Stuff and Moonshine

Found some good stuff at the thrift store on Saturday, including a minidress that looks as though it was designed by Jack Kirby (big, bold geometric print in orange, pink, magenta and bright blue; found a picture on Poshmark of an identical one that they're asking more for than what I paid).

If you like Derek Jarman, Alan Turing, or vivid alternate realities, you need to read this piece by sovay .

Dreamt of reading about a minor literary figure from the early 20th century, a small spry man behind a “wall of beard.” I don’t think I found any photos, but he appeared in caricatures by several people, including Max Beerbohm. He was Scots, with a long name whose spelling he appeared to have reverse-engineered into Gaelic out of romanticism. His personality was the mix of charming and repellent aspects you realistically find in people, especially if they’re from a very different time than your own. I was advised by somebody to skip the man’s later works, when bitterness and misogyny had largely taken over.

The timeline was a bid odd, as I realized when I woke up— he’d a very 1890s vibe, but had apparently been slightly too young to fight in WWI, and he’d still been around in 1974 to give a tv interview (with Oprah Winfrey, who in real life was still doing local news).

In the dream, I was trying to explain all this to my Dad, and also showing him a small model of a railway caboose that I liked because it reminded me of the CN trains that used to go by our old house.

Memorable bit from last night’s dreams: Somebody told me they could no longer respect Neil Gaiman or enjoy his work ever since they found out he didn’t like the licensed Tolkien sequels with a noir theme. I remember thinking “well, I know Neil has no problem with, say, fanfic, so I’m guessing any issue he has is with trying to apply noir themes to the Tolkien universe.” I’m kind of with dream!Gaiman on this one.

In a lot of what I’d consider moderate-left spaces, attitudes re the US election seem to have split into: 1. “Yes, it shouldn’t have been this close, but if Dems hold the House and win the presidency, that’s at least better than 4+ more years of Trump, and we have a chance of fixing some thing even if it will be the work of generations;” and 2. “The previous statement was gratingly naïve and saccharine in its optimism, why can’t you just admit that even if Biden wins, this is a Pyrrhic victory and America is doomed.”

I lean more towards the cautiously-hopeful-at-least-try side of things, but I also firmly believe you can’t argue someone out of a fit of depression, and I can’t stand watching the in-fighting; so I went over to a different forum and a different discussion, not directly about contemporary politics. Which is where I’m currently trying to resist answering someone who believes hunter-gatherer societies were if anything less egalitarian than agricultural ones because “their hierarchies would have been dependent on the ability to get along with other people,” with “oh come on how is that not true of all societies?”

What social skills I have are telling me I don’t need this kind of trouble, but the rest of my personality wants to construct arguments-- I mean, I think it’s one of the duties of a progressive society to build a safety net that protects even unlikeable or awkward people, but I also still think there are always going to be individuals who drive away everyone who makes their acquaintance, and you can do is try to find a balance between mitigating the damage and impinging on their freedom.

Anyway thanks for your patience (or if you skimmed over this, that’s ok too).

Meanwhile, one of my dreams last night involved working undercover as Hitler’s secretary in order to spy on him. In this dream, no doubt totally uninfluenced by current events, I kept thinking that while it was a good thing for humanity that Hitler kept making stupid decisions, it was also really painful to watch somebody constantly be that incompetent. srsly, he had a detail of highly-trained ninja bodyguards that he couldn’t resist showing off, so he ordered them moved away from their strategic positions so they could stand guard in front of his door, in full view and out in the open. Stupid dream Hitler.

 Andrew/the cats/the weather kept waking me, but when I was able to sleep I had fairly pleasant dreams:

1. I had some kind of internet-linked drop box, and an anonymous admirer was sending me small gifts, like a single chocolate, or a tube of lipstick in a colour called “Chinese Pink” which I wouldn’t have selected for myself but which turned out to look pretty good on me.
2. We visited the town where I grew up, and I suddenly remembered it had a water filtration plant similar to the R.C. Harris plant in Toronto, only slightly less ornate. It was considered an iconic work of Modernism; people painted pictures of it, and it was hosting a local theatre festival.

 Just woke from inclomplete dream in which I was somehow channelling a certain spider man. Not Peter Parker.
There was a lot of dream-plot that led up to this, and I can't recall it now. He liked gold makeup -- makeup generally-- and some particular perfume that in the manner of dreams happened to be to hand. I was wearing a skirt, but neither this nor the makeup appeared to make any difference in the subsequent series of events as to what gender (and I suspect, race) others perceived me as. I still don't know what the overall plan was, as I was just following along. I swaggered into a bar (we seemed to be near a university campus) where a young man asked me for a favour -- he was trying to catch the eye of a woman across the room. I sat down beside him as his slightly sleazy best friend wing man, and waved her over, saying someone had bought me a drink and it was now my obligation to keep the chain going. I introduced my man, asked her my name, didn't really give mine. She was on to me, or mostly, but it didn't matter as she was genuinely liking him, and they began chatting. Privately I knew I didn't have any cash on me, and briefly toyed with the idea of putting their drinks on the credit card another man further down the bar was being rather careless with; but I slipped out, figuring I'd done what he'd asked and he could cover the drinks himself. I continued walking, looking for a place to change. I fumbled the shades I'd been wearing and eventually put on a pair of my waking-life glasses, the serious squarish frames.  There's some sort of sloppy bit here where I was dodging in and out of stairwells trying to avoid someone I worried might recognize me, and then I was in some sort of hospital.
,Oh, are you the overnight attendant they sent for?" asked a woman behind a reception desk.  "The patient's just upstairs." 
"Third floor?"
"Yes, that's the one." As I got in the elevator I said to myself: "And now, I am going to steal a Kandinsky." I had no idea how, or why. In the elevator I felt my expression and stance turning dorky and sincere. My hair was short in the dream, but it was at this point I remembered I was in a skirt. I guessed no one in the bar had noticed because I was sitting down.The patient was a dying old man, of course. We talked. I forget about what. Then I went looking for a washroom and wandered into a sort of lounge, into which I was followed by a smiling man who said that this area was a sort of private club for staff and important donors only, so unless I was planning to join or give the hospital some money.... As I turned to exit I saw the Kandinsky on the wall. Except, this being a dream, it was a Grosz, or something very like. I left the private lounge and strutted around the corridors, getting quietly angry at the hospital. In the background I could hear the man and others beginning to phone their higher ups, worriedly confessing that they'd somehow insulted a member of the staff, a senior professor, by mistaking him for a dementia patient who'd wandered in. I was just wondering how, even as a miffed senior professor, I was going to parley this into being allowed to take home the Kandinsky/Grosz, when I woke up. I'm still not sure how the old man factored into this, although I'm beginning to suspect he, or his family, had once owned the painting. I'm still not sure if this was all still part of the scheme to get that guy and girl from the opening bar together. Anyway, I'm grateful and enough for what I can recall, and wary enough of my ability to still have even that in the morning, to get up and type this all down.

 After a number of dreams about nuclear war or other threats, I suppose last night's, in which I converted to (presumably Reform) Judaism and also became a stripper in order to pay the bills while I did social work, was a great improvement, if a bit weird. 

ETA -- near the end of the dream, I also finally got a paid knitting assignment, which in fact just happened now, so, uh, l'chaim?

 Kept waking during the night and thinking "I must remember this," or telling people in my dreams about something that had just happened that I needed to remember. Let's see if I can.

i. I was looking at a shelf of what one might call "esoterica" -- archeological and scholarly publications mixed with neo-Druid and Wiccan books,  Lovecraftian fanfic, and softcore porn with a fantasy veneer. I picked out a graphic novel and noticed that several characters from Dykes to Watch Out For made a cameo appearance on two pages, watching and commenting on the story, but it was in another language so I couldn't tell what they were saying.

ii. I was in another place, looking through a different set of books and papers. These all seemed to be writings by, sometimes about, Amazons, who in the dream were quite definitely a real ancient culture, neither a legend nor a Greek exaggeration of gender roles among the Scythians. They were kind of like the legends, kind of like the DC comics, and kind of neither. I was reading a paper about some love poetry, or possibly tomb inscriptions, it was hard to tell because as I recall thinking, the Amazons were surprisingly gothic. I know the part that struck me as important involved a scarab or other beetle being compared to a tiny skull. I think I needed to tell sovay  about this. I'm sorry it doesn't make as much sense now I'm awake.

iii. Knitting sweaters for cats, who seemed remarkably willing to wear them. This may be the dream version of knitting pussy hats for the Women's Marches against Trump this weekend. In the dream it did seem to be some kind of bulwark against monsters. 

Forgot to write this one up this morning:

I was watching/reading a series about a school. The plots tended towards the fantastic but in varying degrees -- frex, one episode might involve some students becoming haunted after having remixed a hospital recording of a heartbeat into the music for a school dance; another episode might just be about a bake sale.

"I can't tell what decade this is set in," I said at one point. The technology and social mores seemed contemporary, but there were occasional touches that suggested the 1970s or earlier.

Just before I woke, the story involved one of the teachers, a chubby blond man who basically looked like a human version of Desk Sergeant Clawhauser from Zootopia, going through some historical-research notes. He was in a bar, after work, and another guy kept trying to flirt with him but he just kept going on about the importance of comparing primary sources. I think he even used the word epistemology.

 (Middle of the night)
In a warehouse, Salma Hayek was organizing some kind of jumble sale for charity. I was a volunteer assistant. David Bowie showed up with some clothes to donate, though I can't recall whether they were stage costumes or just normal stuff.

(Later, before and after various awakenings)
I was back at university, and living in a residence where everyone shared one big room full of bunkbeds. I had a single bed, though, with a small living room area (square, with little globe-shaped lights at two of the corners) in behind it.

I kept coming across footage of a Spanish Surrealist poet, who had later gone to Hollywood become an actress at Universal -- handful_ofdust recognized her from something called <i>Daughter of the Wolfman</i> (?) Her name was Yva or Ysa something. I think my brain was actually basing her name off Yves Tanguay.

Some kind of cartoon about pigs wearing overalls?

I was suddenly married to a guy named Han (big bearish guy, curly hair, possibly Polynesian) who had a small stepdaughter. They were nice, but I was vaguely worried that I couldn't recall how we'd met or that we only seemed to have known each other a week. Trying to brush my teeth before bed, I kept picking up what I thought were tubes of toothpaste but invariably turned out to be hair gel or some other non-toothpaste substance.