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April 27, 2003

Sunday Night Blues

To use Search Interests, you must have people in your Personal Network. There is no one in your network yet because you need to Add Friends.

These messages are from Friendster, an online friending service that I was not invited to by word of mouth. A guy I once had a drink with in a bar and have had several online drive-by conversations with - well he's on my blogroll but I'm not on his - was talking about it. So I checked it out. It hasn't helped me get through this evening.

I've got the Sunday Night Blues. That feeling of vague dissatisfaction with the weekend that you try to get rid of before you finally turn into bed. In especially bad cases, the nausea can extend back several years or even consume your parents lives as well. On the other hand it can all be erased in a moment by a 'What are you wearing?' phone call. I haven't had such a phone call since my prom, and then it wasn't even a girl calling.

Last night I had an extended set of nightmares. I woke up several times and went back to the same set. The second was mercifully quick but incredibly devastating. It involved my wife telling a busload of senior citizens bound for Las Vegas that she got HIV from the last man she dated before she married me. She kept referring to me in the third person as 'the man I tolerate now', as if I weren't there. That's something to make you snap to attention in a cold sweat.

The first nightmare involved a tour through an interminably huge housing development set in some hills above Atlanta called Factory City. There is no Factory City, thank God, but one who writes horror stories could imagine one up. It was concrete and vertical and had 500,000 residents. It clung to the mountainside like thousands of small apartment buildings all honeycombed and joined by flagstones and short walkways. Every cluster had a tiny courtyard and the whole city had the feeling of concrete treehouses. It was humid and jungly and when it wasn't raining, the drips continued. There were no streets or sidewalks, just stairways and a warren of passages from building to building to building. No ambulance could ever get in. People were robbed, raped and murdered in the courtyards and banistered outdoor halls. There were bodies of children and the elderly twisted face down in puddles under the banana trees and ferns and elephant ear plants in the courtyards. There were racial revenge killings everywhere, and mudslides constantly stained the stucco and spackle walls. Teens smoked in elevators and played mumbltey peg with switchblades into the same wet rotting cardboard boxes their younger brothers and sisters used to slide down the muddy slopes between buildings.

The reason this creation was fouling my dreams was certainly a product of the film 'Identity' that I watched last evening. I believe I am finally getting towards the age at which I cannot physically stomach pop culture, I know that to be true of most candy and all gum. That remainds me, I'm going to pour myself a glass of whiskey, don't go 'way.

I was trapped in Factory City trying to find my way out listening to the AM radio news. The broadcasters reported snippets of clues from various murders which may or may not be connected and they were all flashing through my mind in the darkness and drizzle of the concrete honeycombs. I was supposed to have a clue but I couldn't remember. I kept going around in dreary circles stepping over puddles of bloody mud. The maze had no escape, rusty handrails led every direction but out. The words of the killers kept being broadcast until I couls play the whole scene. And then it came to me - I saw the entire thing. Now I was reliving last weeks episode of Law & Order.

I purchased one book at the Festival of Books at UCLA. I was profiled as the black father in both of my conversations. A recent graduate of Morehouse with a 200 watt smile and a muscle shirt sold me a laminated poem about black mothers and the universe. A man with gold rim glasses and a pale blue oxford shirt sold me a book of 1000 questions to ask your children. His examples: 'Does having different color skin make me stupid' and 'What do you do if somebody hits you?'. I patronized them right back, I suppose.

Yesterday we wound up in Rancho Palos Verdes for the flick. I'd never been to the bad side of RPV. If you would have asked me, I wouldn't have known there was one. The Marie Callendars didn't even serve booze. Another telephone pole neighborhood with green haired youth outside the liquor store. We saw the murder mystery in what is certainly Southern California's last first run flick without stadium seating. Here's what you do when somebody sits in front of you in an empty theatre. Talk angrily about what you did last time that happened. Whether or not it did.

I'm a grouchy old Episcopalian tonight. But the whiskey's good.

Posted by mbowen at April 27, 2003 09:31 PM

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Comments

Posted by: George at April 27, 2003 10:37 PM