Dr. Seuss' The Bippolo Seed and Other Stories, the volume which seems to have given me an extra hour or two of sleep this morning.

The strangest dream? Maybe not, but strange enough that I actually remember it now (as I start typing this entry at 19:53), nearly 12 hours later.

I had, for some bizarre reason, flown into LAX (Los Angeles, for those of you not hip to airport acronyms | I say, "for some bizarre reason" because I have been to LA once, which was enough. It was everything I had thought it would be: a hypertrophied version of Sudbury, Ontario, all desolate suburbs surrounding a mediocre downtown core. Mind you, the food was better. But I digress), only to find that I had lost both my phone and my wallet.

So there I was, lost in that gargantuan concourse, bearing a single knapsack, no money and no identification.

A nightmare? Well, not quite.

I don't know about you, but a not insignificant subset of my dreams are anxiety dreams, in which I am basically a leaf drifting along an unknown current, heading maybe to disaster, and maybe not.

This morning, not.

Instead, I was approached by a 30-something black woman — very dark skinned, but very American: very large, very loud, very friendly — who sensed my confusion and vulnerability and asked me what was going on. I told her, she disappeared, then soon returned with her family — all equally dark skinned, all as large (or larger), and all as friendly.

She pressed into my hand a wad of bills (I wouldn't check the amount until the end of the dream; it turned out to be hundreds of dollars in new and fancifully slick bills, not the shabby grey-green of real American money) and invited me to come along with her and her family to ... wherever it was they were doing.

It was a dream, after all.

I didn't take them up on the offer right away, preferring to spend some time wandering around the airport and beyond, but I had no money, no ID, no phone, and so returned and found that they still hadn't left. So I went with them.

We crowded into their car, their fleshy American bodies crowding me against a door that was sometimes in the back and sometimes in the front seat, but the atmosphere was always friendly, never threatening, though I was always also fully aware I was a white guy suddenly thrust into a black world.

Until, somehow, we were in Mexico, in a a restaurant which in my dream was a bodega. I was even more lost than I had been at LAX, but once again the woman who had first rescued me told me how and what to order and, at last, I was able to use the money they had gifted me — and when I found out just how substantial a gift it was.

And that was roughly when I woke up. At around 08:22, nearly two hours later than Baobao usually makes enough noise from her room down the hall to drag me from my slumber. She had been busy with a book Mama Raven left her with the night before; but for just how long will forever remain a mystery.

As will the significance of that dream, if any. Nevertheless, it is a rare dream I remember a half-day after dreaming it, so I leave it here, on a semi-private social network(s) for my own posterity. Possibly, it will have entertained some of you, as well.

Photo of Baobao finishing up one of her epic works of kitchen art, taken March 8, 2021. Needless to say, I played with the colours becauz dreamz.

____

*With apologies to Pete Seeger

The other day Raven and I set out to replenish our supply of printing paper, on account of we'd run out and I needed to print something toute-suite, as they say over in Hull.

Our mission was interrupted however as, barely out of the apartment, we missioned east towards Bank Street.

On a stretch of sidewalk ahead of us was a very old Oriental woman and a dark-skinned and much younger (not to mention taller) woman who might have been of east-Asian or Middle Eastern background. Or something else entirely. Onwards.

Raven and I slowed as there seemed to be something not right with the situation. But being and/or becoming Canadians, we were hesitant about just barging in.

But I clearly saw the younger woman glance at us, and then, take very definite note of Raven. She opened her mouth, closed it, then briefly spoke to the old woman. Then looked at Raven again and once more, almost spoke, but decided against it at the last moment.

This was a couple of weeks back, and I no longer remember if I stopped, if Raven did, or if the young brown woman decided to speak up first.

In any event, there was a slowing down and turning and we made it clear we were open to "getting involved".

"Do you ..." the young woman began, addressing Raven, "well, do you speak Chinese?" She stopped and looked down, as if she was worried she had committed some monstrous offense.

I presume I've mentioned at some point over the past couple of years that Raven hails from Macau? Her first language is Cantonese, Mandarin her second. (English and, lately, French, are coming up fast from behind.)

"Yes," said Raven, "I do? What's going on?"

"I think this lady is lost," said the young woman, but I can't really understand her. "Would you mind ..."

Raven had already started talking to the old woman. She briefly interrupted to let us know they were speaking Cantonese and that the old woman had got off the bus at the wrong stop. "I know where her building is," she said. "I'll take her home."

"Are you sure? If you tell me where it is, I don't mind taking her ..."

"No, it's fine," Raven said, and the woman seemed relieved and just a little surprised to boot.

Raven told me to get to the stationary store before it closed and said she would meet me there. I walked about with the good Samaritan. "I'm really glad you guys stopped," she said.

"I'm glad we could help," I replied for some reason donning the Royal We.

"I didn't want to assume anything," she said. "I mean, just because someone ... looks ..."

"Chinese?" She laughed, and nodded. I laughed too, mostly in an attempt to make her feel at ease. "You were in luck," I said. "Raven is Chinese. And I know she really was happy to help. It never hurts to ask.

"I guess," she agreed, but I don't think she really did. And who was I, the white guy, to argue? Maybe the visible minorities among you reading this can tell me how common it is — how frustrating or offensive it is — to be asked if you speak this or that language. Raven herself didn't mind, but she is an immigrant, so if someone presumes she speaks Chinese (or even asks) well, she does.

Maybe she'd feel different if she were born here.

Meanwhile, the young woman and I went our separate ways, and I never dared to ask where she was from. Her English was excellent, but with a hint of an accent. Just a hint, though, leaving me to forever wonder if she was from Vanier or Hull, or possibly from some place much further away.

For once I don't have any real thesis or rant to make. This was just an incident that has stayed with me, an uncomfortable encounter that I am not sure what to make of. (Besides being reminded that Canadians tend to be very considerate, perhaps to a fault.)

Secret in plain sight

It's no secret that, despite the official denials, most of us suspect there has been a lot more than innocent sleeping going on in the bedroom of Sesame Street's Ernie and Bert.

The odd couple of American children's television were clearly part of the broader movement for personal liberation that has swept the globe since the 1960s, and kudos to the former Children's Television Workshop for daring to portray the love of one man-puppet for another.

Yet somehow, another revolutionary transgression has, to my knowledge, gone completely unnoticed. You know you're curious. Click — click, I tells ya!

More memeage: In this edition, Young Geoffrey ponders the words of folks he admires.

I had a couple of interviews yesterday — we'll see whether I qualify for a security clearance; if not, getting a decent job in Ottawa is going to prove a little, er, problematic (no, I haven't given up on freelancing. There's a possible ghost-writing gig coming up in September, but neither am I any longer willing to live on spit and promises to coin a phrase). Anyway, if I don't look too terrible, tomorrow you folks (all three of you?) might be lucky enough to see me as be-suited eye-candy.

Which is a roundabout way of overtly copping to the fact that I missed yesterday's entry to this meme.

I opened up the file and started typing, but found it too hard to concentrate, whether due to stress or to the many possible answers to today's question. Should I talk about the usual genre suspects like — Tolkien or Delany, or the more obscure, like Arthur Kostler or Mary Midgley.

But then, what about Peter Watts or Kim Stanley Robinson, Melville or Heller, Woolfe or Lapham or Klein?

The list of good published (and usually at least somewhat famous) writers who have impressed and/or influenced me — whom I "admire" — would get pretty long pretty fast.

So instead, I'm going to talk about a couple of you, Livejournalers whose words I've been reading for some years and whose thinking and craft I've watched (usually with pleasure) change and develop over more years than I care to admit.

( Click to see who I'm talking about! (That oughta pump up my aenemic numbers!) )

( Click to see all the questions )