TW: discussion of suicide
I dreamed the U.S. men’s soccer team was playing the Russian national men’s team at Rice Stadium. The US would be wearing bright orange and electric blue. The Russian team would be wearing the purple and green, basically the same hues of Buzz Lightyear. As a sort of “welcome to Texas” gesture, I made hundreds of egg and bacon breakfast tacos. I lightly painted the tortillas in the teams’ colors using food coloring and milk before cooking them up.
I tucked foil-wrapped breakfast tacos into all sorts of nooks and crannies under the bleachers at the ends of each side of the field, just under and behind where the teams would be sitting, along with their staff and press and people involved with producing the game. The ones on the U.S. side disappeared quickly, and everyone enjoyed them, but the Russian team and coaches and all didn’t really know what to make of hard-scrambled eggs. Apparently eggs in Russia were always served soft and runny. They thought they tasted all right, but didn’t really know what to make of them, and it was obviously not their thing. So for the rest of the game, every time I had a minute and felt hungry, I’d hurry over to the other end of the stadium, underneath the metal bleachers, and I’d grab a taco or two.
For halftime, there was going to be a dressage show with about a dozen horses. They wanted them to be done up like My Little Ponies, with dyed mains and tails, and designs painted on their rumps. So I didn’t have a lot of time to eat tacos and watch the game, because I was in charge of coming up with the designs and painting them on each horse using nail polish, where the horses waited under the bleachers. I had to keep reminding people telling me what to paint that we had to be careful not to paint on trademarked images. One person kept wanting the apples on the rump of one mare to look like the Apple logo, and I kept refusing, saying that this was internationally televised, and we’d all get into trouble and be sued for actual money if we did that.
The U.S. had scored one goal during the first half, but twice during the second half I peered out through the bleachers to see that the U.S. goal was completely unguarded, and sure enough, the ball came flying into it before too long, so Russia won the game 2-1. When the game ended, I put on my roller skates to head back to my apartment, because my senior year was over, and I needed to pack up and move out. If all the exits had been open, I could have just coasted down the ramps and out down the street to my apartment, but because I had to stay late to help with the horses, they kept closing exits, and I had to keep stopping and going back up the ramps to find another way. This was NOT EASY in roller skates and I kept falling.
When I finally got out onto the streets, there were still a lot of people milling around. Suddenly everything got really quiet, and we could hear a deep, eerie chanting, getting nearer and nearer. Here and there in the crowd, deep voices softly joined the chant. Someone near me whispered, obviously afraid, that it was the Hare Krishna, and that they were getting out of here! Other people scattered, and soon the street was almost empty, except for those who had begun chanting along, and a few other people who seemed determined to just pretend nothing was wrong, but were obviously nervous.
A large group of people carrying torches came across the plaza where I stood. They wore robes of black and orange and white, in rectangular, geometric designs, almost like plaid, except without the interweaving of a tartan, just stark blocks of black and burnt orange on white. They wore head wraps of the same fabric. Those on the outer edges of the group held up poles of silver-gray worn bamboo and thin lathes of old wood, all supporting a sort of light canopy of the same reeds and wood, and maybe human bone, the person next to me whispered, though I certainly didn’t see anything like that, all tied together with dried grass and pitch. The whole structure was sort of geometrically knobbly, a bunch of polyhedral shapes all glommed together, with some of the faces draped with the same orange, black, and white fabric. strings of metal beads and disks hung from corners, matching the necklaces worn by the chanters, and clinking and jingling and tinkling in time with their steps and in time with the chant.
All they were doing was chanting and walking, so I couldn’t figure out why anyone had found them super scary. The person next to me whispered that they practiced dark magic and sacrificed babies. But honestly, the only thing that made them seem different from any other group of people wearing uniforms and carrying banners and marching, which is practically an American pastime and on display in any parade, was that all of these people, and the chanters in the crowd who joined them, were Black people. So I figured the fear and rumor was really just racially motivated. The Hare Krishna was headed down my street, so I just skated on after them and made it home just fine.
I met up with my mom and we had just finished packing up my apartment when Robert Downey, Jr., knocked on the door. He was the producer for the horse show, and they’d all liked my designs, and thought maybe they should do something more permanent, and go on tour with the act. I agreed to go along and discuss this with the horse people. We all met up at Pepper Pots’s house for the talks. I almost left, though, because as she showed me to the dining room, Ms. Pots stopped to deal with a wasp next in the living room. The house was really well appointed, but the floors were hard-packed earth, the walls bamboo and wattle and daub and distressed planks, and the windows open to the forested surroundings.
Pepper aimed a jet of wasp spray up at the mud-caked nests in the rafters, and down fell a giant tarantula hawk wasp, not quite dead, flopping and buzzing angrily across the earth floor before finally lying still, orange wings flat on the ground, red-black head and abdomen curled up off the ground, with just a leg twitching every so often. I managed not to scream and run, but I kept my eye on the ceilings as I entered the dining room where everyone was gathered to discuss.
I explained that nail polish was just NOT the right medium, and showed them how hard it had been to complete each design before the horse was sent out onto the field for their show. Some people though we should tattoo the marks on the horses and keep their rumps shaved. One person even suggested branding, though most thought that hair dye was the best, somewhat permanent way to go. But some people thought it was cruel and even blasphemous to do that to horses, so I suggested a sort of clear acrylic, shaped cape or covering, with a printed design. Others, including Robert Downey, Jr., thought this was the best way to go, and that there was surely a mesh or webbing that could be used, maybe the color of each horse’s coat, that would make the designs look well integrated and completely organic to the horse.
Then we had to have all over again the argument about using shapes that were too much like trademarked logos and images. And someone asked how we could possibly have an apple design that did NOT look like an existing apple design. So I explained that there were a lot of things to take into account, like the resources and likelihood of suing of the owners of the trademarked designs, as well as whether or not the owner dealt in horses, entertainment, and other related fields. I got hired to do the research, come up with design options, and present them to this panel for decision. What a huge job for someone right out of college!
I already had an office space lined up that I was leasing for freelance work now that my internship was done. I headed over there to put the horse designs on my to-do whiteboard. I wanted to consult the attorney who had the corner office, but he was headed out for the weekend. He promised we could talk in the coming week. There wasn’t room on my whiteboard for this next item, but my office mate, who was packing up, had a box of hardware fasteners of all shapes and sizes, including little round plackets with holes that could look like e’s and g’s and d’s. I asked if I could have them and he said it was one less thing for him to carry out. I lined up the little metal bits along the eraser holder at the bottom of my whiteboard, spelling out, as close as I could get, the words, “horse designs”.
As I was putting together this note to me, my former office-mate and I got into a discussion about the end of the world. We decided that there would probably be two main factions, at least in America. There would be the people saying we just all needed to keep up our hopes and keep looking for a solution, rationally speaking, and the people saying we were all going to die anyway, rationally speaking, and should commit mass suicide to avoid the long, painful lingering. I said that I figured that, we Americans being ourselves, each group would claim not only the rational, but also the moral high ground, and would think the other group were nothing but selfish, wrong-headed, evil people who deserved what they got.
Then I said, but you know, I don’t think it would be all about rationality. I think that it would also be a lot about innate physical and biological imperatives, like… the will to live. Because I thought that, from a rational standpoint, I’d probably be among the “earth is better off without humans and we’ve mucked this up too much to fix it and the fastest way to a stable and sustainable planetary ecosystem was no more humans” folks… BUT… fundamentally, at a gut level, I want to live. I enjoy living. I value breathing for no really good rational reason. So I figure yeah, both camps would feel that pull, and those who refused suicide would rationalize against it and find the others crazy and selfish for not committing to stay and fix the problem, and those who chose suicide would rationalize against their biological imperative to exist, and find the others crazy and selfish for not choosing to stop being the problem. And then we began discussing how many people would have to choose suicide for the rest to be able to fix the human problem and not make the decision and sacrifice of their fellow humans all for nothing… And that got too deep, so I decided I needed to go to the bathroom.
The office bathroom had two toilets, but no stalls. And the mother of a friend of mine was in there washing her hands, so I was chatting with her and waiting for her to leave so I could lock the door. Finally she did, but then I realized there was no toilet paper. But when I tried to open the bathroom door so I could go get some from the supply cupboard, the bathroom had been locked from the outside by the attorney, who had just left… and taken the key with him. And then I woke up.
