Dream Time Homer

[stilltrucking]

I have an Audio Book of the Iliad, three one-hour tapes; usually I am asleep before I hear the whole thirty-minute side. Thinking about Cecil's stream and the influences on our unconsious minds. The anger of Achilles maybe that is another reason why I have been so pre-occupied with anger lately. I dreamt about Clay but now I sit here and write this I realize it was not Clay, it was a friend of mine from Virginia. Just a physical resemblance to Clay. In the dream my friend from Virginia kept reciting the Iliad, I could not get a word in edgewise. He was like that; he could talk up a blue streak. I was getting angry, but it was not that he was quoting the Iliad it was as if he was making a point how much more he knew than me. The guy was like that. He had to feel superior. We were both busting our ass at the truck stop for five dollars and seventy-five cents an hour. I told him about the part time computer work I was doing for fifteen bucks an hour. He put it down, said he used to get thirty dollars an hour when he worked on computers. He knew a lot but it was getting pretty dated. After he died his sister gave me a lot of his computer stuff. I have been thinking about donating it to the Smithsonian. She told me the circumstances of his death. One morning she went down to his little travel trailer and he did not answer the door knock. Eventually she went in and found him in a stupor, sounded like kidney failure. She called 911 and the cops and EMS came. The EMS was trying to get him in the ambulance but the cops would not let them. They may have seen something suspicious (he smoked weed) they were treating it like a crime scene by the time they let the EMS have a go at him, he was dead. I wonder what my blood sugar is tonight. Usually when I have a nightmare it is very high.

Sleeping and listening, in my dream I was trying to get that voice to stop, and I woke up to and realized it was the tape playing. The feeling was like the one I used to get when I dreamed about driving a truck. And I would wake up and realize that I was driving a truck. It got so bad sometimes I could talk in my sleep on the cb radio. One time around Van Horn I was hammer down talking to the driver in the truck ahead of me. It was a flat bed hauling a helicopter. I asked the guy where he picked it up at and he did not know what the hell I was talking about. I did a slow fade to consciousness and saw that I was behind a truck with those stainless steel doors that look like mirrors. My headlights reflected back to me. I suppose it was more highway hypnosis than sleep.

Empty forks,
in my belly

,
brings to mind that starry night on Soldier Summit, I remember now what focused my attention on the black nothingness as I came around that curve. A feeling of a razor thin sheet of glass passing through my Abdomen A feeling of being cut in half.

[jimboloco]

clay don't talk like no virginian, man they talk real genteel, ya know, like,

evrythanng drawwwllz out softtly, real genteel,

lrod is from texas and well travelled, he don't talk like that,

i met a crazed cat from virginia one time when i was living outdoors outside of santa cruz, up on the san lorenzzzo river, with some other catz and this virginian was a reall crazy tripper, he dressed like a bum, had a big tear in his jeans on the butt and passed out acid etc etc, my last dose of acid taken right there, under a huge old tree, like a oak or maple i mean a total umbrella with a large grassy space in front towards the river and at the base there was a big burnt out natural fireplace at no concern or harm to the tree at all, and there was this greatful dead record album placed there in the fireplace, you could do that back in those days, big zized record album covers made for great decor ....

anyhow after a few months of that, leveraged by the last freaking acid trip (mickey mouse windowpane) i wound up driving a yellow cab taxi great little gig living at the old pacific hotel wow and one afternoon i gets a call downtown and there dressed in suit with bow tie and bowler hat and a cane waiting was this sweet old gent, famous in those parts, there is a bronze statue of him there in santa cruz, playing his musical saw, utah phillips knew him, he was an old wobblie oh Wobblies workerz of the werlde unificight!

and he getz into the cab, smiling, we cruize on up to the old pacific hotel, i tell him i am staying there too, he gives me a small red book, it's the wobblies little red book! then i tell him the ride is on me and he gets out smiles and tips his bowler hat!!! yes!

so what was his name! he was an old man at that time, back in 1980. a little "search santa cruz musical saw" up pops tom scribner!
http://scplweb.santacruzpl.org/history/ ... bner.shtml
nice trucking dream stream there acid man! shape shifting trucks cool!

[Scootertrash]

old wobblie oh Wobblies workerz of the werlde unificight!!

[jimboloco]

Oh thankyou, this is right on. Mercy. I gotta send this one out to all my worker-bee and non-working-bee friends, like, JA!
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/pyramidcapiw.JPG

[Doreen Peri]

A sight for sore eyes!

Great image, Scoot!

And even better to see you!

[Scootertrash]

America 1918
by John Reed

By my free boyhood in the wide West,

The powerful sweet river, fish-wheels, log-rafts,

Ships from behind the sunset, Lascar-manned,

Chinatown, throbbing with mysterious gongs,

The blue thunderous Pacific, blaring sunsets,

Black smoking forests on surf-beaten headlands,

Lost beaches, camp-fires,wail of hunting cougars...

Fishermen putting out from Astoria in the foggy dawn

In their double-bowed boats,

Lean cow-punchers jogging south from Burns, with faces

burned leathery and silent…

Hunters coming out of the brush at night-fall on the

brink of the Lewis and Clark canyon…

Forest rangers standing on a bald peak and sweeping

the wilderness for smoke,

Big-gloved brakemen walking the top of a swaying freight,

spanner in hand, biting off a hunk of plug,

Lumbermen with spiked boots and timber-hook, riding

the broken jam in white water,

Indians on the street-corner in Pocatello, pulling out

chin-whiskers with a pair of tweezers and a pocket-

mirror,

Or down on the Siuslaw, squatting behind their summer

lodges listening to Caruso on a two-hundred-dollar

phonograph,

Loud-roaring Alaska miners..

Keepers of dance-halls in construction camps,bar-keeps,

prostitutes,

Bums riding the rods, wobblies singing their defiant

songs, unafraid of death,

Card-sharps and real estate agents, timber-kings,

wheat-kings, cattle kings...

I know ye, Americans!


This may have been John Reed's last poem:



http://www.ochcom.org/reed





I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I, “But Joe you’re ten years dead,”
“I never died,” says he.

[jimboloco]

Tom Scribner in Santa Cruz singing and playing his musical saw.

He was a Wobbly, blacklisted, a rounder, played his saw for keeps. Gave him a free cab ride in Santa Cruz, he gave me a little red book of the Wobblies.

[stilltrucking]

In their double-bowed boats

mean while on the east coast of the North American Continent

Round Bay on the Severn River, seven miles from Annopolis and the mouth of the Chesepeake bay, nothing like Astoria, such a lazy river, gentle sail down past the Naval Accademy (marina with the prettiest wooden sailboats I have ever seen,) Me in my Chesapeake Bay sharpie shaped like a 1949 studebaker. I felt like I was on a yacht until I got out on the bay. A peak experience for me, but I usualy wimped out and put a reef in it. Pretty sure I aint no alpha male. Thrill seeker to a point. Reed I never knew he was a poet. Beautiful posters. My personal hero in high school was Eugene Debs. And Red Emma, homeless, after her conversation with Lenin after he told her "free speech is a bouguisie notion"

Corporate taxes down to 18% of the budget, I think it used to be sixty percent. Don't mind me I probably got that all wrong. But it is down by two thirds, why do they call ecconomics the dismal science?

http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/CQ/V02N1/side1.html