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.

Night sky activities

I was lying in bed mostly asleep when I heard the whoosh of the burner of a hot air balloon.  I had the thought that it’s rare to see them out in the sky after dark, but the air was calm, so other than the issue of not being able to see, it would be an ideal time to go ballooning.  I heard it again and then thought I heard two going at the same time.  By now I was awake so I decided to go outside and see them.

I went out and there were several balloons up in the sky at various heights.  It was really cool each time one turned on the burners because the whole balloon lit up like a giant Chinese lantern.  I was looking to the south and they were all floating to my right, so they were floating to the west.  The area across the street was much more open than it really is and some were trying to land there.

Then I noticed a parachuter who was riding a bicycle.  I’m not sure how he kept it in place, but he was obviously planning to land and bicycle away.  I looked behind him and there were maybe a dozen more all heading for the open space across from our house.  Several people had come out to watch the spectacle.  As the first of the bicycle chuters landed and pedaled away I heard a gasp from some of the crowd and looked left and up to see one whose chute had failed.  He was about 100 feet up and his chute was fluttering above him, catching some air, but not open and sailing like it should have been.  I continued to watch as he crashed to the ground and a crowd of people ran over to where he was.  The chute must have slowed him quite a bit because he was sitting up, looking pretty seriously hurt, but conscious and in one piece.

I walked along the street a ways toward where more of a crowd was gathered.  The street turned into a narrow, Asian style street w/ vendors crowding out into it w/ little tents and sheds set up selling all the same little junk I saw so much of in China.  I had to squeeze between a couple shops at a corner to get through where I wanted to go.  The hawkers at the corner thought I needed what looked like a candy coated hot dog on a stick, but it didn’t look good to me, so I waved them off and pushed through. 

I was walking at the base of a large earth berm, like a levee, very steep and maybe 15 feet high.  There was a single file footpath, which was occasionally muddy, but the weeds and rubble made people walking both directions try to stick to the path.  I saw Ruth coming toward me, smiling, with mud on her face.  I wiped a blob of mud off and kissed her and we both continued on our separate ways.

At the far end of the path it had been elevated by flat rocks placed without mortar or anything to stabilize it.  A young boy was standing at the very end where the rocks were about 4 feet high and he was wobbling the rock he was on just for the fun of it.  I looked at the situation and thought the whole pile looked unstable, so I warned him that he shouldn’t do it because he was likely to have the whole pile down around him.  I suggested we needed to stack them better and maybe get some mortar to hold them in place since so many people walked there.

Mountain bike & swamp baseball

I watched from behind as a guy rode his bicycle down a busy mountain road.  There was enough traffic and enough curves that the motorized vehicles weren’t going any faster than him, and he could swerve around and between them and was actually passing some.  It wasn’t even remotely safe, though.  The road had potholes and patches w/ gravel on it.  He negotiated the whole way down to the bottom and when it started curving back up he turned around and headed back the way he’d come.

Later I was playing baseball.  There were two fields back to back so their outfields overlapped a little.  Off to what was our right field, the other field’s left field, was a swamp.  Someone on the other field hit a ball that carried out into the swamp.  Apparently I was playing center field because I was close to where it went in.  I walked along the edge for a ways looking for it, but couldn’t see it anywhere.  I thought about wading in after it, but the area was tropical and looked like good alligator habitat.  As I was standing there peering into the water I heard some thrashing and looked off to my right where I saw a small camel swimming.  It was about half grown, maybe 6 feet tall and not filled out.  It had a look a lot like a wet cat – like it wasn’t happy about its situation.  I hadn’t realized the water was that deep, and had never thought about a camel’s ability to swim, but they look a little like a moose – long legs w/ wide feet, a long neck & snout that could stay above water easily, so it was swimming just fine – just not happy about it.

Jax, Jesse, August

September 10, 2011

I was at home in a house that was a combination of our current house and an older one.  Several people were visiting.  I was sitting on one end of the couch and Bill Jackson was lying on the other end w/ his head on the armrest.  The couch was big enough that his feet weren’t touching me.  We were talking about Bibles and he was saying that he didn’t like The Message because, in his words, “it doesn’t encourage God”.  Rufus Campbell came and flopped down on the couch next to Jax.  There wasn’t enough room and it was just play anyhow, so Jax pushed him off onto the floor.

I asked, “What are you reading now?”, which Deb Riffle heard as she was walking by.  She thought I was talking to her and started telling me about a novel that she was in the middle of.  It had lots of intrigue and violence and she said she really enjoyed it, which surprised me.

Jim Egli came in and sat down at a little desk and opened a bible w/ tiny print.  The light wasn’t very good there either, and he didn’t have reading glasses, so he bent down w/ his face about 3” away from the page and curled his index finger and made a little pinhole to look through.  He was looking for something in relation to Jax’ comment.

Before he could comment Emma came down the stairs carrying Jesse saying, “Someone let the dog upstairs and look what he got into while no one was paying attention”.  She set him down and he was wearing a white, lace tutu.  He hated it and was completely humiliated, but Emma thought it was tremendously funny.  He tried to slink away, but I called for him to come to me and he eventually did, but he was only walking w/ his front legs, dragging his back legs as though he refused to acknowledge that the rear part of his body belonged to him.

There was a crowd of kids playing baseball in the front yard, which was huge, like the place we lived in Hopedale.  One of them really got hold of one and it bounced off the house making a big thud inside, enough to stop the conversation and make everyone look.  I went to the window to watch as another kid hit one that came up to the bushes in front of the house and stopped just short of it.  The outfielder came and looked around but couldn’t find the ball.  Since I’d seen where it went in I went out to help.

We looked around the bushes and found the nearly decomposed remains of two other balls.  One was just a leather shell with a hole in the top and the other was rubber that had hardened and broken.  Todd Milner was walking down a sidewalk next to the house that turned and went behind the house next to ours and he saw the ball lying there between the two houses where it had apparently rolled from behind the bushes.  He picked it up and tossed it back to the kids, then turned and walked off w/ two other guys, all three of whom were wearing black leather jackets w/ some motorcycle emblem on the back.

September 12, 2011

I was walking on a pathway that was cut or worn into solid rock, about waist deep.  There was a piece of plywood across it a little ways ahead that someone had tied in place w/ wire to make a door.  I could see small hands working on the wire, trying to untie it, but couldn’t see the person on the other side who wanted to get through.  I came up to the door and untied the wire and it was August standing on the other side.  When I opened it he didn’t come through but went back up the trail toward a shelter.

The shelter was about 20’ wide, 40’ long and 8’ tall and had a flat roof, dirt floor and 2’ diameter columns about every 10 feet that held the roof up.  My Grandpa Wegman was sitting under it in a folding chair and watching August run around.  He said, “That little boy has a lot of energy.”

Off to one side there was a car port that was recessed into the ground about the same depth as the trail.  It had the same height roof as the shelter, which put the roof 4 or 5 feet above ground and there was a row of bushes next to it blocking the view of the inside of the carport.  I saw Jesse run over and go down into the carport so I walked over by it and picked up a couple little rocks and tossed them between the bushes into the carport. 

I heard a woman yell, “Ow!”  She came out of the garage and said a rock had hit her.  I felt terrible and apologized.  I told her I’d seen my dog go in there and was trying to chase him back out.  She wasn’t really hurt, and said it was no problem, but there were a couple guys there with her who wanted to make a big deal out of it.  One of them asked me what I thought I was doing throwing rocks at a woman.  I repeated that I didn’t know she was there.  He huffed and puffed like he wanted to fight, but she told him to cool off.

A cliff

I was in a gift shop at a state park.  I walked out the back door and there was a flat open space about 50 feet long and the width of the store, then nothing.  I walked out to the edge and there was open air straight down about 100 feet.  No fence, no warning signs, just air.  The store and space behind were apparently built on a cliff overhang.  The edge wasn’t a straight line, but stuck out farther in some places than others.  It was all very solid and there was no curve or taper down, just flat ground, then air.

At one point there was a column of rock, almost like a stalagmite, that stretched up from the valley beyond the base of the cliff and ended just below the store level and just beyond the edge.  I looked at it and realized that it had a columnar structure, like basalt, with flat hexagonal tops tapering all the way down, so it would be easily climbable.   The first step would just mean stepping out 3’ and down 3’ to a flat spot about the size of a chair seat and then I’d be able to climb my way down with solid footing at reasonable distances, but that first step would be tricky. 

I’m not sure why, but I really wanted to avoid going back through the store.  Of course I had to weigh that against the notion that if I slipped or lost my balance on that first step I would die.  But I was pretty confident that it would be no trouble.  I thought of the many times I’ve been rock hopping at various state parks – I can’t remember ever missing a step when it mattered.  So I told myself, just look at the landing spot - the step.  Don’t look at the air all around.  Then I pondered whether I should jump w/ both feet or step down w/ one.  I ruled out lying down on my belly and touching my legs to the landing spot, because then I’d have to push myself upright away from the edge and that seemed chancier than jumping or stepping.  However I got there I’d then have to get down to hands and knees to be able to start the climb down, all on a space about 2’ in diameter w/ nothing to hold onto about 100’ in the air.

I decided the best thing to do was the two legged hop, so I hopped, landed, and didn’t even try to straighten back up, but let the momentum carry me down to a crouch, put my hands down on the platform and hung my legs down to the first step below.  From there I always had places to hold onto and places to put my feet before I moved my hands, so I was comfortable heading down.

At one point I had the thought to take a picture.  I noticed that the cover over the battery slot in the bottom of my camera was slid off to one side and the flat, rechargeable battery seemed to be missing.  I slid the cover back and instead of sealing up the bottom of the camera it exposed the flat battery.  This was puzzling, so I slid it back the other way and now there was a cylindrical hole exposed that would have fit a C battery, but it was empty.  I thought it was strange that the cover was made so that it would cover whichever battery I was using, but wouldn’t cover both.

Bob Dylan

I was somewhere that had dozens, maybe hundreds of pencil sketches by Bob Dylan on display.  I was surprised because I didn’t know that he was an artist and these weren’t just doodles, they were really good.  Some were black & white and some were full color.  There were fascinating, intricate geometric patterns, little randomly spaced portraits of people and animals, landscapes, and word art.  Some sheets had been completed as single scenes and others were obviously collections made at different times.

Somehow I understood that he had done all this work as part of his creative process that he used for songwriting.  It apparently helped him think of words and music to draw what he wanted to write, although I couldn’t identify any sketch that told me it was related to any song of his that I’m familiar with.

There was one constant on every page:  his signature.  Every drawing had his name in block letters that looked like leaded glass work in the lower right hand corner.  The color drawings had it in color, and the black & white ones had it in black & white, and it always was blended into the drawing, not out on its own.

Ice

I was in Mooresville looking at a construction site w/ Andy McCarrey (ILAW).  We got done and went to our separate cars to leave.  Mine was an old Mercury Marquis – rear wheel drive, land yacht.  The pavement was covered w/ ice and I had to go up a little rise to get going, but my traction was pretty limited.  After several tries I made it out onto the street and went just a short ways before traffic came to a stop.  Everyone was driving slowly because of the ice and there was a nasty looking wreck up ahead.  When I got to it I realized that the car that looked way too damaged for a slow speed ice crash was actually a display that had been up on a billboard post 20 feet in the air.  Someone had crashed into the post and knocked the car off of it.

Dave Clark

I was in a meeting with Dave Clark from the City of Champaign.  Dave had just started making a presentation of several statistics about the performance of his section.  Across the table in a formal suit sat an auditor, who was Dave’s older brother.  He jumped in before Dave had gotten two sentences out and said, “Did you authorize these vacations?”  Dave said he had.  The auditor then said, with a smug look of defiance, “Policy requires 14 days notice on any vacation request.  Most of these appear to be granted without the 14 day notice.”

This stopped Dave cold.  I could see that he was completely flustered and it was also obvious that this wasn’t just about the vacation time, it went all the way back to childhood, and once again big brother, who has his act more together is putting down little brother.  After a long, awkward pause Dave tried to speak, but his voice cracked and tears were welling up in his eyes.  I wasn’t in charge of the meeting, so I debated what to do, and not seeing an appropriate role, I sat there and watched the painful situation play itself out.  I wanted to step in and say to the big brother that he was out of line, that he had a conflict of interest that should have kept him from performing the audit, that it was inappropriate for him to be there because of the relationship, and to top it off, that Dave had done the right thing in approving the vacations with short notice if it didn’t disrupt his crew’s ability to work, because that was the point of the 14 day notice rule, which everyone in the department knew and he would too if he’d been here.

I sat there and stared at a piece of blank graph paper on the table in front of me to avoid looking at either of the two brothers.  Strangely, when I swiveled the paper to the right, the squares on the page turned to trapezoids.  I swiveled it back straight and they turned back to squares.  I tried the left and they did the same thing, only opposite.

Old car

I was at my parent’s house and we were going to drive somewhere so we went out to get in a car and my dad had my 1974 Dodge Dart.  It had been restored to where it looked great – bright red w/ a white vinyl top and a white racing stripe.  Inside the white vinyl seats had been replaced w/ a fuzzy blue cloth, which was a big improvement.  I was amazed because the car was junk when I got rid of it in 1980.  I wondered how he’d gotten hold of it and how long he’d had it.

Then Scott came out with all his kids and it was obvious that we weren’t going to be able to take the Dart.  I went to his big van and was going to drive when it occurred to me to ask Brett if he wanted to drive, and he did.

Later, I was at a Vineyard event in a high school gym.  There was a big crowd of people already sitting in the bleachers when I came in.  I looked across the room and Daniel Bauer standing on the floor at the bottom row of the bleachers helping to organize something, but he was wearing a brown polka dot dress.

Getting out of church

I was in the Oakville AC church w/ John, Scott & Emma.  Everyone had been seated and the ministers were in the pulpit, but we needed to leave.  We headed down the aisle between rows of pews on the right side of the sanctuary to where there used to be a doorway in the wall at the front between the front facing and side facing pews, but there had been some remodeling going on and the opening had been blocked in and stuccoed over.  We had to turn around and walk out toward the back where we saw a new opening in the wall about half way back.

There was a gap in the regular seating pattern with a short wooden divider separating the back of the bench from the foot space of the one behind it.  It was only about a foot wide, but the divider the same height as the back of the benches so we could scoot through sideways.  I started to turn into this gap, but there was an old woman bent over on her hands and knees picking up something off the floor.  She didn’t look like she would be going anywhere fast so we gave up on that option, too.  We were really starting to attract attention, so we just headed for the back of the room.

A hay field

I was in a large hay field that had been mowed and baled and was now about four inches tall w/ alfalfa and clover.  Several spots in the field had something wrong with them – a disease or lack of some key nutrient or something else – that had caused the leaves to curl up and lose their color.  These were random shaped blobs of damaged area from just a couple square feet to several hundred square feet.  I had a brown glass bottle, about a pint, with an eye dropper in the top of it, and I was expected to use the eye dropper on the plants to deliver the medicine or nutrient that the plants needed.  Instead of the usual inch long rubber bulb at its top end the eye dropper had one that was about twice as big around as the dropper itself and almost as long.  This still meant that it could only carry about an ounce at a time.

The whole concept seemed hopeless and ridiculous.  Even if I took all day and put one tiny drop on each plant, there was no way the bottle would come even close to covering them all.  Worse, a TV news crew showed up on the site and wanted to film me healing the hay field and have me explain what I was doing.

Mazatlan Beach

I was in Mazatlan wearing my swim trunks, barefoot, and headed for the beach.  There was a long, low beach house between me and the beach and I didn’t want to go around it because I was barefoot and the native plant growth tends to be pretty thorny.  One section of the building was open through to the beach, w/ just screens, so I walked through and came out on the beach.  The house sat on a high bank, ten or fifteen feet above the water and the beach made a big arcing curve off to the left.  I was surprised to see that the whole beach, as far as I could see along the curve, was covered w/ boulders of ice and snow.  It was completely covered right down into the water, but the water was still open and bringing in waves like normal.

I wished I had some shoes, but this was unusual enough that I wasn’t going to let cold feet keep me from doing a little exploring.  There was a small cove, maybe 100 feet wide and 100 feet in from the main beach just off to my left.  It was full of ice chunks, too, but there were dozens of people swimming in the water.  They were splashing around and having a great time, so I guessed the water must be warm.  It looked dangerous, though, because the ice chunks moved around with the water and crashed into each other as waves came by.  Some of these boulders must have weighed tons, so getting mashed between them would not have been good.  I found a place that looked stable and went down the bank and got my feet in the water.  Sure enough, it was bath tub warm, except right next to the ice I could feel the cold of the melt water flowing off the ice blocks.

I went back up the bank and at the top of it there was a man lying on a towel right in the only clear path.  I had to step on a corner of the towel because there was no space between it and the rocks and when I did the man yelled at me.  He claimed I’d stepped on his finger.  I had felt what I thought was a stick when I stepped on the towel, but hadn’t seen that his hand was under the towel.  I felt bad about stepping on him and tried to apologize, but couldn’t think what to say.

I went on up to the beach house to what I thought was the same door I’d come out, but when I went inside this time there were several young people in the room and there was some furniture – chairs, a couch, a bar – and they looked at me kind of wondering who I was and why I was there.  I told them I was just cutting through and they were OK with that.  I went out the back door, but this time instead of coming out on the street I’d come in from, I came out into Mexican wilderness – cactus, rocks, all kinds of sharp things that a person in bare feet wouldn’t want to walk through.  I thought that if there was a path I would chance it rather than going back inside and feeling a little like Inspector Clouseau having walked into a closet instead of the exit.  I looked around and there was no opening.  My only choice was to go back through the room to the beach side and try to find the right way through.

Football

I was in a High School and someone handed me a full set of football gear – shoes, pads, uniform, helmet.  They told me Dave and I would be allowed to play.  I was pretty excited about the chance to play a real game in pads, but I wondered how I would do against high schoolers.  Would I be too strong or just too slow?  I started to put the gear on, but realized that I ought to find the locker room so as to not be undressing in the hallway in front of everyone.  

Truck stop

I went into a truck stop restaurant in Morgan County at a busy time of day.  Chris Parker (Morgan County Extension Agent) was sitting at the counter tapping out a beat with a pair of drumsticks on whatever was in front of him – his plate, glass, the countertop, the vinyl seat cushion next to him.  His head was bobbing w/ the beat.  He looked around and grinned and people started joining him.  People sitting in booths eating their lunches started using their hands and their silverware and pretty soon almost everyone in the place had joined the jam in some way or other.  One man got up to leave and started tapping on the window with some one inch diameter rods.  A middle aged black woman wasn’t tapping, but she was dancing a swaying, almost hula-like dance to the rhythm.  The waitresses and cooks were tapping and smiling, too.  I wondered if this was a regular event because everyone seemed so comfortable with it and pretty able to stay with the beat.  I thought if it isn’t it should be.

I noticed Scott Kelly and his daughter wearing Union High School letter jackets.  I walked through the crowd and passed Jeff Bigger walking toward me, also in his Union letter jacket.

Iowa

Ruth and I were driving onto the old Mississippi River Bridge at Burlington when a semi that was going too fast lost control and sideswiped a long section of railing ahead of us, knocking it over and causing the concrete on the sidewalk and curb adjacent to it to buckle and break.  (There’s an inconsistency here, because the old bridge had a metal deck, and no concrete, which comes into play later.)  This section of the bridge had the truss under it, so the semi didn’t hit the structural members. 

The truck managed to back off the railing, get straightened out and continue east across the bridge toward Illinois.  I saw that the left half of the deck was bent down, leaning out toward where the railing had been hit, but the right half was still intact, so once the semi was out of the way, I looked things over and thought I would go ahead and cross. 

But just as I had that thought the entire span started to sag in the middle of the damage.  We were already out on the span that was sagging, so we got out of the car and started to run back toward the closest pier, but before we’d gone very far the entire span broke and dropped into the water.  It was a slow descent, but we ended up in the river in weather too cold for swimming.  Ruth was off the deck swimming toward the bridge pier, but struggling with the cold and all her clothes on.  I rode the deck down and was able to crawl across the metal grating keeping my torso out of the water as I hurried toward her. 

I eventually had to get into the water to get her.  I’ve been in the river before and knew that we couldn’t swim upstream, so even though it was cold I gave up on the pier and aimed us toward the shore, letting the current carry us downstream.  When we made it Ruth was shivering violently.  I wasn’t really cold, so I took my coat off to help her warm up.  When I looked at my coat it was torn up on the outside, but it had several intact insulating foam sections inside that weren’t even wet.

Later, I was at Mediapolis where my Dad had taken all the siding off the bottom eight feet or so of the barn.  Kyle Waller, from Morgan County Highway Department, was there looking things over.  There were three main sections of floor.  The center was dirt and the two sides had rough cut timbers up about two feet off the ground.  Dad wanted to keep the wood floors, but Kyle pointed out that most of the timbers had sagged from the years of load carrying and several were missing.  I noticed the barn start to tilt a little one way, then back the other way, making an awful creaking and groaning.  I decided it was time to get out.

Outside I saw that there were two cranes on the property.  One had hold of the barn and was picking it up off its foundation to be set aside in some open space to be scrapped.  The other had hold of another building that was being swung in to sit where the barn had been.  It was being picked from where the corn crib is, but it was a newer, better building.

The crane set it down on the foundations of the old barn and when it was all disconnected I went inside.  It must have had its own floor with it, because inside the floors were hardwood and smooth concrete.  It had some furniture in it for someone to use it as a house, but it had been a barn or corncrib recently because there were critters in it.

First, I caught site of a mouse scurrying by the corner of my eye.  Then as I got down on the floor near a piece of furniture where I’d seen the mouse I saw a black rat nibbling on some food.  I caught it by the tail and was going to take it outside, but before I could pick it up a cat saw it and attacked, biting it right on the neck.  I decided to let the cat have it and went back to scouring the room for other animals, chasing out snakes, raccoons, possums, and all kinds of insects.

I looked out a window and there was a cliff by the sea.  About 100 feet away was a point of rock with vertical or overhung sides.  Jeff Crabtree (Champaign Engineering) was driving one of those little four wheel scooters like handicapped people use and several people were walking behind him.  He drove it right out to the very point of the rock where he stopped, got up, surveyed the scene, and dived about fifty feet into the water.  This prompted the rest of the crowd, all in street clothes, to dive in too.  Jeff's dive was picture perfect, but the next guy behind him did one of those where the feet never quite get up and all that tucking the head down does is to make the person into an upside down V.  Fifteen to twenty people dived in and all looked to be having a great time splashing around.

An alley and a cave

I was in a crowd in a narrow alley.  I wanted to walk through a spot where a dumpster was sitting and the already narrow space got narrower.  There were some rough looking men congregated right there and when I got their attention and tried to go through, one of them stood about six inches from my face and glared at me.  I pretended not to notice and pushed on past him.  I wasn’t really scared, but felt awkward about the situation.

At the far end of the alley it opened up into a huge cave room about 50 feet high and large enough for two basketball courts.  The walls were made of thin layered, crumbly sedimentary rock, like shale or soft sandstone and the floor was dry and sandy.  There was a sort of rim around the main floor, up about three feet from the main floor.  People were bringing in cardboard boxes to recycle and others were cutting up and flattening the boxes, then throwing them on the lower floor.  Several people commented that the room would hold a lot of boxes.

A restaurant. A hospital.

I walked into a restaurant in a small town where I knew several of the people there.  People were seated at long tables in an area that was raised about four feet from the entry floor level.  Some waved and said hello, and I was feeling self conscious because I was wearing glasses.  I walked through the seating area to the back to an area that had a stage curtain mostly open. 

Behind it the floor was covered with thick, leather covered cushions – giant pillows three or four feet thick and maybe ten feet square.  There were also columns of these same cushions attached to the wall so that the top of each cushion was about 6 feet above the one below.  I bounced across the cushions and climbed up the wall level by level.  When I was standing on the penultimate level I looked at the top level and didn’t like the way it was attached.  There was a string attached to hooks in the wall, but the string looked frayed and the hooks didn’t look very substantial.  I looked over at the column to my right and that top cushion, which was up against the ceiling on its right, was attached by a series of tacks that had been pounded into the window frame and the wall.  Neither one looked safe.  I was probably thirty feet above the floor at this point, so even though the floor cushions were thick, I didn’t want to risk having a wall cushion give way and dump me.

I came back down to the floor level and walked along behind the curtain where I noticed lots of gift baskets sitting on a table.  They were filled with flowers and little knickknacks and toys.  There was a gift card attached to each one and I recognized my Mom's handwriting on the cards.  I was curious whether there was one for me, but there wasn't really anything I wanted in them and I didn't think she would appreciate me snooping, but sure enough, my name was on one of the cards.

Later I was walking through a hallway with concrete floor and ceiling and concrete block walls in the basement of a hospital when I noticed what looked sort of like the cap of a mushroom lying on the floor.  It was flat, about an inch thick, and about four inches in diameter, but not perfectly round.  I picked it up and it had the texture of a piece of raw meat.  I sliced it into little half inch cubes, but didn’t cut all the way through, so they were still all attached. 

Then I went into a classroom and a teaching surgeon came in with the thing I had just cut up.  He proceeded to talk about the possible ways to reconnect the cut up tissue so that it would work again.  He settled on glue, which he proceeded to apply in the cuts.  Somehow in this process he reshaped it so it was now thinner, narrower and twice as long.  He had a patient already on the operating table with his lower left leg exposed and cut open on the outside of the leg and he put the tissue in it.  I couldn’t really see what he did, but he must have been attaching blood vessels to it.  Then he closed the incision and stitched it up.  He applied electric current a few times and declared that it had beaten on its own up to five times.  He said they would continue the treatment and he was confident that it would begin to beat on its own permanently.

I was horrified that I had randomly cut up what was to be implanted as a heart in someone.  I thought I should tell the doctor, but I was worried about liability and worse, that I may have prevented someone from being able to recover.  The fact that the heart wasn’t working on its own meant the patient had his normal heart or some temporary blood pump working, but the fact that they were doing an implant in his leg obviously meant all was not well up in the chest.  I wondered about the implications of having the heart so low in the body.  It seems like that would cause the pressure on the heart to be much higher.

I went out into the hallway with the surgeon to tell him what I’d done when I noticed that he was coughing, a lot.  He said he thought he had TB and was concerned that several people in the hospital had it.  It didn’t seem right that he would be doing surgeries, even wearing a mask, but I wasn’t sure how contagious TB was.

Wierdness in Indianapolis

July 4, 2011

I was staying at Bryan Meyer’s house and needed to change clothes quickly.  There was a bedroom available with no one in it, but it didn’t have a door, just a section of military camouflage netting and I was hoping for a little more privacy since there were several children running around the house.

I went outside and started following a truck that was pulling an all white trailer.  The trailer had nothing sticking out, not a license plate holder, not a tail light.  It was smooth as an egg, but had a 50’s style streamline look where it tapered to almost a point at the bottom but the sides and top curved smoothly around so there were no corners.  I don’t know why it was important for me to catch it, but I was determined to catch and try to ride it.  The trailer turned into a tunnel that was too tight for me to fit between the wall and the trailer, so I had to stay behind, but there was nothing I could get a grip on to hold on and ride.

Later, I came to Anderson’s Orchard on

Greencastle Road

in Morgan County to deliver water by fire hose to irrigate a section of apple trees.  The entire east side of the orchard had been cleared and was just a hay field.  I walked up the top of the hill dragging the hose and as I got to the top I noticed that there was a great clear view of downtown Indianapolis.  I could see a McDonalds sign near I-70 and then tall buildings in the background, but over the center of the tall buildings was the St Louis arch.  It never crossed my mind that the arch was in the wrong city.  The view of the arch from here wasn’t straight on, but just slightly off of looking straight at the end, which sort of makes sense since the arch sits facing east and west and I was southwest of it.

I was so distracted looking at the city that I didn’t notice the people playing softball in the field.  I heard the crack of a bat, looked to my left and saw a ball sailing just ahead of where I was.  There were no fielders near, so I dropped the hose and took off at full speed for about ten steps and managed to reach my right hand out and knock it down.  I thought about throwing it back, but realized I had already interfered more than I should. 

Over Peoria. Blue goo.

June 28, 2011

I was in the air southeast of Peoria, looking down on the City.  I must have been wearing one of those human kite outfits because I was gliding, not flying under power.  I noticed the high bridge over I-74 and had the thought that I had always wanted to stand up there and look out over the city, so it would be a good place to land.  I swooped down towards it and while the glide gave me enough lift that I wouldn’t crash into the ground, it also gave me way too much forward speed to land running.  I noticed a semi with an empty car towing trailer going the same direction I was.  It must have been on the interstate because it was going nearly as fast as I was, although I don’t know when my focus shifted off the high bridge.  I glided down onto one of its outside top rails and skidded to a standing stop. 

The semi swerved over next to a retaining wall that was at the same height as the top of the trailer and a white panel truck drove off the top of the wall onto the top of the trailer, which was still moving down the highway.  The driver of the truck did not want me there so he drove it to the front of the trailer to force me off.  I grabbed a hose that was attached to the front of the trailer and dropped over the front edge, hanging down in front of the semi-tractor, right in front of the grill and windshield.  The guy in the truck on top of the trailer hopped out and started to spin the hose reel that held the hose that I was holding on to.  I was able to climb the hose as fast as he reeled it out so I managed to stay where I was and not get dragged under the semi.

June 29, 2011

I was in a flat, open field covered w/ bare dirt.  Someone was interested in landscaping the site, but wanted to know what was under the surface to see what would grow and/or how much topsoil they would need to add.  I stuck a soil probe into the ground and just below the surface, about 3 inches down, was a layer of sky blue goo.  It was about the consistency of pudding, maybe a little thicker, but it seemed way too soft and wet to support us walking around w/ just a thin layer over it.  I didn’t know what it was, but it had to be something unnatural.

Bunker Hill Road

I was on Bunker Hill Road heading toward Mooresville.  I came down the hill past the house with the ghost tree to the bridge at the outlet of John Moore’s lake.  The bridge was broken down and people were out on it looking around, so I got out to see what had happened.  The main bridge had rusted through and collapsed on the east side and a strange wooden structure had been built adjacent to it on the west.  As I went down into the collapsed area there was a wooden wall with a door in it that opened into the area under the wood framed expansion, which had also partially collapsed.  On the west side of the room under the bridge was a wooden dam wall with the lake right at the top of it at about my eye level. 

My old enemy Jim Bowyer and one of his cohorts were there and they were looking around talking about what could be done.  An older couple was picking through pieces of broken concrete, rusted corrugated metal pipe that had been covered with concrete, scraps of wood, expanded metal, and gravel that had all been part of the cobbled together bridge expansion.  They asked Bowyer why this hadn’t been fixed right.  Bowyer said something about budgets and trying to save money.  They weren’t buying it.  They said (correctly) that someone had spent a lot of money building the ridiculous little room that rebuilt John Moore’s dam, and if they’d spent it on the bridge, everything would still be working.

I thought about jumping into the fray by saying the reason he’d done what he had was because John Moore had been a long time shoddy developer who had probably helped get Bowyer elected and most of the people in the Mooresville area had voted against him, so Moore got what he wanted and Bowyer gave Mooresville what he wanted to give them, which was nothing.  But, I remembered that I was long past that fight and there wasn’t much I could do now, 14 years and 120 miles removed from being involved there, so I kept my mouth shut.

Later I pulled into an angle parking spot in front of a school.  I wasn’t planning to park, just turn around, so I didn’t worry about the handicap parking sign at the head of the spot.  As I was pulling in Sallie Thomas came up to the front of the car shaking her finger at me.  She thought I was going to park there and she was ready to let me know what she thought of it.  I told her I was just turning around, but she gave me a look that said, “I don’t believe you”.

On the beach

Ruth and I went to the ocean shore.  There was some sand, but most of the area was covered by big areas of limestone that was full of holes like Swiss cheese.  There wasn’t a flat level space anywhere.  We were climbing around and came across a woman in National Park ranger uniform.  I asked her if bicycling was allowed, just being silly because there was no way a person could bicycle there.  She didn’t get it and gave me a serious “no”.  Then I said, “This would be a great place for a baseball game.”  At this point she caught on to my joke and seemed to lighten up.

There was a gap about four feet high in a limestone wall that opened into a cave.  I went inside and was walking around on my knees in the sand.  I noticed the ceiling above me was perfectly flat, in fact too flat to be natural.  As I investigated I saw a few pieces of expanded metal exposed where some of the covering had come off, so I realized the ceiling was made of concrete, not limestone.  At this point I noticed Ruth wasn’t with me.

I went to another opening and climbed down a short steel ladder back to the ground outside.  Now I was at a wide, flat beach covered with sand and gravel.  There were dozens of people with baskets and shovels.  They were digging through the sand and gravel to get to the chunks of coal that lay underneath.  I found Ruth and she had a shovel and a basket already partly full of coal.  She was excited about getting free coal, but I wondered what we wanted it for.