ChernHaven

When I got up Thursday it was Friday. It had been another strange and overly extensive day into night’s sleep. Before, I’d already stayed up a bit too long and whiskeyed a bit and was more than prepared to fall out of it when there was a last minute turn and I decided to do what needed to be done instead. So then came further hours of getting stuff ready to go to the post office, walking down there and a side-trip to a store where I bought and consumed things which I should have not. After the staying up, stayed down a sleep-and-a-half in penance; waking briefly for visits from the cat, too impatient with me to stay in my arms, and a surprising explosion from the sky followed by reassuring water fall. Maybe there were some other memorable but forgotten interruptions, but still little indication from my waking mind that it would ever wish to re-enlist.

Toward the end there was one of those long, connected, maybe lucid dreams in a place with diverse enough areas and people to seem to justify the many chapters and themes. Unfortunately, I was once again unwilling or unable to get up after, and the details and connections are eroding and wafting away.

The event was outside at first, a festival of some sort I guess as there were booths and exhibits. In front of the booth where I was, which no doubt had something to do with African-American, and perhaps Jewish-American, cultural history there was an “amusement” of some sort, a game or ride, involving a tall pole. There seemed to be a reference to lynching, a “heritage” thing I guess, and its position right in front of us felt like an intentional provocation. Frustration. Leaving for awhile. Return as things were winding down and some conversation about whether anyone had done something, or why we/I couldn’t. “Well, anyway, they are gone and we are still here, so perhaps…”, she said.

Then it was inside, after-party with many people in The Lodge. Although, there was some kind of overlapping with my place. For, in discussion with someone about my extensive incomplete and undistributed works, as I was trying to explain about how I had been a visual artist as well as songster and writer, I was pointing out that the works on the wall didn’t include any of my best prints, but there were some upstairs I might be able to root out. From nearby a confident-looking gentleman, a solid well-groomed fellow with dark hair, sidled into the conversation. He said he had heard enough to know that I had something, but that I was in need of representation. I allowed that that may be true, and he assured me that he was the man for the job and knew how to begin our business. I was all for it.

It is at this point that I began to have a recurring problem with understanding the other characters’ words. I couldn’t tell whether it was because the noise of the event was making it hard to distinguish, or they were actually using words which I did not know. However, since the confident dark man seemed to be going into academic and Arts catch-phrases of some sort it may have been the latter in this conversation. He started right out with something like, “So, you write Shakespearian <insert Latinesque neologism>s which can be related to <more gobbledy-gook> and for which there is a market in <who-the-fuck-knows>…

I interrupted with frustration (and some yelling, I suppose), to object that, no, I don’t. I had merely made some passing reference to a one-off sonnet, and that all I really do is (generally odd) songs and drawings. He walked off in disgust.

Then I was sitting in a corner next to some stairs, from under which people occasionally crawled out of a door. Someone had witnessed the encounter with the salesman and said that they had noticed his mask. It was a party, so I suppose there may have been masks, but I had not seen him in one. They said, “It was his smile. It is the mask of The Devil.”

Then from the stair-door emerged a lovely young woman who I thought was someone I know (unlike most of the nice helpful women I encounter in these places, who I don’t recognize.) She was talking of someplace I could possibly go and take refuge. A room, or maybe a box. I picture a pillar in the middle somewhere. That it would be alright if I stayed to this one side where the water hadn’t reached yet. But, I couldn’t make out what her word for this place was, and some other details. I kept asking her to repeat it, and she did. But I had to say, “sorry, I’m still not getting it.” After awhile she went off to other things, but leaving some hope that we were going to be getting together later.

The last thing I remember is doing some washing-up with some other women whose words of encouragement I cannot recall. The surfactants in the tub seemed to be working well for them in clearing off the dishes, but I was left struggling with scrubbing at some small utensils whose tiny nooks and crannies, curves and corners, held onto globs of grease.