My Black Star Album arrived today.  It was damaged.

Dream 1.

The China Clipper.  At the dank dirty heart of this town.   By day, [just a place not to go by day.]  By night, the bar where you’ll find fading dreamers sousing themselves into delusions of grandeur; to take a mic and belt their beloved cover songs at audio levels unmatched by the worst sound designers of the VFW grade d.j. scene of 1987.  Though in this dream our beloved, my beloved Clipper sits at the top of The Exorcist staircase in Georgetown University, only here Georgetown is instead Olympia, Washington; that being the welcome difference.  An unnamed recently deceased rock star, gaunt yet dressed for a night in Michael Jackson’s “Smoothe Criminal” video takes  a barstool along side me.   We begin to sing along with a man performing on a stage several feet away.  I can’t see the man.  I don’t know if he’s really there.  Maybe we are just listening to a recording. I don’t recall.  The scene is as ugly as… the China Clipper.  Brown and gray and some random colored lights spill in from the neon Beer signs.  The overhead lights are three shades above what would be considered a comfortable evening experience.  But there is this haze that softens everything enough to accept the circumstance.  So enveloped in my observation of the scene it is a sudden surprise that the gaunt rock star has vanished.  I leap out of my body and observe myself,  physically; seeing myself notice the disappearance, my head turning to a door that  swings slowly shut like that of an old western saloon.  History and the evolution of the modern bar are bending into each other now; here; in the ugliness of the China Clipper, where nobody knows your name and if they do it’s time for a change of scenery.  I rise off my stool and run to the door.  It pushes out to this steep stone stairwell, lit by a single lamp at the end where the cracked sidewalk meets the black tar on the perpendicular street.  The stairwell is sandwiched by the shaded brick walls of two high rise buildings creating a thin, tall strip of light between the walls.   It is not raining but the street glistens wet.  Somewhere between the stool and the stairwell I have jumped back into my body and I’m seeing all of this detail at once.  The pace of this memory, this dream allows me to take in every odd and random detail.  And now again I take notice of the man who had vanished, his thin stature, his pressed gray suit and cropped hair; running gallantly, like the stairs are his dance floor.  He dashes left out of view. I pursue.

The steps are slick and I move slowly though I’m running.  I reach the bottom of the stairs onto a short glistening strip of alley leading to the street. Here  I am bottlenecked by three men turning the corner in opposing direction.  Their bodies move like Jeff Bridges in “Star Man”,  stiff, sharp, alien movements.  Their faces, three identical faces of Andy Warhol; each head looking in a different direction. One up and to the left, one down and to the right, one directly at me.  The white hair messed like silver clouds, the powdery faces, the sunken cheeks.  Confused, I turn onward to the street, though I’d never stopped moving forward.  Time as it does in a hesitant dream, had bent back out again and stretched like taffy.  It had stretched and I continued on to try to reach the deceased rock star for whom time, unlike me, had continued on all along.  I slap the brick of the left wall with a flat hand as I turn the corner that opens out into a wide, dark, empty city street.  He is gone. 

Dream 2. 

I had a dream last night where Caitlyn Jenner appeared walking down the road.  She looked incredibly depressed. 

Question 1.

Can you draw what is behind you from the perspective of looking forward?  

Question 2.

What’s your plan?  The film is the plan.