Saturday, November 3, 2018

Take My Hand, We're Off to Never Neverland

Stuffed Japanese Yams
Fall is as pretty as spring and just as fleeting.  I thought it was starting very late but it turns out the first week of November is right on time for this area.  After all the leaves fall off the trees in the coming months, this colorful time feels like a dream.  Not my dreams mind you.  My dreams are creepy and dark.  I have many a recurring and some are for the books.  I have a house that lives somewhere in my slumbered mind complete with back rooms that keep going for blocks in every direction.  There is a blocked off entrance to separate this desolate area of the never ending building complete with furnished bedrooms, kitchens, offices, hallways, windows that look out onto empty space all interconnecting and endless in every direction.  After some wandering, there is often evidence of someone lurking there suddenly and then it becomes a rush to find my way back through the maze, running frantically back to the safety of the living room of my first apartment in my mom and dad's house.  I might stop in a bedroom with the feeling of someone living there that is loving and I'll feel momentarily protected. Doilies on the nightstand, a cigarette burning in the ashtray.  Signs that person was just there but we never pass.  Sometimes I see a barely visible shadow just out of the corner of my eye.  Last night, I never made it out of that living room or through the boarded up entrance.  Instead the normally still space itself turned into a wet carpeted, feces filled disgusting room that I had to maneuver through. There were mic stands and lots of coiled wires.  How did it get this way?  I remember thinking I knew it was getting bad but didn't realize how much.  But apparently this was not the plot.  The dream was centered around the fact that the neighbors who are my real neighbors here in Brooklyn, rented the downstairs of my family's second home on Webster Street, the one with the bizarre portal entrance.  They came home and found me asleep on the floor in one of their rooms, which was actually my mom and dad's bedroom at one point in real life.  When I awoke still in the dream, I was also very surprised to be downstairs and not in my own flat upstairs.  I was on the floor between the dresser and the bed.  That back room had it's own entrance and was often very cold as it was right then laying on the floor.  Cold like winter.  I heard them talking about me in the other room and the wife asking if this has ever happened before to her husband.  All the while I pretended to stay asleep because I was embarrassed to be there.  Then when no one was looking, I crept up the back stairwell to my own bed where P was awake and I had to tell him the story that I didn't even understand myself.  But not before walking through that horrible, revolting, stinky living room again. 




For breakfast we went to eat at Black Forest Brooklyn, hoping to have bit of a celebration seeing as P got a new job.  We had fun but were starving and my plate came about 10 minutes after P's and not before we had to beg the inexperienced but friendly waiter for it.  In the end, it was mediocre and we know better than to keep expecting excellence from this place but it's a few doors down and we like close.  They have great coffee.
But for dinner I matched the Fall colors with these stuffed Japanese yams and sweet potatoes.



No comments:

Post a Comment

Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone at home?