Safe deposit box

I went into a bank, to the safe deposit box area.  There was a blank blond-red paneled wood wall about 10 feet high and 40 feet long and right in the middle of it, just barely visible in outline was a set of double doors.  They had no exposed hinges or knobs. Nothing to show they were there.  To get in I pushed the door in an inch or so and let it spring back and open out like a cabinet door.  Inside was a series of wooden doors built into the wall, each about 2 feet square, stacked floor to about 6 feet high all the way across the room.

I walked up to B

ox 151

and tried to operate the combination lock.  The lock mechanism was a flat metal surface about 3” in diameter w/ 60 tick marks around it like a clock and an inscribed hexagon that touched what would have been 12-2-4-6-8-10-12 on the clock face except there were no numbers on the face.  The combination was right to 5, left to 8, then push in again like the doors to the room.  The dial didn’t have a handle and it didn’t have a clicker that helped it stop on the tick marks, so I had trouble getting it to operate.  But after several tries I was finally able to open it.

Inside was a cardboard box that almost filled the outer box.  On the surface of the cardboard box was taped a sheet of paper that had printed a bunch of old black & white photos with some typed text.  The old photos were from several different locations w/ different actions, but a certain woman was present in all of them.  She wore several different outfits for the different situations and in a couple of them she was topless.  I knew the old man who had owned the box and was vaguely aware that there had been a special woman in his life from long before I’d known him, but I’d never seen her.  I had to assume this was her. 

The bank officials told me it was time to leave, so I took the paper and put the box back without ever opening it.  I left and went outside and enjoyed shutting the room doors, which clicked into place when pushed an inch past flat just as they had opened.

I walked over to a stadium that was full of people.  It was completely made of stone, like an old Roman stadium, but it had a grass field for football or soccer like a modern one.  I climbed the stairs to the very top where a wall of stone that had window-like openings ringed the back of the top row of seats.  The aisle way behind the seating was a flat area a step down from the top of the stairs and it had a couple inches of water running in it.  There were some people walking in the water off to the right so I assumed the water running in the walkway was intentional to keep people’s feet clean and the dust down.  The water ran from right to left and at the left end of the walkway it turned and went down a ramp/trough at the same angle as the stairs and seating and disappeared underground at the field level.

I went out of the stadium into the street where some water was flowing at different places, pooling in some areas and flowing faster in others.  A group of people was sitting at tables at an outdoor café and  man there was moving leaves out of the end of one of the pools of water allowing it to empty and spill out faster over the slope next to the seating.

It occurred to me as I walked along the streets, which were in San Francisco, that while I'd had the right to see the paper from the safe deposit box, I didn’t have the right to take it, so I should go put it back.  I went back to the bank, pushed on the door to open in to the safe deposit box room, but this time instead of a room full of boxes being behind it there was another blank paneled wall.  I went up and pushed in the middle of it and another door opened like the previous one.  In this room there were two men sitting at a table.  One of them was a bank official, so I asked him where the boxes were.  He said they were not accessible right now, so I handed him the paper and asked him to put it back in the box when it was.  He said, “No problem” and took the paper and I left.  I got to thinking about it afterward, though, and wasn’t sure that I had handled the situation properly.  I didn’t know the bank official and wasn’t sure what he would do w/ the paper.

Nursing home. Mexico.

I was in a nursing home trying to get to Room 123 to see someone, but it was laid out with odd angled hallways and intersections and no logical numbering pattern, so I was having trouble finding it.  Attached to the nursing home was a gymnasium and recreational center and as I went down one hallway it got crowded w/ sweaty people from the gym to the point I couldn’t even push through.  I went into the gym to look for another door, but at the far end there was an 8’ wall with a level w/ doors above it and no way to get to them.  There were some pipes and conduit attached to the wall and a bunch of Indian kids were climbing up and down them to get from the upper to lower levels, so I thought I’d do it too.  I grabbed onto a piece of conduit but it wasn’t attached well enough to hold me.  I pulled a bench over and grabbed onto the bottom of the upper level railing and pulled myself up.

When I went out of the gym I entered a gathering space that had lots of people in it, but wasn’t as crowded as the other side.  There was an old woman lying on her back on a large ottoman.  She arched her back and tried to stand up, but didn’t quite have enough strength to make it and flopped back down on the ottoman.  She did this multiple times and each flop moved her body a little more off the ottoman until only her head and neck were on it.  I thought that if she did it again she would miss altogether and flop down on the tile floor and hurt herself, so I went over and put my hand in the middle of her back and lifted her up.  She grimaced and groaned in pain and as I moved my hand away I saw that she had bandages on her back where I had lifted her.  I hadn’t seen any evidence of pain when she was trying on her own, which seemed like it should have been far worse.

Later I was walking down a dusty road in Mexico with a friend.  He had a giant pair of pliers, about as tall as him.  We had been using them for some purpose that I can’t remember, but he thought it was illicit, because we were leaving and he made a comment, “We’ve gotten a lot of good out of these.  We should give them back to the power company.”  Then he heaved them up in the air where they hit the power line and their jaws clamped shut and they hung there.  He was also carrying a couple clevises – one about 3” diameter and one twice that size.  He decided we didn’t need them either so he tossed them over by the side of the road at an intersection where there was a beat up old Camaro sitting at a stop sign waiting to turn the corner.  They bounced off the wheel of the Camaro and immediately people got out of it and looked to see what had hit them.

I was concerned that he’d gotten us into trouble when two rough looking guys came walking over toward us from the car, but then I saw they had little kids with them.  A little boy about 3 or 4 was carrying one of the clevises and one of the men was carrying the bigger one.  They didn’t speak any English, and of course our Spanish wasn’t much good, but we soon realized they were taking them as a gift and were letting us know they appreciated us giving them to them.

Later I was driving in a city and Emma pulled up alongside me in a beat up old Indy style race car.  We turned a left corner with her slightly in front and she cut me off so I hit the curb and jumped my right front wheel up on the sidewalk in front of a glass storefront.  I pulled back onto the street and we headed up a hill.  I was impressed that she was able to drive it smoothly at low speeds up this steep hill, but apparently the gears and clutch were taking all her attention because she kept swerving and causing me to drive over into the bike lane and shoulder.

Homeless

I was in a library walking among the shelves of books.  I went around a corner and found a shelf section about 4’ wide that had been dragged across the end of the row, turning it into a dead end, like in a maze.  I didn’t think it was supposed to be like that so I thought I would slide it out of the way, but when I pushed on the shelf about shoulder high the top half of it bent over.  It was hinged like a door.  It must have been spring loaded because it didn’t flop completely over, but the books were too heavy for it to spring back to vertical so it stayed there bouncing up and down sticking out horizontally.

I was thinking about an experiment of living as a homeless person.  I read that book where a college student did it for a year and all that he’d learned from it, but I thought it might be quite a bit different at my age than at 20.  First I thought about hair.  I’m pretty sure I’d look the part of the crazy Vietnam veteran in a month or so if I didn’t keep my hair fairly short and beard under control.  So how does one keep ones self groomed while living under a bridge?  Shaving every day didn’t seem possible, so maybe the best thing would be to keep one of those trimmers and try to get to a place w/ a mirror every few days. 

That got me to thinking about where I would go to find a mirror.  I remembered seeing a guy shaving in the bathroom at the library once, but I thought that was pretty gross and wondered if they would kick him out if they knew about it.  About the only place you can get privacy in a bathroom is at some gas stations, and those are usually pretty gross.  I was also wondering about how I would keep my hair trimmed.  A self administered haircut is not going to look good in the best of circumstances.  I thought, too, that my hair gets greasy in just a couple days, so maybe I could learn to run the trimmers and keep it in the buzz cut range.

I would obviously need to keep whatever I owned on my person.  Shopping carts work for some people, but the image is pretty bad and they aren’t much good off-road.  A backpack would work, but I’d have to keep my supplies pretty limited to carry them all there.  I was thinking about the changes of clothes I might need and how I would wash them and where I would shower.  I had the thought of sitting naked under a coat at a laundromat or getting to a park or the Y and getting a shower and washing my clothes by hand while I’m showering, which would work, but leave me w/ a pile of wet clothes.

I was pretty serious about trying this experiment, so I was working through all these items one by one.  Where would I sleep?  What would I eat?  What would I do all day?  How would people treat me?  How would I handle interactions w/ other homeless people, crazy people, the police, people I knew from before?

Bizzare randomness

I was riding in a car w/ Dennis Schmidt, but for some reason I was sitting in the back and he was in front.  After a while of him trying to talk over the seat and it got me wondering why I hadn’t gotten into the front.

I was in a small helicopter flying over an area near downtown Indianapolis.  There was a highway ramp under construction but it ended in an abandoned lot where it looked like construction might still be quite a while away.  As I flew over the ramp I could see what cars on the highway couldn’t – how the ramp was aligned with a piece of street a couple blocks away.  The street ended at a T intersection and it was set up so that when I first saw it the traffic was coming from the side and turning down the same direction I was headed all one way.  I decided it would be a good place to land (apparently my helicopter had the ability to turn back into a car), so I lined up for a traffic speed landing.  But just before I was to set down the cars going my direction had cleared out and the signals had changed and cars started coming toward me using the whole road, so I aborted the landing.

I must have set down somewhere nearby because I was now walking in a urban industrial area.  I crossed a street and jogged up a hill on the sidewalk on the left side in front of a row of shabby little houses and then crossed again to walk on the right side of the street.  I turned down another street and found my way blocked by trucks loading and unloading.  There was a big door about 8’ wide and 18” thick swung open across the sidewalk.  I thought I could crawl under it and continue on my way so I got down on my belly but it was tight and I couldn’t get traction and had nothing to grab my hands onto so I was stuck.

The next thing I knew I was in a room at a party of some kind.  I had the idea that I was supposed to get Ruth a rum and coke, but as I thought about it I realized that I couldn’t imagine that she would want a mix of strong alcohol and soda pop.  I also then realized that I had no memory of how I’d gotten to the party and what had happened since I was stuck under the door until now.  I wondered if I’d passed out or what happened and it was scary to have a blank gap in my memory like that.

I walked out of the room and went outside.  There was a big 3’ diameter tree standing next to a corner in the sidewalk and I reached my hand out and dragged it along the bark as I walked around the corner.  I wasn’t looking at the tree where I was touching it, but it felt like the bark had turned with me – like my hand should have drug more than it did.  When I looked back at it I saw that a knob that had been a little below my hand had turned and was in almost the same place relative to my hand that it had been before I started walking by.  As I looked at the knob it turned into the shape of a duck and grew out toward me and quacked.

I thought this was funny and grabbed its beak.  It grew two more duck heads.  I pushed them back in and it turned into a lizard type head and pushed back out at me.  At this point I was thinking that the technology it took to make something like this was really amazing.  I thought it must be a Disneyworld like machine doing all this interactive tracking and changing.  The lizard grew out about 10 feet or so and pushed me back into a corner.  It had big teeth, but for some reason I wasn’t the least scared of it.  I just pushed back harder and again it collapsed back into the tree.  I stepped back to see what it would become next but now the whole tree shrank down and formed into a flat surface that became a flat screen TV.

Jerry Sparks' friend

I went to the house of a friend of Jerry Sparks in suburban SE Indianapolis.  The entire yard was built on top of a basement or bunker, a large underground space built of concrete.  I was looking down an opening in its roof and saw that it was being used as a car repair garage.  There was a lift that rose up the 20 feet or so to the ground surface level.  They would drive a car up the driveway and onto the lift, then lower it down into the garage.  There was a red, jet powered, batman-like car being worked on as I looked.

I sat down on a couch and was talking w/ Jerry and his friend, a tall, thin, dark haired man about 35 years old.  The younger man was talking about how he came to own the place and what he was doing with it.  As I listened to him I realized that he had the skills and personality to be the new Champaign District Manager for Illinois American Water.  He was aware of the opening, but when I mentioned it to him he at first sort of blew it off like it was way beyond him and he wasn’t going to waste time thinking about it.  Barry Suits (the former holder of that position) came in the room and I mentioned it to him.  Barry immediately picked up on it and agreed w/ me.  I could see the young man starting to think about the possibility, and knew that w/ Barry’s recommendation this could be our next manager.

Uphill

I was walking up a street on a long hillside in India or Bangladesh in the pouring rain w/ a young local boy who was my guide.  The water was rushing down in torrents with the ditches full to overflowing and some places the road itself was flooded a foot or two deep.  At first it was extremely dirty w/ all the trash and filth of the crowded city washing out, but as water kept falling it began to clean up a little.  The street continued uphill, not steeply, but unbroken for at least a mile.  Lots of people were out slogging their way along, completely soaked as we were.  Occasionally a car came past and I wondered how they managed to not drown out when the water was surging up over the hood and roof.

As I got further up the hill it got steeper and now I was in my old 1980 Ford driving up a gravel road in 2^nd gear with my parents in the back seat.  The hill was really steep and I was impressed that the car kept going without slipping on the gravel, and I was glad it had enough power in 2^nd because I was worried about getting it into 1^st without stopping and I definitely didn’t want to stop.  The road was barely wider than the car and both sides were heavily wooded.

I got out and walked along a trail that hugged the edge of a mountain as I headed for the house that was at the top.  At one spot the trail was missing for a short ways but I could see that it continued ahead about 20 feet and about 5 feet below, so I sort of ran on the hillside and slid down and came to the other side just fine.

I walked along a little ways further and the trail widened out into a road again, but it was blocked partway by a large trailer that had some kind of metal frames on it that hung over the sides and took up all the space between the trees.  I thought I could get around by going through the cab of the semi, so I hopped in the driver’s side door.  The driver gave me a funny look as I climbed over him, but he didn’t say anything.  There was a hole in the dashboard on the passenger side and I noticed there was a nest of brown rats in the hole.  They seemed to be hibernating because they didn’t move, even when I grabbed them.  It didn’t seem right that there would be a nest of rats in the cab of a truck that was being used, so I started picking them up one at a time and throwing them out the window.  There were probably a dozen including some nearly the size of a small cat down to a couple little mouse sized ones.

Stairs

I came in the back of a room where Tim Johnson was giving a speech.  There was a group of gay rights activists creating a disturbance right by where I came in.  I wanted to hear what Tim had to say so I talked w/ the leader of the group and said that while I agreed that everyone had a right to be heard, the way his group was acting was denying that right to the guy that most of the people in the room had come to see.  I said I was pretty familiar w/ Tim and thought that he would meet w/ any group that asked, so if their intent was to get a message to him it wouldn’t be that hard, but what they were doing was just making themselves unpopular w/ most of the people in the room.  He seemed to take to heart what I said and started to try to calm down his crowd.

Some security people came heading back toward us and I was pretty sure they were focused on me, so I slipped back out the back door.  There was an elevator, but the car was several floors above, so I decided to try the wooden stairs heading down that was opposite the elevator.  I went down the first flight and the walls were gone, it was just a scaffold, open on three sides attached to the side of the building.  There were two kids standing on the next level down and they watched me continue past them down the stairs.  They had been looking for a way down, too, but for some reason hadn’t considered the stairs, but after they saw me they decided to try it.

The stairway got smaller, dirtier, and less stable looking as I continued down.  Finally after 4 or 5 flights it was just a hole in the floor w/ dried mud all around it and I couldn’t fit.  I knew I needed to continue down, so I looked over the side and there were some thin nylon ropes hanging down.  I grabbed hold of one and started sliding down.  I slid about 30 feet when I saw that the rope ended about 20’ short of the ground.  I slid down to the very end of the rope, just hanging on by my hands and realized that my feet were only 12 or 13 feet above the ground and it sloped downward, so it would probably be OK to drop.  I dropped and rolled and popped up OK.

Behind me, under the building was a large open area where workers were manufacturing things.  Some were operating presses, some were stitching together fabric, some were moving boxes around.  A man from India saw me land and came over to help me.  He gave me two red tassels like the Chinese hang on artwork for decorations.  He told me they would keep me safe while I crossed the water.