Talking Baby Lizards

Last night's dream was over a dozen people crowded onto every available piece of furniture in Chet's apartment, drinking wine from glasses and mugs and jars, watching Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness as projected onto the room's white wall, a bedsheet nailed up over the drape-less window to block the light from the streetlamp outside. A Czech astrophysics student declared the occasion not a "movie night" but a "film salon," printed copies of an essay about Herzog and handed them out to those assembled. After the movie, we sat around Chet's floor to and wrote an exquisite corpse-type story about a badminton-playing dog with thumb implants. Then we climbed through Chet's roommate's window, up five stories of fire escape stairs, which were missing many rungs, and a ladder which slanted precariously away from the side of the brick building, to a vertiginous rooftop where I sat on a ledge with kids whom I'd only met hours before for a long-exposure group photo with the Mt. Vernon Methodist steeple in the background and the city's ember ocean below. It's alright, this drifting in and out of people's lives, meeting people on a regular basis but only barely remembering them, making reserved, minimal, but hopefully positive, conversation, and excusing myself early, after running out of the few things I have to say, before everyone gets too drunk and self-involved.

Actually, no, all that actually happened. What I really dreamt last night was that I was on acid. The trees all changed color. Maybe it was a metaphor for autumn. Autumn has, traditionally, been hope, as I told Maria today when I called to wish her a happy birthday.