Apparition Commission

A few days prior to the just-posted apparition (a low-grade hallucination while in a bar, just after the Bookslut/Stop Smiling reading with Nick Bertozzi and Austin Grossman... I think the television was showing a commercial for an upcoming broadcast of the movie "Das Boot," but that may be a mistaken perception itself), I was commissioned for a drawing, with the unspecific instructions that the art be whatever came to mind. I considered a few images, had two false starts, but decided ultimately to bring this one to completion. (Though, in the end, the person commissioning the piece opted for a different piece of art entirely; fine by me, as I had grown to like this one and was glad to keep it for a while.)

I removed the wire (mentioned in the original note in my sketchbook), because, well, it just seemed too practical. I wanted this scene, to the non-submerged walker, to be almost mundane, though that removes the subtle paranoia the protagonist in the original note was feeling. Ah well. You can't have it all.

Apparition 3: June 27, 2007

I looked to the television screen.
I saw the man in the navy issued trench coat.
The pouring rain pelted the man as he walked on the bubbling surface of a thousand heads, just submerged.

He held a wire for balance lest he become one of those foot holds

Apparition 2: December 3, 2004

Dustin Hoffman/Mat says, "Wow, you're not lost in your perception, are you? You really ARE your perception."

(He said this outside the back of the storage house in which we were all staying. It was a weekend long experiment on sleep deprivation. I think it started as a comic book I was reading in the dream, but the expanded, became the reality of the dream.)

"I want to talk about that, what you just said," I told him, "but this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen." I nodded to the source of my amazement.

The water was a muddy green/teal, and the flowers to the right were the most vibrant reds and hot pinks. Beyond this, in the water, was what appeared at first to be a unicorn, but was actually a horse – white, with very sparse, very light gray spots – with its mane spiked straight, impossibly vertical, as I've seen in the appearance of certain show horses. At first he was alone.

Then, as if in slow motion, we realized he was running in out direction, with a pack of horses, of similar size and presence, trailing behind. We recognized these to be the wild horses of this area, an ancient, massive breed we would later refer to as "The Tyrannosaurus of Horses." Natives – oddly pale olive colored – walked and ran with these horses.

We pressed ourselves against the barn/house to be out of their way, but I couldn’t resist reaching out my hand and grazing one of their flanks as they passed. I was afraid somehow I would infect or destroy them, as they seemed magical in their anachronism, and somehow fragile to the poison of modern things.

One of the horses stopped, as did one of the natives, and I felt instantly guilty. The horse was ill. But its illness was independent of my intrusion; I was not to blame.

We immediately slid open the barn (the “basement” of this house was a sprawling dirt floor barn that was featured in another dream I had about my sisters and me rebuilding the basement of our parents’ house) and the native and the horse came inside. The horse laid down to rest and I spoke with the native, who said the horse was young – despite being already far larger than a normal horse – and would grow much larger, each of its legs being seven feet long.

He said they would rest here a while and catch up with the others. I didn’t stay long enough to see them leave.

Apparition 1: (date unrecorded)

We were sitting in a field populated by marshmallow peeps with Rottweiler heads.

Later, still in this universe, I was recalling it to (a person).

(A person) : "Was it scary? Or cute?"
Me: "Sort of tense, but beautiful."

The description satisfied us both, then we left that world.

Sightings and Apparitions

A few days ago I woke up to a phone call. It was my younger sister. Her opening line was, "Are you okay?" I replied that yes, sure, I was fine. Why?

"We thought you'd finally lost your mind."

She was referring to a message I had left, in a purposely rasping, meandering croak, where I read aloud the entire front label of a Nature's Crystal water bottle. The gravel of my affected voice was sufficient, that, when combined with the distortion of an answering machine, they had absolutely no idea what I was going on about. "Crystals? Something about milliliters? What?"

Of course, the plan had been to leave a coherent tail to the message, but I was cut off in the play portion, and, laughing hysterically at what I thought would be a great (but understandable) message, I left it truncated.

All of this misunderstanding, and the fact that I'd received a call half presuming my final collapse into full insanity reminded me that , hey, sometimes my skull can be just as much nonsensical fun with the eye parts of the head open as it can with the eye parts closed.

And this reminded me that I'd been intending to start a couple themes in this blog: sightings and apparitions. Or more physiologically: eyes opened and eyes closed. Or more exactly: probably really saw it and saw it but not so much in the "really" way.

Some of these will be cuddly stories I've come across on the way to wherever I'm heading. Some of these will be percolating bog dwellers from sleep. But either way, why not give them a home? Here's to more phone calls.