In last night's dreaming, a Hollywood version of a Voodoo-esque ceremony, a man pulling an endless string of t-shirts in many colors--like a magic trick, except he'd stolen them--from his pants, using a rigged up gear and pulley system, and a wedding.

I guess it was romantic comedy night. Sort of. It was all very entertaining.
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Pulmonary function test yesterday; according to the tech, at least, I haven't lost too much more additional capacity since the last test (due to scarring and tissue thickening from the scleroderma). So, uh, yay! It's a weird series of tests, if you've never had a PFT, and makes me dizzy and my lungs ache.
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Three things I recced made it onto the final Nebula ballot, so I'm pretty pleased about that.
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Finished Kathe Koje's Under the Poppy and really enjoyed it; her writing is so very fine, and the characters move into good places from hard ones, and puppets! Puppets are love. It's apparently being adapted for the stage, a show I want to see.

Then, for an abrupt change of pace, I read Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot, after a 50 page preview online hooked me; a fun, fast read.

Now: Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death.

Dreamed last night that a kitten, a scrappy little black one, climbed up onto the bed and joined Aristotle and me in slumberous cuddle. The dream was so real I tried to wake up to call out and see if my neighbor B was there and was the one responsible for bringing the little guy over.

Dreamed I was at some sprawling writers' conference/workshop/retreat and one of the things was a 'give up your words' challenge. I didn't want to do it, but was cajoled and gave in. In the way of dreams, the rules and mode were understood, but never articulated. Most of the writers (all younger than me) did little films full of evocative images. One older woman did a kind of q&a in which she answered questions without using words, charade style--except no one asked anything, so she never left her chair. Watching the various lovely little films, I was dismayed at my own lack of preparation, but filled with things I could have done if I'd felt like dragging a lot of props along--put a beautiful scent on a scarf and waft it up and down to fill the room, pass around various tactile objects, use a fan and ice to fill the room with cold wind...

My brain maundered on about this for awhile after waking, on the way in which we use writing to conjure the simple magic of the everyday--food, touching--that another thing one could do in such a challenge would be to take liberties that would be too intimate outside the bounds of words, go around kissing people on their bellies, for instance, or tickling the backs of their necks. Writing a story, bringing a person into a narrative is, thereby, a very intimate act (my half-asleep brain said).

Rich time in the dreaming last night; spent all the dreamtime in this old curiosity shop, telling story to myself, one big story, about the objects, while playing out  a story with the owner and the place as I did. The tiny doll of a burlesque dancer, in tattered, sparkly pink, the shadowed painting of three women in white, the central arrangement of antique red velvet and dark wood settee and chairs that the young man who is the most current owner tells me is known as the "well." You haven't really settled into/been accepted by the store until you sell the well, but the person who buys it always pays the $500, says they'll be back to pick it up, and never returns for it. And then there's the old notebook, which I am remaking, in vivid colors, as a new book, full of story. And the story the objects are telling me, and the one the owner and I are in, are both so amazing.

And at the end of the day, potluck dinner with the employees, and it rains outside, and the story is glorious.

Really didn't want to wake up.

Appearances were made by Bette Midler and (older male actor whose name I can't remember); Ms. Midler was crocheting a costume beard and yeshiva locks from her own hair. There were also a whole party of people in an apartment (male and female, gay and straight) having a general circle jerk, and a plan being floated to bring back the wild abandon of a Pan/Dionysus reign in Williamson County (but I live in Travis County, I kept thinking)...

More than enough said, perhaps.

I mean, really.

N&C and the kids came over last night; we used the lofts grill, the kids ran all around the grounds like a three-short-person army of destruction (why don't we toss the hula hoops up and hit the light globes in the pavilion, that are so high up some of us never would have guessed they were even in danger); then we all sat on my little balcony and watched both the city fireworks and all the various neighborhood shows as well. It was nice. Plus N made pecan pie from pecans the kids shelled.

Had my echo cardiogram last week; always cool to see the ultrasound of my heart.

Things in the dreaming last night included two tiny kittens I was watching for a friend, which turned out to be the nymph stage of a strange bug, when they suddenly began splitting again and again by process of mitosis into even tinier bugs, bugs with more than a passing resemblance to insect-sized kittens, but with insectoid accoutrement. I was mostly worried how I was going to explain to my friend what had happened to the kittens.

I blame this on planetalyx's picture post of baby globe spiders and our conversation in the comments about the snuggliness of same.

 

Having such a weird day, physiologically, today; feel dizzy and somewhat surreally disconnected from everything, with a headache trying to verge into being, but not quite coming (thankfully). And just...weird.

Had weird prolonged dreamage last night, too, in which an evil fay had gotten into the house where I was staying with my sister/not really my real, but sort of my real sister and my mother and her husband (sort of). In order to contain the evil fay being—a wizened, nasty man-thing with lascivious wiles and agenda—at bay/contained, sister/notsister and I had to wet our hands in the rain outside repeatedly and go around touching all the doorknobs (there were a lot of them) on doors while saying a little spell in our heads on each one. Which we did, but somehow the fay still managed to get into my sister’s room and affect a changeling switch with her/me (it wasn’t clear which one of us, or, rather, it kept switching off between us)…vaguely disturbing, that.

And I’m sleepy and I don’t want to be here and I’m tired of editing the endless ass document I’m currently editing.

And I feel weird, did I say?

In L.A., I run into my friend D, who I've known for oh so very many years, but he looks like he looked when I first met him; he's holding a very lovely little babe, the child of other friends of ours; he takes me and a posse of other folks to visit this artist, who has a sort of touring installation set up. It starts in an old trailer, of Silver Stream extraction. Here, in decrepit environs, he has a bunch of freezers with glass doors set up. There is much thick frost surrounding little acquarium pieces in which odd things like half-decomposed foods, meat, veggies, soggy bread, have been arted up and then frozen. It's very strangely beautiful, but what I say, when one particularly large, magnificent acquarium of frozen foodly art is taken out to display, is "jeez, don't let it defrost." (ants crawling on it already, apparently impervious to the freeze-iness, and I can only imagine the smell should melt occur)

This is only the beginning of the art of this mysterious man (he looks like a skinny santa in soberly-toned day off clothes); in the trailer we also see all these clothes he's handmade, in fashions as strange and strangely beautiful as the frozen art. Then we discover that the trailer is only the front of a large, rambling complex, rather like an ultra expensive hotel in another, somewhat grotty and freakish, dimension. There is a ladies room, large and tiled in small square blue tiles, peeling, and distressed, giving the feeling that the room once used to be a pool, long ago. The light sconces are half submerged in the walls. What seems an automaton of a woman rests in a crab like position at one wall; she looks exotic and barbaric, and seems to have a malfunction, as she periodically shudders and jerks as if her servos were fucked. Then she crabs across the floor to a large round divan. As she does, her toe rings get caught in my pinky ring and in the process of getting us seperated, she reveals herself to be, in fact, a performer pretending to be a messed up automaton. She smiles, somewhat abashedly and conspiratorially at me and my companions.

Then there is a hall at the end of which is a set of windows, that appear to be very small because a parrot perches on the sill and fills the window, but as we get closer, we see it is a giant parrot, giant and green and part of a flock of other giant parrots. There are other performers, all very artfully made up as strange beings and things.

In the course of all of this I am thinking about how I will write about if for lj (as I sometimes do when out in the actual world seeing actual things); I even do a series of illustrations of all of the above, which come out very well, considering I can't draw at all.

Last, we return to the trailer where the artist has tables set up with materials similar to those he uses (soggy breads, soaking and unidentifed bits of sealife, crystals, pigments made from god knows what...) and we all attempt some art. I very intently squish balls of softened sealife of some sort into a paste/pigment and work them onto a rough peach and gold crystal, but it's not a success...

However, it was a hugely entertaining dream.