too numerous to mention. This warehouse, I suppose, is situated in an abandoned, gray, industrial corner of the city where vagabonds gather to do their sinister, unabashedly underhanded business. The only problem is walking to and from the safety of the heavy-swinging, dead-bolted entranceway.
“I wouldn’t go out there If I were you.” Jord calmly stated not even looking up from his newspaper. Particularly concerned about my front motorcycle tire going flat, I was ducking looks out the brown, cellophaned windows. “I’m not afraid of them!” I said, rummaging through a drawer looking for a kitchen knife. I finally chose a long wide knife and a short thin knife. “One for slashing, one for stabbing.” I thought.
Outside where my motorcycle was parked, lurked all the archetypes of evil. There were those damned short ones with beady eyes that sought to scam or control anything they could out of you as soon as you turn your back on them. There were those large powerful ones across the street staring from out darkness like hungry carnivores on prowl after nightfall. Their eyes will glow reflective when seen from certain angles. There were the less obvious ones, disheveled, leaning hard, starving with a glazed-over look in their eye. All of this aside, I unlocked the numerous bolts and the door slowly swung open on its own weight as the curtain at a fanciful play allows the audience a gradual and dramatic entrance to the nature of a terrible scene.
Emerging from the entranceway I immediately attracted the attention of all these dream-demons. As if their polarities had at once changed they all turned and began moving towards me in a slow, mechanical fluid motion. However I was wielding two knives with every intention of defense. And not one of those things had enough courage to get close enough to get it in the eye, or in the gut. None, save one. And it moved forward as it sensed my growing horror. It was the biggest one of the bunch and it was wearing a leather jacket. My worst fright was to commit fully to lethal combat by puncturing its tough skin with my kitchen knife. It began backing me into a corner so I finally managed to slash, first with the broad-sword.
All creatures’ eyes, great and small, in the Omnigog, seemed now to watch me boldly plunge the stabbing implement, (two inclined planes, flat, back to back, pointing) into the huge thing’s chest. Then again. Then again. The monster falls, and quickly I slink back to the safety of the warehouse, all the other demons stunned, my flat motorcycle tire completely forgotten.
I slay the dragon! Demogorgon lay slain! Then basking in glory as if trapped within some old Arthurian legend, I noticed a curly brunette among our guests at the warehouse party. She was a maiden in black dress, displaying damsel in distress, chewing on the tips of her fingernails, bitten-red. She was departing the party and needed a drunken walk to her car. I was the dragonslayer and therefore designated to escort, safely to her vehicle. I walked a little ahead, she walked a little behind. And she was gorgeous: all big lofty eyes’ distressed, tangles of coils like frozen electrical arcs radiating, spilling around her tilted head so. My mission thus was to convey this bright creature at all costs from point A to B. Come rain or shine. Come hell or high-water. Come all or none. Come one come all. “Come on!” I said to her as I saw what lay dead ahead. A rogue group of individuals was lumbering towards us with a pre-violence pace. “Come on!” I grab her hand and nicely can feel when her arm runs out of slack, twisting shoulders, her waist soon following as I pull her off the sidewalk into the tall, lawn grass. We exit down a side path between houses until we come to an ancient stone bridge or wide-spanning industrial overpass of some sort. From where we stand, through a torn curtain of treetops we can see an array of city lights shimmering like an electric sea down below all the way to the horizon. “Wow, would you look at that?” We were still holding awkward hands. With a laugh, a smile, and a flash of eye contact we were kissing. We were kissing a most wonderful kiss. And somehow it was meant to be that this woman, who took me, and I who took her, were program-synced to be together, conjoined by the almighty intricacies of this bold-existing universe. And yet I had only found her in this half-remembered dream.
I woke from this dream as if someone had thrown a switch or two somewhere.
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The trashmen are rumbling and squeaking outside. Again in dream, we were watching the drunkards walk by, sitting at an outside bar patio, drinking golden beer and silver tequila. “Tequila, it agrees with my heritage.” spat Calliope fall leaning close to my face, elbowing me hard in my side. “Hell no! Hell no, Zoroaster! Don’t give me that heritage shit!” I yell. Calliope, when real drunk claims to be the descendant of many greats. Lately she had been on a Pancho Villa kick. “...Whose horse’s name was Seven Leagues, y Siete Leguas, en Espanol.” Says a stinking drunk Calliope, dancing, holding the square bottle over her red, red mop of a head, tinkling silver tequila. “But you seem more Irish to me!” I slurred to her. She belted out a laugh, scrunched up her eyebrows and spat on to me, “Your eyes are too small! Yeah, and I am also purple-skinned with red eyes. And when I go to India, I am black as starless night with a lolling tongue between two blood-soaked fangs. But when I drink tequilla in New Mexico, for God’s sake, it’s all about Villa!” At which point she let out a low, sustained volatile burp. I told her that Villa wouldn’t have liked the fact that she was drunk because he was against alcohol, at which she most viscerally returned, “Oh, daddy’s angry! Oh, and by the way, Hemmingway told me he doesn’t feel sorry for you at all. In fact, he said he would very much like to kick your ass if he were still alive. He thinks you need to do an outline first, before you attempt your esoteric vomit.”
Staying on horseback when that drunk is like being inside a very difficult video game. We go riding off into the night, laughing hysterically, shooting our pistolas up in the air, swearing like cabronas, choking down tequilla, and always eating the worm.
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