Hobo Flotilla vs Hamster Plague


Another night during my battles with insomnia I had a vivid dream with cinematic scope.  Kyle MacLachlan in Dale Cooper mode played a government bureaucrat who by twist of fate was put in charge of a British industrial ship, during a time when a weather crisis had messed up global trade.  Most of the ship’s crew had been allowed to go home with a generous buyout, so the skeleton crew that remained was able to just maintain the boat in a lazy mode.

The plot of the movie revolved around a decision by Kyle to have the crew do something positive with their idle time.  This was treated feel-good and uplifting.  He got them to build a floating city to help with homelessness.  It was originally going to be in a foreign country – they got the parts somewhere like Indonesia or the Philippines – but they negotiated to have it parked outside San Francisco instead.  The city charged $100 rent to floating city tenants.

Years later Kyle was married to somebody from that crew and looking at retirement.  The couple were toodling around the ocean on a personal craft, and by talking to some aquatic hobo, found out the floating city was then moored in the neighborhood of Long Island.  They went to visit and found various people of limited means living there.  The landlord types had complaints about the students being rowdy and polluting.  They also talked about other issues in the community, like finding a humane solution for pest control, since feral hamsters had become the city’s rats.

Despite not being a class of people who would ever need income restricted housing, the couple settled there, for poetic reasons.  At this point in the dream the couple became my boyfriend and myself, and my brother was hanging around as well.  I had to take care of my cats, which included the late Momo.  For some kind of basic care, I had to routinely cut off all of Hecubus‘s legs.  It’s OK; they would grow back.  I was pondering to myself that maybe I could get away with not cutting off those legs this time around, or only cutting off one of them, and my brother was finding it bizarre that I ever had to do it in the first place.

Comments

  1. moarscienceplz says

    Wow GAS, I think you have the kernel of a great story there. Or even a book series or TV series. The Floating City could have episodes dealing with income inequality when it is moored next to a city, then it gets moored next to farmland and has stories about labor exploitation and racial stratification, then it is at the mouth of a river and explores pollution. You really should take a look at that.

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