Saturday, August 30, 2008

My dad was ailing and yet he was driving somewhere with my brother and me in the car. At a certain point he became incapacitated - not exactly unconscious, but suddenly unable to operate the car. I reached over from the back seat and did my best to steer us to safety, asking my brother to step on the brakes. We managed to pull off the road into a strip mall parking lot in our old hometown, Storrs, Connecticut.

We were indoors suddenly, with other people around us. My dad was slipping in and out of some kind of trance-like, near-death state. Someone asked him, "What's teap?"

"It's peach-flavored tea," he replied authoritatively. I viewed this as a sign that his mental faculties were still strong.

Then he began to describe a fancy dish he'd had, or seen, or was anticipating eating, which consisted of five kinds of small shellfish impaled on the spokes of a kind of radiating fork. He called this dish the "hand of god." My sister-in-law Amy was there and immediately corrected him, saying that in fact "the hand of god" was a phrase used to describe a controversial soccer goal scored by the Argentine player Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup against England, in which he deflected a ball into the goal with his hand.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

I dreamt I saw a drone up in the sky. This was the night after I think I saw one in real life. In the dream it was darker but still small, jagged-looking. It flew lower and lower and closer and closer to me - it seemed that it knew I was watching it, or knew I was thinking about it, and this compelled it to come closer. I was afraid and rueful that I'd dared to notice it at all. It made a few harassing passes, a bit like a bee. When it was a few feet from my face it opened a mechanized mouth full of arrowhead-shaped metal teeth. I was terrified it would bite me of course, but when it didn't it occurred to me that its purpose was to open my third eye. It hovered right above my forehead and somehow coaxed my third eye from the middle of my brow. When it opened the drone placed a contact lens in it.