Bits and pieces

Lots of little dream bits last night.

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I've trekked into unfamiliar territory, by car or by foot or by combination of both, to a building where a kind of informal committee resides, to try to apply for the zombie walk permit (this is something I'm in the middle of doing now in real life). I'm having to appeal to a group of elders to get approval. I tell them all about our plans, and the date (last Friday in April). They get a little iffy about it and point me to the CA's M section, where there's a story about Native Americans coming from all over to gather and pay their ancestors' respects downtown that day. I feel gross about hundreds of people lurching around as a zombies while people are spending the day mourning their ancestors, so it occurs to me that we might ought to move the date to the end of May. I find Sharon and Leah, two of my fellow organizers, and tell them what's up. They're really disappointed (Sharon rolls her eyes in a moment of Oh yeah, I think I knew about that!!!), and while I'm explaining what's going on, it occurs to me that it might not be a problem after all. I check the CA article and see that the bulk of the Native American ceremonies will take place around noon. Our march will be after six.

We breathe a sigh of relief.

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I find myself trying to get back to somewhere and being confronted with an ocean and a beach. I'm standing on a concrete landing, under a pavilion. I can either go back to wherever I'd come from, or go forward and inch along the side of a cinder-block building, against the angry waves of the ocean aggressively lapping at the side of the building. I imagine a swell of salty water and drowning there, trapped. So I go back the way I came.

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It's like I'm watching Flavor Flav's show. He's welcoming the camera into his crib in New Orleans (did I gank any of this from real life?). There's a butler at the door of a shotgun-style mansion (it is the definition of "ghetto fabulous") whose facade is an icky green color, with peeling paint and a cagey wrought-iron door. I get the feeling that Flav's house has been recovered after being mostly destroyed by Katrina. Inside, everything is damp and the walls are plaster and buckled and peeling. The long hallway runs parallel to some other hallway where a pulley system has been set up with all of Flav's clothes hanging on it. The clothes move along and he can choose what outfit he wants at the door at the end of the hall. I (or the camera?) make my way down the hall a bit longer before suddenly we're in Flav's dirt-floored basement and it feels like we're making a music video. Featuring zombies. Fucking zombies! That you can only see with night-vision goggles. It's exceedingly creepy. Luckily my brain does not supply any Flavor Flav musical stylings.

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I'm at a guy friend's house (I'll not mention him by name in case he reads this, so I'll call him Tom). It's actually probably his parents' house. It has a parents' house feel to it, even though no parents are to be found. We're having some sort of small gathering of friends. We're lounging around, watching TV (I'm on the floor), when Tom sort of scoots over to me and says something — god, I wish I could remember what it was — and then kind of nuzzles my neck and kisses me below my right ear, in that crook where you can, if you get close enough, tell easily enough if you have chemistry with a person. You know the crook I'm talking about. I get a little short of breath and feel slightly self-conscious in case others are watching, which they don't seem to be. He puts his cheek just near enough to my face that I can flutter my eyelashes against his lips. He smiles.

It's a sweet moment. He smells good.

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I'm on some kind of truckbed tour of something ... either a city or an event ... I can't quite explain, but it ends with us driving around this church where all the members are around, cloaked in red robes and holding burning crosses. There are also burning crosses used as torches on the side of the brick church. The people are singing and it's obvious that they see nothing wrong with what they're doing. I get prickly at this; why would they need to burn crosses? Don't they understand the racist implications of burning crosses, even if it's their stupid church tradition? I bitch loudly when the truck stops and I can get out and walk away. There are a lot of people in red robes (with hoods!), holding burning crosses. I can feel the heat from the group of them.