Saturday, 2 April 2011

Bad Hair

    I dream this again: a slight scratch of cough, something discreet-ish, behind a napkin. It's a restaurant, I don't know which one. I mean, I don't know if it's a restaurant that exists outside of this dream. It seems really expensive. I cough again and it's like - inhaling the fumes from dry frying chillies or burning tyres. My eyes water and it's becoming embarrassing,even though I know it's a dream. K's sister pats me on the shoulder reassuringly.
    I can feel something lodged in my throat, or just beyond my throat and this thing needs to go somewhere, up or down. I push two fingers as far inside my neck as I can and this makes me retch fruitlessly a couple of times. The third time the tips of my fingers brush against this thing, this foreign object or it's tail at least. I try to grasp it between the two fingers, make this confined scissor motion, but that feels freaky and kind of sexual. It's useless anyway, I can't get a hold so I try to force it further up with these rhythmic muscle spasms. Whoa, I'm thinking, this is some heavy psychoanalytically significant kind of dream, isn't it? Now it's in a place where I can fix this tail-like wisp between the fingers enough to start pulling and it feels huge. Because it's a dream I'm expecting some real Gothic monstrosity - a decaying rat, a very deformed foetus - but it's just like, hair matted together with some gooey grey substance. Like the stuff you have to pull out of a plug hole when it gets blocked. Yeah, kind of gross, but not that scary. I keep pulling and it's wrapped around a bunch of complicated flesh stuff that I guess are my internal organs, or some of them. It's a sizable, messed up pile on the restaurant floor and I feel much better, kind of light and empty, with a sense of mission accomplished.
    I wake up then and notice I've thrown up on the floor next to the mattress and a little over my right arm. I take my t-shirt off and use it like a wash cloth. Then I face the other way and go back to sleep pretty swiftly. I don't dream anything else, or if I do, I don't remember it.

    When I wake up again I'm thirsty and my throat hurts some. I drink three glasses of water from the tap. The place where my tooth was aches from the cold of it, it's like a phantom sensitive tooth. The cats sniff at the soiled shirt and the patch of whatever soaked into the carpet. I wet the shirt and rub at it half-heartedly, blot it with a magazine. They weave around kind of menacing with their tails straight up in the air, the tips twitch like signals. I tip something foul that's their regular breakfast into their bowls, before things get nasty. They're pleased enough, I guess. I pull on someones hoody I find on the back of a chair. It's white and a little too tight across the shoulders, short on my arms. I'm thinking: I probably should have washed or something, before wearing someone else's clothing. I'm thinking: this is an uncharacteristically impolite action. I sniff my arm, but it just smells bland and slightly unfamiliar. My housemate stumbles into the kitchen, bleary and morning-like, starts making coffee. She says "You look rough" I can't see myself but I explain it's because my things are white and ill-fitting, it makes me look like a patient, or a jumble-sale ghost. She frowns, holding the  coffee pot between us defensively. "Go back to bed" she says. But instead I watch these heat resonance cameras tracking the captive animals.Sip coffee while giraffes glow in patches, rhinoceros horns register blue and cold.
    Smoke two cigarettes laid flat back down on the table outside. The sky is this unreal thing, wide, colourless and empty. I fall asleep as two magpies try and rip the felt from the roof of a shed.

7 comments:

  1. I love your bad hair, i want to feel it flow through my fingers, wanna rub it between my palms, i also love your internal organs i want to feel them up in a sexual context.

    I'm from now on psychotic, and i don't know if this is who i truly was (unruly, erratic, dumbfuck) or if it's just another boring and attention-seeking persona.

    I love you.

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  2. Ah, hi Lou, I was wondering if you had done away with yourself for good when your latest blog disappeared again, or if I would see you again. Psychotic sounds good. Tell us how it works out. You seeing things or hearing things or something more esoteric? (I have full sensory hallucinations of spirit foxes, and I hear God speak to me.)
    Love the idea of feeling up Mischa's internal organs and getting off on it... it's probably impossible to get an arm through the larynx deep enough to use the stomache as an acid filled fatty glove to rub his heart and liver without killing him, eh? I wonder if a child with thin enough arms, just long enough for reach, could do it somehow, like the ultimate deep throating...

    Re: The Story. Another unexpectetly coherent and lucid one, not that I am complaining. Love it. The dream reminds me of the more hallucinatory passages from Japanese horror movies. The moment when the narrator tried to clean up the vomit with the T and goes back to sleep stands out to me as especially touching and sexy. And the brief mention of the female housemate has a very crystalizing effect, sucking me fully and entirely into the scene very suddenly and makes me want to know a lot more about her, but in a good curious and not frustating way. Perfect. The heat resonance cameras and giraffes (esp. the way the just sneak in unannounced) had me wonder if it was all just one continuous dream. The cats feel somehow unreal, too pat, as if they walked in Cheshire like from some adjacent fictional universe that operates on different narrative rules. The last paragraph is familiar ground again, if a bit exchangeable, like a ritual coda to some religious rite. Magpies again. Something decaying in your subconscious, or just too many secrets never to be told?

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  3. It's narrative laws, of course, not rules. And these customary codas actually feel less religious, now that I think about it, but more like the ritualized, careful blotting up of blood at the end of an deliciously shameful session of desperately erotic self-cutting.

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  4. FreeFox, I'm actually feeling kinda uncomfortable talking about changeling's organs without his presence...I honestly feel like a sell-out, like a traitor. Things are getting out of hand.i apologize.

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  5. @Lou: Pity. I was very comfortable. And why isn't he be present? This is his blog, innit?
    *shouts*: Yo! Mischa! You okay if we feel up your organs through your throat?!
    "...out of hand..." *snicker* you throw a wicked pun, my friend. ^_^
    Btw, who'd you sell out to? Me? What'd I pay you with?

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