A SOME-WEEKS-AGO DREAM:

China. The lands are owned by the political philosopher John Rawls. Cliffs, a quarry, almost a chasm, dropping down, me and family members at this stage walking the edge of it. The ocean not far off. We sit down to lace a shoe or chat or something on a rock. A sense of excitement, fear, something wrong perhaps. Then it's the grey gameshow arena. Conrete. Desks tiered, ranged round in a semi-circle. Perhaps there are hidden cameras. It's a gameshow. Very Mao, but modern. Dark grey. Here's how the game works: when it's your turn and you're ready you press your buzzer from your audience desk and the two opera singers, both Chinese and painted in ancient Oriental style, go careening warbling out into the centre of the space, turning about gesturing and warbling the high-pitched opera. When you've guessed what it is they're warbling, you press the buzzer. NB: the militia come in if you're not up to scratch, with machine guns.

Then you're in the holiday place. Up on stilts, perhaps. There's a verandah. The place could use a sweep or something. You're camped out there with your uni friends. You weren't expecting somethign so domestic. But there's no furniture. It's cold. It's funny how the ocean comes almost right up to the front steps, the verandah, the door. That's Julie's handbag getting washed away down there! She left it on the sand, who'd have known the tide would come in like that? Was that a little dog just now in a blur?

Something's wrong. There were war crimes in the quarry, or something. And what's with Rawls being a big landholder here? That seems dark.

But then, you're the singer. You're in the mall, you're with Rhonda. You're wearing a ball gown - I think it's royal blue. You head towards the dingy supermarket. You pass the opera singers. Their are two soloists, and then behind them, two or three people provide the choir, the chorus, only there's so few of them, and they turn around and sing down the empty lift shaft because the reverb fills out the sound so they sound more like a real choir. George Torbay is conducting. You reel - you jump the fence that fronts the supermarket - it's metal - then you're inside. You head for the foriegn foods, I think, section. There they are - the mushrooms. Cut in quarters. Each quarter is the size of an LP. Fucking huge mushrooms they must have been, fresh and whole. They're dried, of course. In their compartment.

Up on the nearby shelf: the canned weetbix. With milk.

Yes, it does seem as if, with this dream, you are mocking yourself. If only you'd get it!

LAST NIGHT:

Maybe the building was drowning. A hotel I think, the four of us, the family, staying in one room and we saw a dad and daughter from a neighbouring room going out now and then on the balcony looking over the sea. I don't know, anyway we had to keep going down the grey brick chute and the black meerkat cartoons were hitting each other over the head with their paddles with cartoon whacks, flattening the flat tops of each others cartoon heads. We went up the dark chut the other side, came out, went down again, Kit and I. At the bottom, the next time, there was the cartoon warthog. It chased us like a minotaur, reddish, bullying, and we were terrified and somehow we got up the chute slammed a cubicle door on it, I don't know, I felt hearbeat terrified, and then, up top, guilty sad - maybe we drowned it.

There was something also to do with a hospital bed and a very high ceiling in a huge gallery-white room with some hint of green, and all of us girls in our nighties.

found in old scrawlings during cleanup:

"in a way, it was rape. i mean, i consented to sex. but i didn't consent to it being so BAD!"

&

there's no such thing as fiction. only history in disguise.

&

i should go home and dig into the mulch mound of homework and so on instead of leaving it to compost.