California Dreamin' becomes Montana Dreamin'. And I'm Still in New York

Oh, if I only put forth a little effort in life, I would be able to make good on all of my wasted computer time, and be one of those "bloggers" that everyone cares about, instead of one writing semi-prolifically in secret. I could get advertisers to shove crisp newfangled bills into my pink parts and fill me up with money and importance. And no, it wouldn't make me happy, but it would let me let go of the worry a little bit more, cause dollars buy soft beds and soft friends to surround you with. Ah well.

Although, I do seem to get a lot of sleep done anyway. Here is an amazing Melatonin-induced dream I had lately. I hope that shit isn't bad for you, because erratic sleep patterns have me taking it a lot. I have several friends who say they get bad dreams from it. I guess if I worried about it more, I would say that I get bad dreams from it too. But since I don't like to think about things I don't like to think about, I have always just considered them vivid dreams. This one had me wake up in a bit of a worry, but there was nothing too too bad about it. Insane, but not bad. I did wake up a couple of times during the night, so my dreams were restarted quite a bit. Perhaps there was some bleed.

>> As I often am in my dreams, I was in my childhood home in CA. My brothers were about, particularly my younger, Landon. I was hanging out with a comedian friend, Becky Poole (this has to be because she performed at the RIP ME OPEN benefit, and because I furtively find her entirely devourable) at my parents home (which is no stranger to subconscious lesbian sex for me, although there was no sex in this dream, just teenage awkwardness... but I tend to believe that there is sex in every dream, cause there is sex in everything) and we were just hanging out and giggling. She was leaving that day to go to camp for two months--probably one of those performing arts camps; she was going to be a counselor. We went to the hall closet where she had left her coat to find that someone else had taken it (with all those people who never came over to my house growing up). She wanted to borrow one of Lando's coats, and he was away from home at the time. I figured, as it was March, and California, he probably wouldn't need it anytime soon, and it was cool. She also found a book, I think of his, on "resistance." At least, that was in the title. Resistance Film. Makes sense. I thought she might enjoy reading it on her bus trip to camp. My older brother Reggie, who in this dream, was also my roommate, Scoop, and also some sort of Native-American guy, helped her find a coat to wear and came to tell me so. He told me she was already gone by that point, and I looked out the window to see if I could catch her, only to find that a hailstorm was in progress.

I laid my body down in a bed/seat near the window, only to wake up and discover that I was moving. Not in motion, moving, but unpacking boxes, moving. I am in the new apartment. There is a tall black guy moving stuff in already, and I am thinking that it is just the two of us in this new apartment. There are huge clear windows and I have taken the corner bedroom that faces the city buildings (which are very close, it looks like I am living in the heart of Downtown Wherever) and most of the day's sunlight.

Later, when trying to figure out what city I am in, I notice there is a huge gold, glowing, radiating meteorite lodged between the buildings. There is a TV on in the apartment. There are several TVs in the apartment, 3 that I notice. Two belong to the guy, and one belongs to the people who lived there before. And I have yet to unpack my TV. At any rate, one of them is on, and "Quantum Leap" is playing in the background. In the scene, Sam and Al and whoever else are in the middle of some desert, and the same, gold, glowing, radiating meteorite is there. Apparently a town has started to raise itself up around the meteorite. I still don't know where exactly this Meteorville (that's not the name, I just wanted to call it that in my comic book reasoning) is, but i am *hoping*... somewhere near New York?

Meanwhile I still don't know the name of my roommate (or for that matter, why I moved, aside from the fact that I spend many days in New York daydreaming about getting out, only, apparently, to night dream about it too) but I am trying to check my email to find it out, and also to find out how and when I found this apartment situation and negotiated a move, how much the rent is, etc. I see an email with a picture of him that says "Jack" underneath, but as I look closer, it is a video link, and when I click it, the video is of a much more "street" black dude missing a tooth in front. Definitely not the HowardCollege-looking neatly unpacking his personal effects and high-tech electronics around me.

"Jack" is in the living room with a Mexican guy I haven't met, who apparently is helping him to install the living room entertainment center. I tell them both to wait--that I have TiVo that I would like them to install. I tell them that the instructions must be packed when he asks for them, and begin searching the apartment for the TiVo box and instruction manual. I find both these items, but oddly, no other boxes of things that I have packed, and start to look around the rest of the apartment for them.

I am realizing I chose the right room for my bedroom, since the next room I turn into off to the right is much smaller. I go into the next room down the hall and it has a lot of old wood items in it, like a heavy, early 80s, wood-paneled design. It has old dusty wine glasses stacked in it, and some plants I think. Wood shutters on the windows. It is the den. There is also an old wood-paneled TV and some old pictures that the previous tenants left on the wall. They were black too. There are old plaques, awards perhaps, about them being wine collectors, awarded for something. The name I remember from the plaques is Wendi Wiley (this immediately tips me off into something supernatural... Wiley makes me think of Wiley Wiggins, the dreamer in "Waking Life" and Wendy was one of the names that my mother wanted to give to me--check out the page on the derivation, it's funny that my mom's name is actually Gwendolyn. Fortunately a nurse "Desiree" was announced over the loudspeaker and gave my mom a sudden flash of needed inspiration). I gathered from the plaques on the wall a somewhat bohemian nature to the couple that I liked. They had left personal pictures there too, a couple on the wall, but several more stacked on the floor, as though they had been forgotten. The ones on the floor were pictures of my family. One in particular, taken when I was very young, of my older brother Reggie, older sister Gigi, and myself. There was a school picture of Reggie and one of me as well, separately.

From this I can only assume they are relatives of ours that I didn't know about (which would not be difficult since both my parents isolated themselves from their families a lot, and occasionally someone's name comes up and it's like, who's that. Oh, that's your father's uncle/half-brother/whatever. Oh. Ok), and that that is connected to the fact that I am now living in this place--more arrangement than coincidence, though there does seem to be some of the latter involved as well. "Jack" must be a cousin of mine.

I talk to Jack about the Wileys. He knows all of this stuff already, and shows me big, poster-sized, black and white pictures he found of them. One is of a woman that I assume is an aunt or a cousin. Perhaps it is Wendi. She is wearing a Cabaret-type outfit--top hat and coattails against her medium brown skin. She is topless and her small, pert breasts are exposed. Jack suggests, and I believe that there is some relation to me from this picture because of the performance connection and the somewhat provocative nature of the picture. He too makes the suggestion that we are related somehow.

I return to the previous room to discover there are two desks there, side by side I didn't notice, for the couple, who must have moved out in a hurry. Then I notice a white guy, with a pock-marked face, walking around. Unpacking items. He must be living here too. This place is turning out to be less spacious than I thought. Realizing I have absolutely no hold on what I have gotten myself into, I ask the strange white guy where we are (seems safer than asking "Jack" who I already have this supposed interaction with that I can't remember). He says that he thinks that we had just crossed the border of Montana when we found this place. MONTANA? It sounds wonderful, but I start to freak about it, because I know I have so many shows and rehearsals in New York. There is NO WAY I am going to be able to commute and do this. Even if I commute half the day. Jack is in the living room talking to Quantum Leap's Sam Beckett (who remains in the TV screen) about how long he has lived in Montana. He defends his circumscribed Montana existence to Sam (which of course one has to wonder about, being a black guy in Montana), but admits that the only women he is with are the ones he fucks in the bathroom of the gym because he lives too far away for anyone to come back to his place.

Despite this interesting argument, I am still worried about the highly potential radioactivity of the nearby meteorite (which glows gold and bright right in my bedroom window). Even the knowledge that it fuels nearby hot springs that the townspeople love does not comfort me. I can only think, "no one has been in the town long enough to know the long-term effects of this meteorite." I leave the place and somehow find myself at a subway station (Like the one at the 8th Avenue "L" train in NYC, only, of course, much cleaner and less packed). I am waiting for a train so that I can explore this town and leave it at the same time. <<

And that's the damn dream. I wake up and scrawl all this down as I run late to a really early morning appointment (to be a guest on some Oxygen talk-show pilot, if anyone cares). Yikes. This dream is rife with imagery. So much about my issues marrying my family and youth to the life I live as a performer, dealing with my interracial attractions and trying to paint myself into a romantic picture I have not been able to focus in on yet, my issues with New York, and my ambisexual mental roamings. But this innocent dream is full of sex, no? That, and the fact that I clearly watch a sickening amount of TV. What the fuck would I do if I didn't have this highly addictive personality? I guess I need to start figuring it out.

Deaf Poetry

So last night I did a runway audition for a charity fashion show. If selected, this will be my first time on the runway since I was 13 and at the Barbizon school where my gold hoop earring got caught on the shoulder-padded polyester blazer that I was rocking over my adolescent 201 lbs. of awkward, and I looked like I was caught in some Whitney Houston 80s dance move freeze-frame. I remember the teacher afterward saying, "don't be so tense..." and I was like, bitch my fucking hoop was caught on this shitty nylon blend Nordstrom's Rack crap my mom makes me wear so I can look like a 40-year-old CPA. Why? Cause it makes more sense to be a 200 lb. 40 year old than it does to be a 200lb 14 year old. I still had the Big Bad BeetleBorg glasses then too (they didn't look exactly like that--theirs are more a-la-Geordi LaForge--but that's what my brother and I called them). It was depressing.

Anyway, this audition was a call for models of "all shapes, sizes and colors" and that kind of decent crap. Don't worry. Fat is not the "new black" on the runways of Milan. At least not yet. The theme of it is celebrating diversity and that kind of thing. It's a charity fashion show to raise money for JADE Films, and this woman JADE (Jamaican-American Destinee-Empress) was the first, and I believe, only director to graduate from Tisch Film School who is an African-American Deaf woman. Obviously this woman has got a lot of shit telling her to stay in the corner and shut the hell up, and yet she has created several award-winning independent films and begun her own company. Quite remarkable. I got a chance to shake her hand yesterday after my audition, which I had been looking forward to doing. I wanted to explain to her how much I respected her work, and the fact that she was putting this show on, but I didn't speak her language. She spoke mine--she went deaf due to mysterious causes in Jamaica when she was four... kind of like Ray Charles, only with ears, not eyes... Ray was such a fucking amazing movie... anyway--but I was auditioning for a whole room full of deaf people with different backgrounds in the hearing world, and as little as regular, hearing auditors want to hear what an auditioner has to say, deaf ones probably want to hear it less (or maybe more, at first, and then just less entirely--like your mom calling to you while you are floating in the pool with your ears under the water and nothing can touch you, accept the creepy-crawly vacuum wigging you out).

And the irony doesn't just stop with that last deaf/auditor wordplay. The best part of the night, which is usually the worst part of any other auditions, was waiting around before hand. There were about 12 people waiting to audition in the hallway, and about 4 of them besides me were actual hearers. The others were all deaf (although the one really cute model girl might have actually just been able to speak in sign language, as she spoke vocally in English very well, but I did detect a slight discrepancy in the way she spoke, which may just mean she was able to "pass" extremely well--she was this tall skinny black girl with a big afro puff in back, and definitely the most attractive woman I had seen all night, portfolio and stilettos in hand). All of them engaged in the most vibrant conversations I have ever seen. I am always jealous of people speaking in ASL, just like I used to be jealous of the cliques of Korean kids at my high school, sitting around in their big circles and laughing in a language I didn't understand, about things I probably didn't understand. This situation was different. I felt much more of a sense of connection to things that they were talking and laughing about, even though I didn't understand a damn thing they were talking about. Oddly enough, this is probably because they were signing in English. The thought that I would understand someone signing in English (or in this case, American... Sign) before I would understand someone speaking in Portuguese is an interesting idea. But I did feel a connection to their conversations, probably because I understood the emotion and animation behind them. And it's so visual, it's great: generally one is used to seeing people having an animated conversation where their hands move uselessly to gesture at intensity, but in this case, the opposite occurs, where every hand movement is emphatically specific, and it is the voice which gestures widely unspecific with grunts and unarticulated laughter.

Oh, the laughter. That was the best part. Because the laugh has that unspecific sound of being unheard and uncensored, so that it's really just expelling every sound that the throat can articulate. Every guffaw sounds like a grunt of sexual desire. Every time the monitor laughed amidst her conversation it sounded like she was coming by being fucked with a large blunt object. It's dumb and beautiful, like laughter is supposed to be when you are unaware of an audience of people (or yourself) judging your joy. It was raucous, and made me turn around the first few times so I could figure out who was being bludgeoned in the skull. But I got used to the sound. My ears god more sensitive. I was reminded of the beautiful subtleties of hearing as the guy working in the design studio next door jingled his keys to go back into his office after having gone to the bathroom and I was the only one who instantly turned around responding to the keys chiming.

When I went in, the girl closest to me in the panel was talking to me and gesturing at the same time, and as I was trying to figure out what was going on, she said, "Oh, you're not deaf?" Which is a great question that I will remember having been asked. I almost thought to be offended for someone by that. Like deaf was a bad thing to call someone (since it's used among the hearing as such, to denote someone's ignorance). I need to wash that P.C. right out of my hair. There was a camera there, with a black guy with dreads operating it, three women behind the table, and one sort of asexual t-shirted female techie hand running away from the camera to sneeze every so often, and a stylish gay at the end of the row--all in all, situation entirely normal for an audition. There was a makeshift runway taped on the floor, and a pseudo costume rack with laundry bags and scarves from which I had to fashion a wardrobe in under a minute. It was quite hilarious, and I can tell that for the non-hearing, it is quite a bit of Chaplin-esque comedy to see "models" run about trying to fashion a costume and look sassy on a fake runway. I forgot that they couldn't hear when they told me to go and I stopped, waiting for someone to turn on the music (and they were like, oh, that's right, she needs music). The whole situation was great--comedic in all the ways that auditions are for auditioners, with a sense that everyone (or at least the auditors and myself--and who else really matters in this case) was in on the joke. And that the joke is actually not funny, but just is. And that's cool too. I got to shake the director's hand, and thanked them all profusely. I should have thanked them as they were thanking me, verbally, but also with the padded tips of one hand pouring forth from just beneath the mouth. I thought to do so, but didn't want to be a poser. But that's exactly what a model is. And I so want to speak sign language with them. Damn. I missed my shot.

Fuck Me Addendum

Apparently I need to look at my own blog, and maybe be the 10th person to read my blog. I think that the 5/5 I got comes from Jase, who was nice enough to check out my blog and compliment. And considering he is a guy, I owe him a big fat ball-lick for that. Maybe it was a girl like Greg said, and maybe Jase had given me this ironic compliement in the vast universal mechanism of me needing to learn a lesson about dissing on kind people who are better at blogging than me. Thank God for the millions of eyes in the world. With all of their staring. They keep you in line. Dancing about with one foot in your mouth. (Especially since I haven't even looked at this alleged ranking and don't know who said what or why... It's amazing that the internet, the information superhighway, allows you to act so easily out of such ignorance. Although it is no news that an overabundance of information can encourage unawareness.)