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Thursday, February 15, 2001
11:15 
What a weird fucking dream I had last night.
I mean really weird.
I dreamt I was in France somewhere but it was the future. Everyone was speaking French, obviously, which is a shame because my French is not very good, although it once was. I can't remember why I was there, I think I might have been there for a job, or with someone.
Anyway, I was in a club, which is also weird because I never go clubbing, can't take the noise levels in my head. I met this couple of guys. At least, I think they were guys. There was something androgynous about them, and I had the sense that one of them might actually have been a very masculine woman. We got to talking, and immediately I could see that they thought of me as a mark, but this was a lucid dream and I was interested to see where it was going. After a couple of drinks they suggested we go somewhere else. I agreed, although I got an exasperated look from someone I was with.
I got into the back of their car, they got in the front. The masculine woman/man person was driving...no, she wasn't. She was sitting on the right hand side. Her friend, a shorter guy with short, thick, black hair and a moustache, and faintly greasy skin, sat on the left.
This is where things start getting really peculiar. I am told, as is the habit in these sorts of situations, that they want to show me a good time. It quickly becomes apparent that this means fixing me up with a guy who will demand a fee for his services. I am handed photographs over the shoulder of the short man. They are like polaroids, but covered in an opaque, shiny cover almost like a white sweet wrapper with "polaroid" written in diagonal lines across it in a cursive font and gold ink. The cover peels back, but remains attached at the bottom. This is to avoid people accidentally seeing the subjects of the pictures, particularly the police. It took me a few seconds to work this out.
The photographs show people. They snaps aren't pornographic - they aren't even very good. Or, at least that's what it looks like. I suddenly realise that if you hold the cover and the photograph at the right angle then the subject is naked. They still aren't pornographic, it is simply that the subject has gone from being clothed to being naked.
I wasn't interested in sex. I rarely am. But for some reason I want to find Mug someone who looks and feels like me. I don't know why. I go through the photos, discarding those of men, and get an approving look from the masculine woman. It appears she thinks I am a lesbian and is trying to appraise her own chances, now that I have gone up in her estimation and am a bit more now than just a mark.
Finally I pick one, and the panic that tries to arise because I am going along with this even though I have no means of paying whatever fee they may charge, feels quite distant. This one isn't quite right but she has echoes of what I am looking for.
The lesbian makes a phone call and we drive to another club. I am immediately aware that this is payment up front, and that the lesbian will pay a fee to the chosen woman just for making an appearance. I will then be expected to pay the lesbian back, plus a percentage. She is taking a risk that she doesn't usually take.
I smile.
The woman turns out to be fairly empty-headed. Her name is Jane. She is interested in nothing but the acquisition of money and using sex to get that money isn't something that bothers her. She thinks she is intelligent, but she isn't. She is incredibly selfish. Everything about her is superficial and hollow.
There is nothing about this woman that interests me. She is a lesbian who goes with men simply for the money. For the first 5 minutes she is discussing business with the two who brought me.
I take my opportunity to leave.
Being pursued through a strange city, where the people speak a foreign language, in the middle of the night and you know things are not what they seem but you cannot change the landscape, is always very peculiar. I didn't know my way around, I had this idea that I owed them something in the region of £3000. I ran, but I wasn't afraid. I wasn't afraid even though I knew Bad Things would happen if they caught up with me.
I come to a bridge, if you can call it that. It crosses an estuary, perhaps a mile of it. Two steel wires of impossible thickness thrum out across the water on either side. In the middle is a ladder type arrangement, tubular struts the thickness of my forearms, painted white. It is perhaps a metre wide. On either side, in a parallel plane to the wires, is a pair of curving lines of struts that are curvilinear like a cross between ivy or rose tendrils painted on a wall, and the double helix of DNA.
They are close behind me, those two. Pilgrims - and I know they are pilgrims - try to prove their faith by crossing the estuary on this bridge rather than pay and use the one further upriver, the one that the cars use. This one is free. They call themselves pilgrims and will gain the same respect for having made the crossing, but they are mostly terrified and too poor to use the other bridge. They inch along, tentatively creeping forward, clinging on so that knuckles turn white.
I discard my shoes and start climbing along the curvilinear struts at the side, where I can put my feet on the white tubes and hold on to the wire. The struts feel quite wide to my feet inside their socks, and remarkably I am not afraid. I am going much more quickly than the pilgrims. Suddenly I realise that this is the whole point. If a person discards enough fear to take the curved path, and not creep along the safer-seeming ladder in the middle, there is a magnetic field that picks them up, cosseting them, and whisks them across to the other side. All I had to do was hold on.
It was a good ride. I left my pursuers, gawping in astonishment as if they believe I have suddenly achieved enlightenment in a religion in which they do not believe.
I make my way to an airport where I am met by Henbane, although I wasn't expecting to see him there and he doesn't seem to recognise me properly. At least, he doesn't give the impression of recognising me but there is a twinkle in his eye. The airport isn't really like any airport I know of. There is one door labelled "mouse". He informs me that I've made an enemy, as if I needed telling, and then tells me to find the red car and hurry. He had come to make sure I got away ok.
I think he means an automobile car, and go looking for one, but I come across a small cart, rather like a carriage from a ghost train. Four seats, arranged in two pairs in a box. The red is a deep red, almost blood red, the upholstery something that looks like velvet but is much softer.
I get in and the car takes off. Henbane jumps in from out of the shadows and spends a few minutes looking behind us. Then he grins. He's taller than I thought he would be, dressed in black jeans, a black t-shirt and a black leather jacket. Almost goth like, but with more style in an unthinking sort of way.
The cart takes us to an aeroplane, or something - certainly something to get us well away from our pursuers, anyway, and back onto friendly turf.
There was more after that, involving some friends of mine and a trip out to a theatre, but it was only minor work-type things or social mixing. I do know we went to visit a lightship and discussed going to the circus. We seemed to be somewhere that was like parts of Dublin, or Morningside. There was a minor incident in which we had to help a little old lady who was feeding birds at the head of the pier and got a bit lost and confused (and then damp), but nothing as exciting or plain odd as the first part. It felt rather like the old gang was back together again. I've missed them a lot.
Tuesday, February 13, 2001
17:41
Feeling put upon.
And guilty for feeling put upon.
But the weekend wasn't good. My dear pseudo-twin managed to cause a great deal of distress by being a selfish, inconsiderate bastard. Ach well, you'd have thought I'd be used to it by now.
Still, I beat the elliptical for the first time yesterday. Twenty minutes on forest walk level one. Pathetic, I know, but the sweat was dripping off me. My cardiovascular function seems to have bottomed out. It's dreadful. I'm also wary of pushing too hard on the cardio for fear of exhausting myself. The pain is still there, but I've noticed it's more bearable if I keep at the whole gym thing. Three times a week at the moment, for about 2 hours. Sometimes I end up in tears during the session, but I've discovered that if I quit it doesn't give the same benefit, so I'll push through the pain because I know I'll feel better for it afterwards.
I've lost five pounds in the last week as well. I'm kind of hoping I can keep that up, on the basis that if I'm losing weight but still working out it's probably fat I'm losing rather than muscle.
Just heard from Bling that she's feeling much better about Cornwall, and I'm desperately happy about that. Was so worried that I'd have to go up there, bundle her into the boot and drive her down kicking and screaming.
My head is feeling rather weird these days. I've been learning all about the futility of words recently, and the misleading nature of world models. Example. If I say "fire" you have an idea of fire. But if you actually come across a fire, is it the same as the idea you have that is triggered by the word? No. The word is a mnemonic for a model, and all models are inaccurate and imprecise. So no language can really describe the world. This means that words, although not false as such, are inaccurate and imprecise by definition. I am being frustrated by the inadequacies of language, which is terrible because I enjoy using language so much. Perhaps it is the challenge of concatenating imprecise and inaccurate models to produce a sense in someone else of what I might mean. Even so, of course, short of jumping inside someone's head and playing it for them first person, I can never engender in someone else a precise clone of what it is I am experiencing.
Remove it even further by using words to describe what is happening and the level of inaccuracy increases. Invocation. Mirror neurons. Empathy.
All sorts of things are happening to my perception and at the moment it feels like my head is too small to contain even the glimmers of understanding I am experiencing. Suddenly I am frustrated by the limitations of communication and the blog doesn't provide the same relief as it used to.
Mathematics. Even that is a model really. But it has a precision about it that language doesn't. Still, introduce chaos and suddenly you are left once more with imprecision and lack of repeatability.
Too many people live inside models and don't experience the world first hand. Why?
Because it's safer? I suppose. Because everyone else does it? Sad.
Right now I am finding it hard to be the amazing coping Sam with the spiky shoes who can be there for anyone to talk to and cry on and be crap to without fear of reprisal, when no one seems to be around to do the same for me and my perception is warping so fast and so far.
My head hurts.
I tarted up my CV today. I'll probably htmlify it and then the ranks of weird who read this blog can comment upon its crapness. And then I can start trawling through CSS protocols again. Sigh.
Not to mention trying to track down a copy of the National Heritage Act 1983. Anyone with access to legislation archives fancy photocopying it for me? Hmm?
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