Again I found myself having to move home to the house I grew up in (which my parents sold and moved from twenty years ago or so)—and of course, my mother demanded I instantly take my old job as a produce clerk back. On my way to my first shift back there I came across an anarchist book-fair being held at… the VFW Hall just behind the gas station across the street from the grocery store. That it was being held in a VFW hall clearly made it suspect; but I was lonely. Upon entering, I made my rounds, looking for friends or friends-of-friends or even mere frenemies-of-acquaintances from the ol’ anarchist scene, but I recognized nobody and everyone present was easily half my age. About halfway around I found two people in a stall speaking Japanese, selling art and books featuring an Edo Period samurai ronin who’d become an anarchist against the Tokugawa shogunate. Shocked at never having heard of him, I excitedly pulled out my wallet to see what I could buy. As I did so, your typical show-off anarcho-scenester showed up and started speaking in Japanese, ticking his head at me and causing the stall attendants to cover their mouths and giggle. I knew he’d said something about me being a gaijin with irezumi tattoos, which I guiltily and shamefully started rolling my sleeves to cover, only to pfft and think, “Pfft—whoopee fuckin’ doo—another class-slumming hipster who beyond the established trust-fund didn’t get enough attention growing up…” Rounding the circuit of tables back to the door, I found myself so depressed and dissociated that I caught myself nearly passing out [akin to in the fainting spells in realtime I experienced after my last TBI]. Two of your more hippie-adjacent types caught me just in time by the elbows and brought me over to bedding laid out for opioid addicts experiencing the nods. Immediately after they walked away a woman I saw near Berklee College of Music a couple days ago in realtime dressed all Cirque du Soleil came over and started binding my legs, whispering cliché BDS&M lines as she did so. Barking, “Oh for fuck’s sake…,” I untied myself and got up, heading immediately to the bar still in somewhat of a somnambulistic state. Instantly, anarcho-scenesters from various periods of my life—including regulars from a certain squat bar in Berlin, roomies from the punk house, and jewelry sellers from Buenos Aires—all descended upon me to razz, poke fun at, pick on, etc. Thinking, “Fuck it—fists are short to fly…,” I ordered a shot of whiskey, breaking my near twenty-years of sobriety. I realized in that moment that while I may have taken to drinking originally ‘to forget’, it eventually became to deliberately *escape responsibility* [which I’ve been pondering with my therapist recently in realtime, which woke me from this

#Dream ]

Apparently ‘The Great Catastrophe’ had happened, statism had fallen and we had entered into a shiny post-capitalist future brought about by a group/movement espousing elemental views merging #SolarPunk and Quakerism; *allegedly*—for I found myself rounded up onto a school-bus and brought to The Aptucxet Trading Post, where I was to be forced into labor as a cashier. My brother (who I went no-contact with over a decade ago in realtime) had turned me in, and he was there at the cash-register to insure I “just be normal / don’t act 'all weird and shit’.” Despite the old familiar familial demand of feigned ignorance and willful compliance in public, my effortlessly recalling the produce code-numbers from my first job thirty-six years ago proved threateningly triggering to him in revealing the likelihood of my undiagnosed autism, which (along with an ‘intersexuality’ of which I was convinced to have been born with) I’d despairingly reasoned suffering from being bullied at school for to my mother in the fifth grade [for which I was then shamed and kept under house-arrest {in realtime} for the rest of summer vacation]. As I’d proven myself ‘too capable’ as a cashier, I was transferred to act instead as a half-assed personal trainer. The first client I had was a ridiculously bougie and malignant woman who reacted contrarily to everything I suggested she try. After a spell of hrmph’ing, pfft’ing and crossing her arms, she reached in her pocket, pulled out what appeared to be a piece of broken-off car blinker [i.e. 'signal'], and barked, “You JUST. DON’T. GET IT!” My brother then showed up and whispered in my ear for me to follow him to the hallway, that he had something to show me. He pulled up a laptop and played a video shot overhead from a helicopter. It was of a crowd dressed in black bloc chasing the woman and her husband into a mansion after overturning their SUV. It became apparent to me that my client was Patricia McCloskey, the MAGA wife who pointed firearms with her husband at Black Lives Matter protesters on June 28th, 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri [who I dreamt of three days ago]. “Wait,” I thought to myself, “Who’s side won the future here?” {which woke me up}.

#Dream

Christ it was another make-up session with first-love/-obsession/-narcissistic-frenemy D'Arcy this time. We’d gone to an old-school fancy restaurant, i.e. French in a dark oak-paneled room. We talked so much upon being seated that when the server first came over we hadn’t even picked up our menus. I’d immediately apologized for “how I’d been back in high school,” but she shushed me and started talking naturally to me like Simona Joyce, the popular girl from senior year who I became friends with who decades later told me via facebook that she had actually been hard-crushing on me. At some point I realized with the drain of lucidity that I was dreaming, and I thought to myself, “If I could transfer my #StillMasking cautiousness in realtime to dreamtime, I wouldn’t be here,” to which <poof!> I woke up.

#Dream

I was in bed in the bedroom of the house I grew up in, the furniture configured as to how it had been in the 5th grade, when The Priest molested me there while I was home sick with the chickenpox. In this dream, I heard his knock at my bedroom door and immediately wrapped myself tightly in the bedding. Someone started feeling me up in the characteristic fashion of The Priest's early abuse, which always struck me as a feigned ‘medical checkup’ holding only half his interest. Enraged, I unfurled myself from my bedding and used it to pin him by his neck to the wall. It turned out not to be The Priest, but the neighbor in my building who's been unsolicitedly cruising and catcalling at me. Here his head, shorn of hair in realtime, had the affect of a hairline being eyeshadow'd on akin that time Steven Miller tried to pull off doing so on a TV interview.

#Dream #Flashback

I was at an after-church soirée up at the Tunneys’. It involved one of the older boys, because there was a bunch of CM bros there; however, it was an alternative reality, and in place of olde tyme Boston-Irish jocks the CM bros here were tech-bro stoner/libertarian types. I was in the kitchen with the crew, and as they passed a joint amongst themselves I took an occasional hit myself from the bat that I lost years ago which was painted in such a way so as to disguise it as a cigarette stub. Suddenly, the door burst open and in rushed dudes in tactical dress I knew had to be ICE. The Haitian woman who lives down the hall from me and the Eritrean woman I always see in the laundry room of my current residence in realtime both shrieked and rushed to the basement door, but ICE surrounded them. I immediately up-pinched my one-hitter, gouged and tore out the larynx of the ICE agent closest to me. The others ran off squealing, while the one I’d killed shrunk into being a 3.5” version of himself packaged a la a Star Wars or G.I. Joe action figure from the ‘80s. I picked it up off the floor and simply tossed it into the trash. None of the alt-CM bros seemed to care or notice, so I tied the trash bag, removed it from the barrel, and yelled to Mrs. Tunney that I was taking out the trash for her. After doing so, I then left the party and went back home. 1/3

#ICE #Dream

It felt like a reunion of merging alternate-histories with housemates from two of the few positive shared-living situations in which I’ve lived (as opposed to the fifteen-or-so malignantly negative ones). I was brought to the backyard by the tall nonbinary guitarist from the punk house I lived in following my first stroke. They were now dressed wicked ‘80s Masshole preppy in a blue Champion sweatshirt and chinos pegged over green Adidas Gazelles, but still soft-spoken and femme. They told me Sarah L. would be arriving shortly and that she said she had *longed* to see me again. I thought how now that I was sober and had been in therapy going on nineteen years from last seeing her—(someone I’d always felt was way too good a person for me)—perhaps her heart and partnership would prove my hard-fought prize. While we waited, Enby Preppy helped me repair a flat on the bicycle I suddenly realized I’d ridden there. Leaning it up against the garage wall, they plugged a pump to the tire’s valve. Telling me it would take a while to inflate [?], they brought me over to sit with others around the fire pit. A bowl was being passed around, and I declined, but they told me it wasn’t cannabis, more an equivalent to caffeine, so I toked it, and sure enough it only hit as hard as green tea. A dude then showed up, who I knew in this alternate universe to be a frequent visitor of the punk house back in the day named Tony. He strongly resembled Mike McColgan, original lead singer of Dropkick Murphys. He took me aside and told me he was nervous about Sarah L. having asked him to move to NYC to couple-up and live with her, explaining that they’d only emailed, texted, and messaged each other on social media a handful of times over the last two decades. I felt myself slump under the old familiar weight of hope I’d barely dared shoulder beneath the boulder of another’s worries over having won another unrequited of mine. At that moment Sarah L. showed up, dressed in flowing black satin, linen, lace, and a shit-ton of gold. As I sat back by the fire to slink into heartbroken dissociation, someone put on 'Black Sheets of Rain' by Bob Mould, an album I haven't listened to in realtime for years [which I put on to fix my breakfast to this morning].

#Dream