Too bad for her David Lynch wasn't there.
By the way, I talked about David Lynch and Detour yesterday but failed to mention Lynch had recently dubbed over a scene from Detour as part of a promotion for Cellophane Memories, his new album with Chrystabell:
My internet is so slow to-day, it's driving me up the wall.
Last night I dreamt Sylvester McCoy was my uncle and he was taking me on a tour of New York City. I suppose it's because McCoy's birthday was recently and I was admiring New York in Only Murders in the Building.
Yesterday, the last day of August, I decided to go up Mount Amanokagu, one of the three famous mountains of Kashihara, the Yamato Sanzan.
So now I've been up all three, though it's been a year or two since I went up Miminashi. Maybe I'll go again this weekend. Here's a map at Amanokagu showing the three mountains:
The grid shows Fujiwara City, the capital of Japan from 694 to 710, with Fujiwara Palace being the dark square in the middle.
Amanokagu is 500 feet tall, smaller than Unebi but a little taller than Miminashi, which surprised me. I felt like I got to the top of Amanokagu much faster.
There was a little shrine at the top. I saw a guy there with a big green bug net. A popular summer activity in Japan is bug catching. There's also an insect museum near Amanokagu. I think I had my fill of gnats yesterday but I was heartened to see plenty of spider webs.
Here's Mount Unebi from Amanokagu:
Here's Miminashi:
My glamorous selfie:
I dreamt last night I met Brigitte Bardot at a museum. It was in a non-existent European country. The museum was underground and seemed mainly to consist of the future according to the 1960s. Lots of Star Trek and Doctor Who sets--featureless grey and navy blue walls and panels with Christmas light keypads. She was more like 1950s Bardot, though, with long blonde hair and curly bangs. She showed me around. I tried to tell people about it but no-one believed me.
Oh, by the way, no Comic Con reports this year because I'm still in Japan. I actually considered going back to the U.S. for Comic Con since I still get a professional badge--actually the badge that was kicked down the line from the cancelled 2020 Comic Con. But at this point it didn't seem worth the expense or the risk. Maybe next year.
Twitter Sonnet #1603
The weather wrought a second Zeus for fame.
The double turned to two again to reign.
As tall in light the children grow defamed.
The prankster's circles lie beneath the rain.
The teasing teeth remembered tricked the red.
A dream of dragons changed to nights of bats.
The lab procured a book the monster read.
Assurance passed the mouths of ancient cats.
With jungle dreams the plane contained a map.
The ancient stone proclaimed the brothers moot.
With rolling fame the dame pronounced a sap.
The broken stone detained the slimy boot.
Forgotten fireplaces keep the cast.
The ash's lengthened limbs recall the past.
I used to really love shopping malls. Not that I hate them now but they used to have kind of a magic for me. I associate it with Trekkie-hood. I remember when Roger Ebert complained the bridge of the Enterprise stopped looking futuristic and just like a mall security kiosk. The similarity was always there for me and it was something I loved. It was easy for me to imagine a shopping mall, particularly indoor malls, as a space ship with their even lighting and controlled temperature. But I like outdoor malls. I love the feeling of a place that contains many places somehow.
So I'm pretty familiar with all the malls in San Diego county, where I grew up, and a few in L.A. When I was in my 20s, I used to love finding shopping malls I'd never been to and exploring them but I always felt a particular loyalty to the most familiar malls.
Anyway, it's probably due to my urge to find and explore new malls that I started dreaming about finding malls. The strange thing is that the malls I've found in my dreams have remained the same. That is, malls I've discovered in my dreams have consistently appeared in my dreams for around twenty years. I even know where they're located in San Diego. One of them is an unpopular indoor mall with green tiling located around where the 163 freeway merges with the 15--in reality the spot just has an overpass from the 52 freeway. There's a four storey indoor mall a few blocks from a real mall in El Cajon-a Petco holds its place in waking life. That mall has a very large food court but there's something cold about the place, maybe because it looks like an office building from the outside and generally has plain, blocky grey features.
A few nights ago, I dreamt I visited a very fashionable, high-end mall I'd previously visited in other dreams. It's located east of the football stadium near the 8 freeway. It's five storeys (my dream malls seem to be much taller than any of the real ones in San Diego) and has a large Macy's. It's an outdoor mall for some reason surrounded by an empty dirt field where in reality there are several neighbourhoods, parks, and the San Diego river. I generally seem to visit this mall at sunset at a somewhat awkward point where it's starting to get too dark to see but it's not quite time for the automatic lights to switch on. The glass windows on the Macy's, too, tend to catch the sunset. Since it's a high-end mall, it sometimes has fashion shows and art exhibits, though less often now due to the higher rent prices. In my dream from a few nights ago, I discovered this mall had a library where something sinister was happening. I suppose it was because of the episode of The Magicians I'd watched that evening. I'm not sure what happened, though. I always feel like I'm trying to find something out at that mall but it's hard to investigate because of how difficult it is to see.
The new Sirenia Digest has a wonderfully weird new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan called "A CHANCE OF FROGS ON WEDNESDAY". It's a bit more surreal than usual for Kiernan or the Digest. A first person narrative that feels a bit like Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" it's set in a post-apocalyptic world where the structure of reality has broken down along with everything else.
The unnamed protagonist encounters one strange person after another in his journey to a tower and a "Pale Lady". The people he meets sometimes shift into other people or just have abrupt emotional shifts. The protagonist is carrying a jar in a paper bag, the contents of which, hinted at, I'm tempted to interpret as cruelly suppressed, instinctual need, if not sexuality. The protagonist mentions having been an astronomer before the apocalypse, the fact that he was a scientist highlighting for me the distress in a world dominated by weirdness and chaos. I was a little reminded of "The Inner Light", the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, probably only because I happened to have watched it last night. But the story added a new level of dread and sadness to my recent memory of watching Picard observing troubling signs through his telescope, not knowing he's trapped in a dream of a world that already died a thousand years ago.
The new Sirenia Digest also includes some of Caitlin's thoughts on Harlan Ellison, who was a friend of hers. The issue is well worth reading.
