The Dream Of The Defenestrated Dog

This is from 26 December.

It was pretty much a gathering of everybody I know. I certainly felt like EVERYONE I knew was there, but I only got to interact/get in adventures with a few people.
All the action went down in or near a huge freaky old house. It was white. On the outside it was a larger version of what I've heard described as a crumbleshack, sort of leaning, maybe in the wind, and alone in a vast rural area. I didn't see it from the outside until later on. On the inside the place was very comfortable with bright windows and open space. At least two stories. Clean. Enough room for, it would seem, EVERYONE I knew.
The first person I definitely ran into was Jesse, who alerted me to her presence with great grace and ladylikeness and we had what I remember was a really wonderful reunion (having not seen each other in a long time), although I don't remember what was said or anything. I think the main point we both drove home was how long it had been.
My conversation with Jesse happened in the basement, and across the room Rob Grieve and Chelsea Very, who I'm sure have never met, were arguing with each other over who was better. I don't think at any one thing in particular. Just who was better. Rob asked for my help a few times, saying "Alev. Come on. I'm better right??" whereon Chelsea would sharply criticise Rob for saying my name wrong.
Paul Woida was also in the basement, and his new way to greet his friends was to lift them o'er his head like the Stanley Cup, and that's how he said hello to me. He had a t-shirt with ALGERNON written on it in large friendly letters.
I then headed upstairs where someone who I believe to be Rob Campeau was shouting "KISS ME!!!" with thespian passion at various guests. I haven't seen you in a while Rob so forgive me if this is all I could dream about.
In the large magnificent kitchen, Kyle Gardiner, Marcus Engel, and Lewis Longard were cooking up a likely incredible dish that I would guess might involve a blowtorch, Sriracha, and noodles, based on the brains involved. Maybe a spicy baked pasta dish! The three of them were having quite a time. But Marcus refused to use any kitchenware that wasn't gold. Lewis sang "Hoist That Rag" by Tom Waits, which I'm not sure he's ever heard.
I hear Paul Woida shout "ALEV COME PLAY WITH THE DOG!!!" from the gigantic sitting room on the same floor. Scores of people were piled into chairs and couches having a rambunctious time, and playing with a golden retriever. I was passed a squeaky toy and this dog, whose name was apparently Rubbish, threw his retrievin eyes on me. So I threw the squeaky toy. It landed behind a big comfy chair by the window and I thought that the dog saw this. But instead he leapt through the (closed) window to give airborne chase to the squeaky toy. I ran to see what he might be landing on, because there was an immediate stir among the sitting room throng. Cries of concern for the defenestrated dog. I looked out the window and saw that the big house was precariously perched on a cliff (what another house-on-a-cliff-related dream of mine would call a grace, "a house on a grace") and our friend Rubbish had been dealt his doggy demise (probably).
Paul Woida was the first to blame me. His humongous Woida eyes dumped soggy guilt onto my Alev heart. I wished I had been the defenestrated one. But Paul agreed to go with me to search for the dog, and so did Maddy Geneau who was there also apparently.
The three of us ventured outside to where everybody was keeping their shoes. I couldn't find mine. And all the other shoes had keys and wallets in them. So I went in my red socks to search for this dog with my two friends who have never met in real life. But we were embarrassed by the dog's name, and after shouting 'Rubbish' a few times with no success we decided to shout something else. I started shouting "ALGERNON," and my friends Paul and Maddy followed, sort of. Paul shouted "ALGERNAN" and Maddy shouted "ALGERNIN" but after a great deal of shouting, the dog, Rubbish/Algernon/an/in, returned completely unharmed, but with no squeaky toy.

Garburator Man

The thick soupy fog that settled last night left frost on everything this morning. It makes me wish I had some thick foggy soup around, but I don't really. Not the kind that I imagine would really hit the spot on this kind of grey day.
The birch trees have frost hanging off their wintry tendrils and they look like spooky old ladies telling stories, or chasing their rosy grandchildren around with their teeth out. All the other deciduous trees are wizards shouting at the sky trying to make snow fall on me. It's working a tiny bit. No lightning strikes or avalanches. A girl once told me you can spell it Lightening. But that's something else I'm pretty sure.
Things are crispier outside. I feel like anything I touch will break. It looks like I could even put a crack in the air, so I'd better be careful. Everything's dense, but in a thin way.

A fairly soused older man boarded the train earlier. He had found his way into an old Sun-Ice type coat and had maybe had it on since Halloween. If you take a lid from a big casserole dish and put it on the counter, watch it warble and whinge; that's how this guy stood on the train. His mouth was a garburator. It was because of this that a young woman sitting in front of me couldn't quite hear what he said to her in his drag-a-bike-under-a-car voice. GHKJTGKJTKSGHK, he garbled. She offered her seat to him. I think that's what he was getting at. He proceeded to creak his neck up at two men who were talking about work. I'M A COP, he offered. One of the men, the very tall one, smiled and thanked him for his service to the community.
Over the next ten or so minutes the garburator man made several attempts at standing up again, each time hurling itchy broken threats at a gaggle of teens by the door. If things really did break when I touched them, I might have given the garburator man a decisive poke. The very tall man intervened.
It was at this point that, I hope, the Alev from an alternate reality stood up and took matters into his own hands. His hand would have gently and ethereally alighted upon Garb's shoulder and suggested in strangely elegant - but not obscure - terms, that the pair of them should disembark. Alternate Alev (who might have a goatee) would, by his behaviour, suggest to Garb that he was not of this earth. He would give the impression that he had never before worn shoes, and would look about the train in fleeting fascination with its various parts. Somewhere between the Help button and the door, Alternate Alev would bring Garb to ask if he was God, to which Alternate Alev would reply that he was quite a bit smaller.
But the tall man's friend pushed the Help button and things were resolved in a more earthbound way.
The silence that followed was exactly like the conditions outside. You could cut the tension with a knife. Well not the tension, but the thing that was tense. You know the car of the train. Well the people in it. You could --
The silence that followed was exactly like the conditions outside. But without scary grannies and wizards.

#2 Krushchev

AWESOME. This is the first one with Algernon Mongoose and his scary roommate Alger Non-mongoose. WHAT HORRORS HAS HE SEEN??? I don't know because I never drew him before today. But rest assured. Um. I'll think of something.

Yesterday I tried to fix my double bass pedal. I think I should be trying to fix my feet instead.

#1 "Ommelay"

One day and one day soon I'll think of a better way to get these on the internet.

This is my webcomic. It's got animals. I'll post further info, probably days after I intend to.

Translations are available upon request! And I'll make more.

You can click it and get a really big one.

What else. I almost fell down the stairs in my house TWICE today and I think it's because of my slippers. I'm eating a sandwich right now and it's helped me to realise that if math came in onion buns I would like it a lot more.

The Last (Dumb) Post

November woo!

zomg sry 4 not upd4tign

Tuesday night. There's no WAY he's getting in here. I have moved many a mountain around the mews of this monster. It never ends.
I would move many a mountain for this muse, this monster. "YOUR heart hurts?" I didn't mean to tunnel until I hit a fireball. That was, as are they all, an innocent mistake. I have hurt myself skating and I have hurt myself whilst turning leaves, whilst shaving, whilst making faces in the mirror, whilst deliberately misanswering questions. I have tripped over cordless phones, incurred the wrath of four parents, planned a hostage situation, hidden the truth, I have failed to act. Not all at once! Don't misunderstand! This is a summary.
But x, that young sprat. That variable. One setting: Um. As much as I, v, have a particular disdain for the way he operated around 06-07, without him I would just be velocity. One setting: I love you. With him I can be an integer. Balanced, wise, a stable and natural rhythmic figure, prime, even, open, curly?
x/v
2
Um/I love you.
I'm perplexed. I'm confused as hell. WWJD? What would Jojo do?
"Just trelax. End don't forgettu breathe!" Frig.
What else is there? Redemption maybe. The chance to talk into a mic to people. To appease x, a dying thespian. To dustbust some of my ghosts.
I moved down here to fight a war. "Come across and help!" Verdun.
But it scratches at my Swedish heart. Shakes it like molten light.
What if I can convince my pops that I could really cash in on an allegory about the Boddhisattva Kannon? Then I could uproot and buzz off any ole time. To "Denman Island." To Denman?
That would be dumb.
Maaaaan.

I'm trying this thing where I have a very carefully cultivated disregard for my appearance. I don't think it's working. Or maybe it is.

It Means You Count To 19 Every Time

WELL it looks like I'm turning into one of those people who don't update their blog and then update it to apologise for not updating in a long time and then stop updating again.

SORRY FOR NOT UPDATING, LEGIONS OF READERS.

I don't like keeping a blog. So that's probably part of the problem. Also I created this bastard so I could share with the whole internets all the sweet stuff I write but I haven't written anything in a long long time. So that's another part.

I guess today's order of business then is Ceylon. You mean Sri Lanka? No man I mean the hypothetical band I may have made this weekend when my good friend and I made 12 bars of nonsense on Garageband by singing an excerpt from The Home Medical Advisor over a G chord. This was an older edition of the Home Medical Advisor, you see: the first to ever be put to writing. Before this development The Home Medical Advisor had been passed down orally, and to facilitate its memorisation it was composed in a catchy rhyming metre. So when it was finally written down in 932 AD the rhymes were preserved in the transcription for the amusement of future generations. I didn't know that either.

So that means we're in the future...? Where are the robots?

Oh right Ceylon. When we get more songs we'll play in bars and you can pay 5 dollars to sit at a table and shout over us and text your friends! And at the end you can say "Sweet show bro" and I can say "Thanks man I got your text."

Maybe you know about this phenomenon. I get a bunch of texts from a girl I know and she likes to double or triple the last letter of some words as if to imply that if they had been uttered in real life they might have had some cute half-sung sustain that some people employ. So instead of Hey or Yes or Sweet or Stoked or Bored I get a lot of Heyy and Yess and Sweeeetttttt and Stokedddd and Boreddd. It's nice and everything and I totally understand the intention. It's to add emphasis. I use all caps to emphasise things myself, and that seems to be the funniest and most effective way to do it (definitely more effective that another method which is to Capitalise The Beginnings Of The Words You're Trying To Emphasise - that method is gayyyy). My qualm is that you can't draw out hard consonant sounds in real life. You can say Yesss but Ts and Ds and things are harder to do. IMPOSSIBLE I'D SAY. So go for the main vowels. Shit.

I've also learned recently that adding more mouths to smily faces makes them that many times more emotive. :)))))))))) is 10 times happier than :) according to texts I get.

If I saw THAT in real life I'd be creeped out. Put those mouths away man you're creepin me outtttt.

Still. Having said all that, I do really appreciate the practice of putting an UHH at the end of things to express your frustration. YOU'RE CREEPIN ME OUT-UHH. That's real. I've done that. When I was a tyke.

She is a really nice girl though.

I Had Some Vivid-Ass Dreams

Before I begin, I want you to know that I usually type the name of my blog into the browser to get to it, then I click Sign In and off we go. This blog is called brownagasttherad which is quite a feeble pun having to do with a wizard from 50s fantasy that some people read (I've never actually read it in its entirety but I do know about the wizards!). There seems to be another blog on here that goes by the wizard's proper name, and I visited it by accident a few minutes ago. So Nik, that's really shitty that it rained all day RIGHT after you took the top off your Jeep Renegade. Blah is right! Holy I'm pumped about your 90% in communications too! No wonder you're so stoked, I read one of your posts and I wouldn't give you a 90! Yeah discussion groups are laaaame.

I wonder where he is now, our Nik. That stuff happened in 2003.

Grace Is Another Word For Cliff Apparently

Yes the vivid-ass dreams. Some friends and I were looking out the window of my home at the cliffs that you can just see on the other side of the bay/cove/inlet/estuary that I lived fairly near to. I was sort of pointing vaguely in the direction of one of these cliffs, saying, "Yeah she lives way over there, on the grace. Imagine having your house perched like that, right up over the water. Like what if it fell off?" And my friends expressed genuine concern for this mystery cliff-dweller's house falling off the cliff. As I looked down at the table in front of me, it became clear that I had a very detailed miniature of the whole cliffside area. It was made out of that scratchy synthetic material that museum miniatures are sometimes made of if it's a shitty museum, or alternatively it's used to make the scenery for little model train sets. The little ones you know. The OH or the HO or the HH or - the little ones. And on this detailed miniature I had built, I indicated her house. It was a fairly big old thing, yes old for sure. White, the paint was peeling off, but there was more ancient white paint underneath. There was a decrepit old fence and long grass and bushes. The windows were that ridiculous romantic kind of dusty. I decided I would go.

I was by myself now, and the hike was long and arduous up to her house. The grass was long and the wind was crazy. It was a frustratingly sunny seaside day but there weren't any birds about. Eventually I ran into her up on the hill on the way to her home.

This entire time my brain had been telling me that in this dream I was looking for "her" but until this point I didn't know who she was. She turned out to be one of my friends from college, a piano player with whom I had a very lovely little friendship, and then I screwed it up and we haven't spoken in months. Well here she was now, en route to her big ole house, and I had managed to intercept her. She had a dog with her, and all I remember about him was that he was fairly small.

We started up to her house, and she had all kinds of things to say. I don't have to tell you how stoked I was to see we were talking again. All seemed well. In fact all was well.

And then in one of those crazy dream montages I learned that I visited her up there on the grace - which my brain told me is another word for cliff of which I had previously been unaware - every day, and we would sit in or near the house and catch up and have an amazing time. And the sun would play off her skin in the way that it does, and this would in turn strike me in the face. She always struck me in the face. Not actually. The figurative face.

This continued for a number of visits until - so I am told - I stopped coming round every day. I don't know what I was doing, whoever was writing this dream never informed me. I did return eventually, though, and at first she was nowhere to be found. Her house had fallen into a bit of disrepair. Everything looked a lot older at least.

I surprised her by appearing on the deck of her big graceside house when she returned from walking her dog. She looked exactly the same, but something went off in my brain to tell me that it had been a great number of years since my last visit. She still seemed very happy to see me. And then Wedding Day In Funeralville came on at 9 and I got up.

WELL. WHAT DOES IT MEAN. I haven't thought about that particular person in quite a long time. My thoughts have been elsewhere, here in town. Now I'm going to have to email her and ask how she's doing.