I had an amazing dream last night in which I was on the phone in a friend’s incomplete, under renovation house. I was speaking to Scott Colburn and Joey and Johnny Ramone on the telephone, when enormous hailstones began to fall from the skies outside. I got off the phone and rushed to grab my new camera, which at first was a digital Leica and then became a D70. By the time I’d rounded up a memory card and figured out that the camera’s battery was not fully charged, the hail had shrunk in size to a fine mist, a slurry of water and ice, which blanketed the landscape to a depth of three inches, but which was rapidly melting.
A couple days ago I dreamt I was driving around the perimeter of the site of the Seattle World’s Fair of 1932, which had been unaccountably abandonded for many years. The muscly art-deco buildings were proudly incised with cheerful bombast such as “A SEA OF TOURISTS AWAITS THE FUTURE VISTA” and “LET US GO FORTH AND MINE OUR FELLOW MAN,” but the cheap concrete surface of the stubby towers flaked with age, the white paint peeling in strips.
Broken windows and twisted frames drooped like the eyelids of a dead man. Around the base of the buildings, baking in a noon sun, weeds, rippled asphalt, heaving slabs. Debris festooned the empty lots behind rusted chainlink fences.