dream aug 8th, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crazy nocturnal vignette culled from the ceiling tiles of last night's dream: I was futilely surrounded by this Babylonian-eque army, all of them wielding arrows, all of them clad in gilded Spartacus-like headgear. I was trying to rescue this wispy-clad 'maiden' (i.e., my feminine side?) and this old man...we were surrounded at this impasse thwarting us from making progression and going forward. Infantrymen brandished arrows on all side but directly in front of us was this general who demanded that we pay a fee of gold (imagine that an artist needing money)... the general had a wild Bear on a leash and the bear began swipe its claws and snap its mouth in our direction, purportedly this Thermopylae was to be our demise. I looked at the girl and she told me, very vividly, "Remember the myth. What you need is inside." I brandished my own sword, and, in a single linear whiff, severed the ursine creature's head at the neck. I then sliced it again near (linear fashion) above the bears eyes. I reached in and grabbed the cerebral chandelier constituting the creature's brain and hurled it as hard I phucking could at the soldiers, bowling them over...when arrows began to fire upon us like a spring tempest I employed the top o the bear's head and his nape as a shield and the three of us were duly protected and were able to move on.....

 

 

 

                                                  

dream: July 8th, 2013

Two nights ago I had dream where I was driving through a vertical neon-doused Appleton with my mother looking for you. I kept trying to call you only you wouldn’t pick up. Finally you answered yer damn phone and told me that you would be late meeting me because you were “busy changing clothes,” (all these years later and the thought of you in bra and panties still turns me on…”

Two enthusiastic thumbs up, Gene..

Four years ago I had a dream where I was drinking at one of my “seedy Rick Baker writer bars” in the Southside of Peoria (bars with names like Duffy’s and Boa’s and Dave’s on Shelly. Bars where you can still smoke in and all of the female patrons have big boobs and bad teeth. Bars where it behooves you to take an insurance liability out on your liver before entering. Bars that I have to go in to by myself b/c all my friends get scared shitless to even go down the social-economic slope of Western hill even though I went to gradeschool just down the street at Christ Lutheran). In the hazy den of the dream-bar I was imbibing draught beer (Schlitz) with a young Roger Ebert. He had ruffled, unkempt grainy-hair the color of fresh kitty-litter. He was pudgy, ashen countenance that drooped from the lower hemisphere of his neck like a bespectacled Pillsbury dough boy.  He looked like the kind of kid who spent much of junior high adapting to the ill-time hazing of a locker room wedgie. The type of kid who spent much of the day mulling over Dungeon and Dragon manuals while fantasying about girls he would never date.

The type of kid who would one day be a writer.

In the dream I invited Roger to belly up next to me at the bar and we drank heavily. There were tufts of cigarette smoke, sawdust cumulus morels sprouting as if from the earth between intermittent sudsy swigs of beer and intermittent journalistic banter. In the dream we talked about the loneliness of the literary lifestyle, the critic who cavils vs. the critic who creates, but in the end of the dream I remember sitting next to Roger Ebert and looking around the room and all he would say to me is, “This is a great bar. It’s a great bar.”

 

Two days after I waded through this nocturnal-splotch of sifting images I stumbled upon the article linked b’low. For all the accumulative prizes he rightfully garnered throughout his four plus decades as a movie critic I guarantee the thirty year medallion mentioned below was his most valuable because (like the addled protagonist of any cinematic inflection) Mr. Ebert was willing to change while graciously goad such change via instilling hope in others.

So here’s to you Roger Ebert. It’s a great bar but it’s also a great life. Two thumbs up, Gene. The greatest review awaits you…