I was in the shower

I was in the shower. Warm white morning light was falling onto my face and body. My body was happy from the water licking my body. Someone else had been kissing it too.

One side of my loft was my apartment, as normal. The other was dark waters. I knew there were sea bears out there.

Lucid Tom, August 18 2010

I'm at Walmart in the bakery. I was hired to decorate a cake for them, but just for this one job, it was a favor they needed me to do for them. As I'm sitting at a throwing wheel with the cake, the woman who's in charge is screaming at me. I'm trying to reason with her but she's upset and frustrated. Tom walks into the scene and tells me I'm dreaming.

"You can do whatever you want."

With this new information, I look back up at the woman. She's younger, maybe in her 30's. She leans her head up against a doorway across the department and gives me a sad look, silent. I stand up from the cake and leave with Tom. I follow him down a hallway. I notice a dark shadowy figure that we're following. He tells me that this is apart of my dream and we're following them into an elevator.



When we get to the elevator he again reminds me I'm dreaming and tells me to look at the button panel to prove it. Only the buttons 6 and 8 are there. I smile and think of Paci. I look down and there she is at my feet, smiling back up at me, wagging her tail, tangled in cell phone charger wires.

When the doors open, we are standing in an apartment. This is Tom's mother's apartment. The lights are dim and we walk into a warmly decorated living room and kitchen. The bedroom door is open, Tom's mother is sitting in bed and happily greets me, but doesn't get up. Tom begins to touch me. I get upset because we're in his mother's apartment. But he reminds me again that I'm dreaming. And I let him touch me wherever he wants.

After all this, he tells me we're leaving again. Kyra is now in the apartment with us. We walk over to the kitchen and tells me to climb through the cabinet. I'm confused and wonder how it's an exit. Again he needs to remind me I can do anything I want. Kyra climbs in and up somewhere. I ask her how it felt going through this supposed portal. She calls up from an above unknown place that it was a little squishy, but she's in a large space now. And I crawl into it and pop out in a mattress store.

August 12 2010

Natalie Nunez, a friend of mine from high school gave me a call on my cell phone and asked me to cover her shift for her at the Maggie Moo's in Port Richmond. I wondered if the Maggie Moo's in Wynnewood would actually transfer me just to work there for a day. After debating this with her, we both actually didn't care if the system worked that way and I covered her. When I got there, I realized I actually was in the Wynnewood store and I was working with my co-worker Joe Garber. The lights in the store were off and we hadn't opened yet, late morning light pouring into the store.

Suddenly, the fire safety sprinkler system went off, water pouring into the ice cream and down the walls and onto the floor. I call up my boss, Patrick, on the store phone but he doesn't answer. I leave a frustrated voicemail asking if he even cares about his business at all and if he does to come down and fix the problem. After complaining to Joe about how much I hate this job. I leave to run from something in Pennypack Park with Alex Willis.

Part I of Future Gazing

Monty is attempting to be a wizard. This is a drawing of written advice.

Harrisburg

I was staring down at a wooden floor and a large dog laying looking up at me and around the room with an orange tablecloth over him. I removed the tablecloth only to find another tablecloth hiding the dog's face and body from me. As I placed the first cloth on the floor to remove the second, another large dog appeared under the cloth, it's face turned away from me. Determined to see this dog, I kept removing tablecloths, only to find more and more.

On the Red Sofa. Oh, that Red Sofa.

It was about 4pm and I was laying on the Red Sofa in my living room. The afternoon light softly shining through the verticals and I could feel my eyes slowly closing when Rena walked in and began to talk to me. As she rambled I could feel my legs and hips and arms lift from the Red Sofa and and my head and torso sink into the scratchy red fabric, amazed by the loss of gravity and pressure. I was floating inside and above the same object. That scratchy Red Sofa.

"I'm getting a real bad body high here." I said.

On May 8th

John Slavin and Jeff Hall asked me to be their fifth roommate they were going in on with some boys and another girl. The house is somewhere around Temple in North Philadelphia with hardwood floors with a lot of old white doors and not too many windows. There's a huge backyard where the clouds are dark making the green grass appear saturated against the ominous clouds. The wind picked up and I felt unsure. I sat in my old bedroom of the house I grew up in on Farwood Road staring at the foot of my bed, the old white radiator, my dresser the old creaky floors.

"No, I don't want to leave home. I like it here."

Even though I knew this isn't mine anymore.

A little after Christmas...

It was night and I was walking around 5th and Berks where I walked into a little corner grocery store. There I found my two middle aged co-workers Jackie and Evelyn. Jackie smiled to me standing at the counter and didn't say anything to me because she only spoke Spanish. I talked to her and Evelyn as I walked up and down the isles full of cereal and canned soup. Since it was after Christmas, before I left the store Evelyn handed me a gift bag. Inside was a glockenspiel. As I stood outside the store on the corner I thought to myself,
"Eric would appreciate this glockenspiel a lot more than I would."...

Back in late April

I climbed a rope ladder into the sky and into some building. It was Rena's apartment building in Moscow Russia, the overcast sky outside reflected into the battery blue concrete walls and Glenn Graeber and I ran up the cement steps laughing and screaming joyfully. Our laughs and pants echoed through the staircase as he chased after me trying to grab something I was concealing with my hands. I turned my body into the blue railings away from Glenn and smiled.

a couple of weeks ago

I was in my kitchen brewing tea with money. Maybe it'll bring good fortune.

Dream Art.

I made these cellophane tapestries with pressed pansies and rice in them.

Sunday Evening

I was at the Shop Rite in Rio Grande at night, the super market was empty and the lights were turning off slowly. As I walked towards the automatic sliding doors and passed the pharmacy I began flipping through a series of photographic color images of the ocean that I was holding. Skimming through the saturated cyan photos I began to see moving waves, then shadows of fish and sting ray moving across the page. As I got to the end of the pile, I noticed my hands were becoming wet and drops of water were falling off the image and onto the floor.



I was a tiny Buddist artist sleepily laying on the belly of a giant Buddist Prince, resting my miniature head on his monolithic chin. He called me his artist and he would take care of me if I took care of him, as in create art at his commission. Upset that I was not free to create as I wished, I filled with anger, but was grateful somebody was going to take care of me and too tired to act out on my frustration. As I began to fall asleep I took notice of his smile lines.

As I began to doze off...

A beagle began laughing like a seagull. The sand kicked up and twirled around.

Many Months Ago

Sigmund Freud came galloping out of the forest on horseback.

On the Second

I'm in the back of my Toyota Camry with my dad. I'm eight years old. We were along the side of my grandmother's house in Cape May parked on the grass near the tomato garden waiting for my brother and mom to come out of the house to drive back to Philadelphia. They were together again, my mom and dad, even though things weren't so perfect.

After a while of waiting I went inside the house. In the living room were moving boxes and bins stacked up around the room. I went upstairs to the hallway to find my mother pacing and screaming. "I'm never going back. I don't want to and you can't make me. I'm staying here."

Tuesday

I met up with Colin where I had asked him if he could sell me tree. He began shoving large undried leaves of an actual tree into a tiny black film canister. For a moment, I stared in dismay as he struggled to make this work, the motion of him packing in the green leaves was mesmerizing, but a bottling fear of anxiety began to rise as I heard Mama's voice, she was coming closer with her boyfriend, Frank, afraid they would see...despite the fact I know they're total stoners.

Over the weekend

I couldn't sleep so I decided to develop some photos despite the fact it was 4 or 5am. I was under the El, along Front Street by Berks station because there was a communal storage tub of developer there, next to the abandoned store fronts and overgrown lots. As I began to dip my photographs into the solution, I took notice of the withering prints in the tub that had been deserted by artists. They were all photographs of young women who must be grandmothers by now, either that or far gone from this place.

Just Recently-

The other month I discovered that Chris' bed sheets were light sensitive and recorded our movements and the shape of our bodies- like a giant photo-gram. The bed sheets became darker and darker as the morning light crept into his room and the space beneath us remained light from our bodies hiding it from the sun.

The other morning when I was opening a package of poptarts, I realized the poptarts were light sensitive as well. The pastries turned black instantly as I exposed them to light, leaving the spaces of white where I had pulled them out of the packaging.

The Other Day

A few days ago, the house I grew up in became a farm house. One you see driving through rural New Jersey. The land was flat and the air was warm, a purple haze along the horizon as the sun set. My mom and dad got back together. They loved each other again, just for a day, but I'm so thankful for it. Something that hasn't happened for 13 years, at least. They were all in the family room watching television together with my twin and our dead family dog. This was when I was upstairs and discovered that my great-grandmother has possessed the dresser in my room. Her spirit angrily shook and rattled the wooden drawers. I flew down the steps to go tell my mother, only to find myself in North East Philadelphia up near Pennypack Park off the Delaware River. I frantically began gathering people, people I didn't even know, to come see the spirit of my great-grandmother. We never made it there before the sunset.

Yesterday

All my great grandmother's furniture fit into my apartment. The huge wooden dining room table, the dressers, the big dark Victorian painting of the queen clad in pearls with two men. To make this possible, our apartment had expanded and sprouted windows where I hung Rocco light blue and gold curtains. We painted the walls a lime green. In my spare time, I walked from the Pine Barrens in New Jersey along the train tracks home. Along the way home my entire family was having a party. My father and his new wife, her children, my family in Italy and even my dad's side was there. I'm pretty sure I saw my dead grandfather there too. It was great, wonderful food. My mother is dating a buff half Italian half African man and the Broad Street line created a new station around the corner from my dad's home in Wynnewood.


Hunters Lane and Rolling Road Broad Street Line Station : Wynnewood