I awoke from an almost violent dream. It's been a long time since I had a dream like that, frustration bubbling to the surface.
I was trying to prepare for my classes, but they kept changing the schedule. Just as I'd put together my pile-of-lesson-plans, they'd come and give me a new schedule showing I had some other configuration of classes that meant everything needed to be re-done and reshuffled.
Then I went out into the hallway and it was dark and poorly-lit. There were homeless people sleeping in the halls at work but the work halls went on and on, like pedestrian tunnels in the subway. I went into a room with a lot of kids, but they were just playing, it wasn't a class. I tried to get them to help me organize this box of posters – each poster had to be rolled up neatly and slotted into its spot.
When I came out, pleased to have finally rolled up my posters, I was presented with yet another new work schedule. I started yelling.
"Get away from me," I finally said. I threw down my poster box and they all escaped and began unfurling. Instead of just being posters, it was like they were alive – like long blankets or banners of cloth unfurling in wind, with monsters dancing beneath them. Rather than feeling dismayed by this, I was thrilled, but the people around me were screaming. It was quite crowded, now, in the halls.
I pulled back the roiling paper to reveal an angry child with a pair of scissors, screaming and chasing another child. I was frustrated again, but unable to control things – they were getting out of hand. A homeless man looked up at me and grinned, and held out his hand in that passive way beggars do here in Korea.
I looked up in turn and saw my sister looking down a stairway toward me and the roiling paper and homeless men and children screaming with scissors. She was just watching. Next to her were other members of my family. They could do nothing to help. I shrugged helplessly, and fell down, as a now shoulder-to-shoulder mass of people moved through the hall.
A child was getting hurt, now – there was blood. I could do nothing.
It was 330 am. My mouth dry like dust, as it always gets at night, now. I sat up rapidly, the way one does after nightmares, sometimes.
What I'm listening to right now.
The kids from El Paso capture the mood at the end of my dream pretty well, here – and interestingly, the song includes scissors – if only one arm of them.
At The Drive-In, "One Armed Scissor."
Lyrics.
yes this is the campaign
slithered entrails
in the cargo bay
neutered is the vastness
hallow vacuum check the
oxygen tanks
they hibernate
but have they kissed the ground
pucker up and kiss the asphalt now
tease this amputation
splintered larynx
it has access now
send transmission from
the one armed scissor
cut away, cut away
banked on memory
mummified circuitry
skin graft machinery
sputnik sickles found in the seats
self-destruct sequence
this station is non-operational
species growing
bubbles in an IV
loitering
unknown origin
is this the comfort of being afraid
solar eclipsed
black out the vultures
as they wait
dissect a trillion sighs away
will you get this letter
jagged pulp sliced in my veins
i write to remember
'cause i'm a million miles away
will you get this letter
jagged pulp sliced in my veins
i write to remember…
Notes for Korean vocabulary
두고보다 = to "wait and see", to watch
[daily log (1100): waking, 1 km]