Journal 1996 (in progress)

July 26, 1996

 

Ah regret. The summer after the trial that was supposed to be a blitzkreig of spontaneous fun and adventure but had just crumbled in the blast and bombardments. Oh you fucker! Not life, I guess. Harvard Square, maybe. Civil imprisonment. Random drug tests. Five nights of AA classes a week. Probation officer monitors my life (who’s nothing but a shadow really but he’s a heavy hitter if I get in harm’s way). The life I wanted to get back to after the misery of 5 year jail sentence but probably at most six months but who knows about the courts (hello OJ). The plans. School and work with some possible travel. Before the incident I was already planning to move to Montreal for at least the summer and was already looking for apartments. Hell just to be free of this mistaken conflict. No. Not to be. Two years of my life in civil slavery. Hell, might as well move back to my parents.

 

August 22,

 

A dream.

 

I’m in DD Coopers in Randolph and it’s dimly lit crowded and noisy. I’m standing alone. A dark skinned, plump girl who I faintly recognize approaches me then introduces herself as Valeria. She pronounces the R with foreign accent. It occurs to me that it is her, the girl from Sao Paulo, Brazil whom I dated breifly in 1994 for about three months before she realized she missed her family and returned to Brazil. Here, now in the dream she has returned. Her hair is longer, still fabulous locks and curls that fall to her her waist. We recognize each other and sit at a table. She tells me since she left she got married and had three children and a divorce. She has an angel-like quality to her now, something in her eyes and presence. Her skin is still light brown but as I said she has put on a little weight. I hold her hand and massage her fingers.

 

Just then, someone in the bar, a person I know but can’t remember comes up to us and says, “Valeria, your friend Jolene is here, she wants to say hello.” Valeria excuses herself and moves across the bar to another table where, I presume, Jolene is at. Jolene is an exgirlfriend. As I sit angrily, waiting for Valeria to come back to me— I sensed something romantic between us— then Jolene appears at my side— she kisses my lips and leaves a heavy sour acidic taste on my mouth that I want to wipe immediately but I don’t because she lingers. My mouth is soaked and leaking. Where she was once beautiful physically, she now looks like Frankenstein, and I’m scared. Ugly, a thin box-like head with the skin at her neck wrinkled and thinned out. When she walks away from me, her body appears bold legged and frail. I wipe away her kiss with my sleeve.

 

Not sure where the transition begins here— almost like a new scene but what leads to this, I can’t recall— actually, as I try and recall images, the images are fragmentary but the characters are still the same.

 

Somehow, DD Coopers changes into a dark maze of corridors with spider webs and random objects on the floor that I stumble upon. Someone is guiding me through, holding my hand— an authority figure, a devine entity, perhaps a king (it is a he) and at one point we pass through a dark abandoned supermarket where upon the turn of a corner it is suddenly alive with people, real people, but me and my guide, we are dead, everyone else is alive. But it is strange because the people can see us, pretend not to and avoid us but my guide says, we are good and must be careful of those who are like us who are evil. Soon after, he leads me into a room, it feels like a room because it is contained but what it really is— a neighborhood with broken down skeletal house structures that have become overgrown with thick unvegetated charcoal black trees that are a combination of fullgrown, half formed to charcoal sand along the floor. We pass along quietly but I can sense an eveil presence in the blackness. My guide beckons something above. It is a man. He tells the man to come with us and leave the evil. But the man, a construction worker says that it’s impossible, that it’s too late for him. This is his home and he must build it. My guide tells him to beware of Jolene (who at this point has taken on a supernatural evil quality). Jolene is like us, I’m told but the evil twin. Beware, he tells the construction worker, of the house beside his for it is Jolene’s. And as we turn the corner, I’m bumped and knocked heavily to the ground. As I get up, I see Jolene running down the track, cackling loudly. My guide is nowhere to be found. A train is waiting. Whistles blow. There are people everywhere dressed in costumes and masks. It is Halloween night. I want to find Valeria.