eight rows gone

so plenty of time, in summer they run wild with their line

he grows back, casts the first stone

come someone and go somewhere they find

I count crimes, absinthe and lime, a pound and a penny and climb.

You can’t grow back what has no fall and fast they run when have no tell your burying ways in gradual clime as chattering things come wild in behind and pouring the way over water and fall in the idolators day and the christians’ call how many were found and lost in that fall.

And late last night or early this morning, Daimian had a chainsaw for one hand, waving it about and cutting things off including himself in a very upsetting but not life-threatening way.  A restaurant, health food, a painting, ah?  Or none of those fragments except the persisting thought that I ought to tell Daimian about that chainsaw.

I dreamt of a madcap ride from the meeting room to the computer lab, atop a rolling condiment stand and bench with overhead scaffolding,

all of this after making the last minute call for everyone to come back to attention so I could tell them where to go next and what to do in between.

I dreamt of a perfect sentence.

Each word conveyed specific and precise information. There was nothing excessive or redundant. To change any word, even to rephrase, would change the articulated content. It was something to do with odds. “The mason’s odds become more readable with each wrong choice,” or words to that effect but not those, not really. Something about odds, and a collection of safe but wrong options, a right one, and some dangerous ones.

Dreams from the latter cusp of self-disappointment

Dinner at a hippie/healthfood restaurant (Cafe Gratitude but up a hill in a Santa Cruz sandwich shop way) in one of the hillside neighborhoods I dream of that don’t quite map to any actual place. A little Rockridge, a little East Grand/Wildwood…

though can’t through

sort by now and with though from have cut through then and half by white

old can win as walk past twice how they came forth as night began light

eight in doubt and twine for rope caught down under firing pain

those on shelf in write and ray made hope before that gain

as both instead of rock for now

the time we have to leave or play.

Back at Bar 717 for a visit, K was typically cold while walking around with an inspector, and I waved at the usual folks and said hello to some kids and explained to the old friend whose girlfriend I’d just slept with that (even though he didn’t want to hear anything like this from me) I wasn’t trying to compete with him, and that he was at a crux now and had to decide whether he wanted to go the distance with her.  He left and the other fellow there told me it was a crock, what was I talking about, and was just about to explain how anger clouds or skews my perspective when the alarm went off for the second time, or perhaps the third.

I did not respond to what I did not receive.

There’s an envelope of evals in the corner of the room that I’ll crack open and read, as soon as I get my clipboard in order to start tracking the day and figure out what to do with this bounty of free time.

I didn’t go to camp and I didn’t get the text from the poet saying it was alright to call and I didn’t give myself time to shave my face or head yet and I didn’t say goodbye to my neighbor but now I’m thinking about taking over her apartment.

I checked myself right out from large chunks of the weekend with Jennifer, for lack of getting on to the things I had planned for myself. Now it’s Monday morning catch-up like usual, except that I really do have some time and space to play the game and make up the lengths.

I wore my beach-bum outfit and garnered a few comments; the 7-11 coffee rounds out the look quite well.

Saturday night I dreamt that I smoked pot for the first time in years. It tasted sticky sweet at the back of my throat, and I felt the bubbling consciousness of marijuana high, and the gladness of returning to it, mixed with the regret of letting my streak of sober years slip away. “I need to go to a meeting,” I thought. And I thought of that dream last night, as I trawled through unincorporated Richmond looking for KFC, listening to NPR.

That crazy junk heap of a truck that I piled all of the staff into?

The one with engine trouble, stranded out there on the rickety pier,

Diesel fuel internal combustion engine on top of a hundred or so splintering, rotten two-by-fours,

All on the verge of collapse?

That might have been a premonition of yesterday, if at the end of the dream,

I’d taken a deep breath, checked my to-do list, asked for faith, said thank you to everybody,

And stood with them as we all got out and pushed.

One can only recall so much before eating burros and refried beans.

I had to yell at kids to get them to recognize that I was in a bad mood and not interested in their antics.
I sat one down on a bench, or a grassy bank, and tried to get her to open up,
But first I had to angrily shoo away others.
I took a phonecall at the phonebooth.
My uncle, telling me I had taken money from him, and we had to talk, because now he would have to do I-don’t-know-what, he began wheezing, and Linda was cackling and whining in the background.

The Admin team all piled in to drive down for a conference, or to see a model school?
We got turned around in San Francisco and ended up at a private preschool, like Redwood Day,
Ms. Macabee was playing with a couple kid in the side yard,
Which the kids steered us over towards with calls of “free parking.”

She did not acknowledge my little hand wave.
We disembarked and all of my bags were unceremoniously laid on the kitchen counter. I hadn’t asked for that and knew it was a favor that would cause me problems.
We drove down in more than one car. Mine was one that made the trip though I hadn’t driven it. But that was good because now everyone else had left, and the pre-school staff had gone upstairs to bed, and I was left to root through my bags, finding old index cards and other stashes of packrat things, all in my big mountain backpack with contraptions in it.
I helped myself to some candy on the counter, and considered leaving behind some change.

The lights were on, and the fan, and I was concerned about waking the preschool staff and having to explain myself.

The last honest cyberpunk pawnbroker in a world of zombies

I watched large chunks of Shaun of the Dead and Johnny Mnemonic last night.
Both seeped into my dreams.
They mixed with the New York Times article on Phillips Morris’ pursuit of tobacco regulation,
Stirred by the general atmosphere of discontent surrounding my mother and brother’s spat throughout the Father’s Day weekend,
And I spent a great deal of time as the Henry Rollins character, trying to get my head around the ethical delivery of repairing cyberspace headsets for the living dead. Or something to that effect.

Today’s heartfelt desire, not made manifest through myspace email wish fulfilling forwards or sigil work: To create a consensus around leadership principles among the teaching staff today, and buy time to ready the full teaching schedule for tomorrow.