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.