Cold and Repetition ~ 1/7/2013

Two dreams last night.  First, I dreamed I was creating a canyon, with a stony peak on one side.  I was building it out of rust-red rock, and the rock was cold.  Not, the rock felt cold.  The rock was made out of coldness.  The walls of the canyon were building up around me, veined with white streaks of calcite, punctuated with cactus and dagger yucca.  The white streaks were shivers from the cold, and each cactus and yucca was a brief spasm of shaking from the cold.

I woke up and discovered I was, in fact, shaking from the cold.  The heater in my hotel room would only work full blast, so I hadn't turned it on, and my blankets weren't enough to keep me warm.  I turned the heater on full blast, then, but it didn't warm up fast enough, so I finally pulled the hair dryer out of the bathroom to heat up my little air pocket in the blankets, and finally got warm enough for all my muscles to un-clench and for me to stop shaking and relax back into sleep.

Then I dreamed there was this bank of guitar strings labeled A to Z, and when you plucked or struck them, they played a note from a famous song or artist beginning with that letter.  My friend David was able to correctly identify all of them with one listen.  So that was interesting, but I was too busy to pay much attention, because I was flying up to the Liberty Bowl with the MOB.

Joanna gave me a flyer to put in my car window so I could stay parked at Rice, and the same style flyer to put with my baggage so it would get loaded and delivered properly.  We all got on a plane, and started flying north.  But then the captain realized that they had forgotten to install one of the tables in the plane's lounge, so he said, all right, everyone buckle up, and to turn around he did this huge upside down loop-de-loop, like a roller coaster ride.  It was terrifying.  We all got back to Houston, and Joanna gave me another flyer to put in my car, and another for my baggage.  When we got back, after the game, Joanna gave me another set of flyers.  And then things started to get really repetitive.

We were going to go back up to Memphis to play another Liberty Bowl game, but I needed to get my measuring cups and spoons, and a spice rack.  I had to conduct a crucial experiment where I would measure out a certain amount of an herb or spice, put it on a shelf, and see what happened.

So I measured out a tablespoon of coriander, and put it on the shelf.  Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun.  Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.

Next I measured out a teaspoon of rosemary, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun.  Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.

Then I measured out an eight of a teaspoon of ground allspice, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun.  Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.

The exact same things kept happening in the exact same sequence as I measured out other spices. I was looking at Madonna on the cover of Vogue for the sixth or seventh time when Joanna told me I really needed to hurry up and get on the plane, and I could hear the guitar strings playing again in the white room with the big window next door, so I woke up.  At least I was still warm.