Life List: Eastern Kingbird

My favorite encounters with dinosaurs are the ones that are incidental to my life.  I was just out doing something else, and there they were.  But still, expeditions specifically meant for birding can be very productive and a good time in their own right, if you don’t fuck yourself up doing them.  I haven’t been on a ton of these trips, so I sound like a broken record when I recommend the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.  The paths will keep you from twisting your ankle like you would on an undeveloped hillside or a rocky beach.  I dearly hope orngdolf shitler and apartheid junior haven’t fucked it up too much yet.

My brother was living in Kansas and every time we went out was a chance for me to see something I can’t see where I live.  But he wanted to see things that were new to him as well, so he’d take me to some odd spots.  I don’t remember where this one was, but I remember the tableau.  We were on a path, might have been paved, like a regular walking park for dogs and joggers.  Down a grassy hill there was some kind of water out of sight, and a very small tree sitting alone just on the visible side of that crest.  Sitting in the tree was a single bird, maybe robin sized?  Dark on top, white on bottom.

Absolutely unexciting, uninteresting.  It did nothing interesting and made no interesting sounds.  I pointed it out and my brother said it was new to him as well.  Not too hard to ID, looking at passerines in the area for something with the right colors.  Eastern kingbird.  Woohoo.

What exactly is the point of paying this much attention to little creatures?  Sometimes, if you put your findings into publicly available data sets, it can be citizen science.  Sometimes, you may see something you didn’t know was there before, and be filled with a sense of wonder at nature.  Sometimes, I dunno, it’s just not that thrilling.

I have been posting these without googling the animals, trying to go off memory alone because it can be more fun that way.  I might make an ass out of myself, but I give readers a chance to siwoti at me for their own amusement.  But I caved on kingbirds.  I read the wiki, trying to find any connection to anything interesting.  Zilch!

They are part of a clade of passerines that is absolutely massive, the most speciose in the americas – tho much more variety below the US.  I skimmed those birds and had not heard of any of them.  Some looked like birds I knew but only because of convergent evolution; they were not the same guys.  What are kingbirds all about?  What do they do?  I dunno.  Eat a bug.  Have a nice day.

Even a drab and conventional bird can be a person’s fave if they have personal experience with them.  If you love eastern kingbirds, holler in the comments.

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Curtail Executive Power or Else

Obama should have done it.  Biden should have done it.  In Clinton’s time this would have been a little harder to see coming, but sharp people were already predicting some flavor of it.  If the dems ever gain power again, the hindsight should be bright as day.  They need to limit the powers of the president.  The executive branch in the USA has too much power, and it has caused direct, possibly irreparable harm to our standing in the world.

In a sense, who cares about our standing in the world?  We deserve to be taken down a notch or several.  It’s a market adjustment that is very long overdue.  But it’s going to be painful and ruinous to people all around the world, so perhaps best avoided?  Accepting this shituation is accelerationism, not my favorite flavor of change.

The issue is stability.  You’d think a dictator’s hand on the tiller would stabilize the country’s institutions, but that’s not how this is playing out.  Stability is the source of value in our treasury bonds.  Lose that stability, lose value, lose bargaining power, and there you are.

The system of checks and balances that we all learn about in elementary school, that thing that was supposed to make us so much cooler than other countries?  That was the stabilizer.  The oligarchs could play tennis in the legislature and pass the baton to the other guys every four to eight years, the supreme court could go one way or the other on any issue at any time.  Through this all, nothing truly radical could ever be accomplished.

That sucks when you want things to be radically better, but at least it keeps things from getting radically worse – when it’s working right.  If the democrats want to be moderate and responsible and not be radical and not rock boats, they should go for that moderation radically.  A Constitutional crisis calls for a Constitutional Amendment or several.  We had a bill of rights, how about now a Bill of Liberty, to save us from democratically elected dictatorship?

They will need to angle desperately to fight any vote suppression tactics in preparation for the outside possibility a fair-esque election can happen in two years, but they also need to have an agenda locked and loaded, ready to go, to force checks and balances back into government.  That executive power can be used to undermine itself at first, through careful use of executive orders, but it absolutely must be relinquished as soon as humanly possible, and locked out of future hands.

Tvfnp will pocket veto and otherwise stymie any legislation to that effect, but keep up the pressure and see what’s possible a few years after that, in the presidential election.  If, by some fucking miracle, dems get control of this trash fire again, it’s time to lock it down so this disaster can never happen again.  The next democratic president, hope to hell it’s four years from now, needs to gut their own power.  It’s a moral imperative, it’s crucial for the US to continue to have anything resembling the prosperous status quo it’s enjoyed for a hundred years.

Personally, motherfuck our prosperity.  Time for everybody in the world to come up and get a piece of our loser asses.  But dems, if you’re listening?  If you ever get another chance to do this?  Curtail executive power in any way you can.

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Life List: Northern Mockingbird

I don’t get mockingbirds where I live, so this is, once again, a bird I saw on vacation.  In Kansas.  I’m glad my brother finally moved away from that state, but I imagine the birdwatching might be slightly better there than at his new place in Chicago.  Not sure tho, I have yet to visit.  All I’ve ever seen of Chicago is the airport, whose bathroom stall dividers went all the way to the floor to keep closeted gays from hooking up, were made from aluminum to reduce odds of someone drilling a glory hole.

Birds!  Kansas.  We were trying to find some kind of bird I don’t even remember, and found mockingbirds instead, near a random elementary school – so we didn’t want to hang around for long, ugh.  But they were amazing.  I had no idea they had the big trailing tail feathers and remarkable dark grey and white patterning, mostly visible in flight.  Prettier than I expected.  I didn’t get to hear any notable calls, don’t remember what they sounded like.

You ever hear them do the mimicry for which they are named?  I presume.  For all I know they are just called mockingbirds because their default call sounds like they’re making fun of you.

That’s it tho, the only time I’ve seen them.  So I must blow up the word count with a lil’ more.  There’s the nursery rhyme.  “Hush little baby don’t say a word, mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”  Was that the song the first possession victim in the first Evil Dead movie sang?  I’m sure it’s been used like that a lot.  The Munsters lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, right?  Does that mean mockingbirds have a spooky association?  Are they psychopomps, winging souls to the underworld?

Munsters were a knockoff Addams Family, and I feels like Addams Family were a knockoff of something Ray Bradbury created in like 47 Anno Domini.  Spookhouse families.  Hey, they could coexist.  I wonder how much Addams/Munsters crossover fic there is.  In real life, spookhouse families are few and far between.  Who likes Halloween the mostiest?  I’m reminded of this pic that sometimes does the rounds, a family photo of a goth mom and dad, with a goth daughter and a randomly sunny-looking son.  I believe he was wearing a blue sweater, like a blue jay adopted by a family of crows.

Spookhouse families can be cool, but sometimes they are very much not cool.  The most halloween’d out house I randomly passed last year was also ultra-maga.  Eww.  Nazis shouldn’t be allowed  to be spoopy.  I revoke their spoop privileges.

I suspect the spookiest people are not breeders, and therefore cannot manifest a spookhouse proper.  It’s the province of gay uncles, and other sundry LGBTetc family members.  One day, may our condominium live up to this promise..

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Mah Spoon is Too Big

Hey who remembers Don Hertzfeldt?  His early masterwork circulated in low quality bootlegs for a long time, having been released just in time for massive expansion of the internet, to be downloaded at 320p a quarter bazillion times.  Edgy wiggly cartoons.  Funny voices.  Violence.  Amusing nonsense.  More importantly, artistic use of the medium.  I don’t think Adult Swim even existed back then, tho it was young enough to have been influenced by Matt Groening and MTV’s Liquid Television.  Content warnings:  This shit be violent, including against children.  Very brief fatphobic joke.

I am rather fond of this little film.  Don has more -and more important- works, tho sadly his personal website bitterfilms.com is no longer as artistic as it used to be.  I imagine some kind of hassle came along and broke the cool navigation and format stuff he had done, and he didn’t feel like struggling against that particular river.  One of these years, I want to make a cool personal website again.  I’ve purchased bebemelangedotcom but it is presently nothing at all.

During a window of time when I happened to be majoring in animation at art school, Don teamed up with Mike Judge to produce a thing called The Animation Show.  I attended one of those events and got his signature in an old sketchbook.  Good times.

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RP by Comment 00005

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Strolling through the halls of the dormitory, checking out the fellow freshmen.  Finger guns and cool-guy nods.  Shy looks and fumbling.  Excited plans being made, tho they would surely all amount to timid testing steps into the Adult World of Collegery.  The gendered wings of the building remained mostly separate, tho there was a little overlap in the middle.  Time to figure out who wanted to be an adventurer, or a champion, or a courtesan, or just an accountant or radiologist.  This had ramifications for future romances and rivalries, so people were a little nervous as they flitted from group to group.

The adventurers were deep in the male end of the building for cultural reasons.  Some were comparing weapons and scars, some were sizing up the others in more esoteric ways.  Ilmardan could tell some of these guys were going to develop very interesting powers indeed.  At last, there were Div and Humuk, with some other meatheads down in the first floor lounge.  Wooo!  Div waved Ilmardan over with a whoop.

“Ilmardan! You’ve met Humuk. These are Grundr, Tollison, Liu-gon, and Markud. Guys, Ilmardan.”  Their expressions were reasonably cordial, but you got the distinct impression these boys would be more impressed by a guy who could bench press a luxury sedan.  Not like you wanted to make out with a leopard-headed dude anyway – that was Markud.  Div said, “I told ’em about the club.  The more the merrier, right?”

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Life List: Blue Jay

The famous american blue jay.  Iconic bird, famous.  Star of cartoon network’s Regular Show.  Mascot of Toronto stickball.  Festive blue and white raiment with an artful dash of black stripes, white face with black dot eyes for Hello Kitty points.  Unfuckwithable.

And indeed, I’ve never really seen them.  I’ve glimpsed them briefly at a distance, only able to tell what they were by context, and by my brother calling out when he saw them.  I get the impression our california scrub jays are less shy.  After all, I’ve seen them on my lawn and the roof of our carport.  I spent a combined total of a few weeks in Kansas and only saw the more famous jays flitting around trees and hiding the second my brother spoke.

So technically, yes, there are on my life list.  But I’m not personally familiar with them.  Talking about jays more broadly, they’re the more graceful, slightly smaller cousins of the crow family, with similarly harsh calls and opportunistic habits.  They’re often blue.  It’s a… oh what was the term… poly-somethin’… polyphyletic.  It’s an artificial grouping like “fish,” not a category describing a natural grouping based on common descent.  As I discovered while looking at info about canada jays, some are more closely related to magpies.  And magpies aren’t even a natural grouping!  Whatever.

I’d talk about Canadian stickball but I don’t know a thing about it.  How about Regular Show?  That was a cartoon on the TBS-owned cartoon network, about a blue jay and a raccoon that work incompetently for a city park?  If I remember correctly.  Mordecai and Rigby were their names.  They got up to hijinks that would not be terribly out of place in a 1980s comedy movie, but leaning more into the unreality possible in drawn media.

They also had relationship problems, which is weird for a kid’s show, right?  The raccoon was dating a beaver and the blue jay was dating a red and white bird that was shaped like blue jays are shaped in that universe.  Does that make her a red jay?  Is there such an animal?  Googled, seems it’s an occasional name for Cardinals.  Nonsense!  I refuse.

Anyway, the blue jay breaks up with the red jay and dates a storm cloud for a while.  I don’t know if that show was at all watchable for ten year olds, but it worked OK for me circa age forty, watching basic cable while I cooked, back at the old apartment.

That’s all.  I’m done.

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Tales from the Ghetto: Schoolhouse Foolhouse

My earliest school experiences were either preschool, kindergarten, or very early grades.  I don’t remember which or much about them, but as I’m trying to put together some childhood memories before they disappear, it’s school time.  The school that had me feeling the youngest was an overtly christian one in a rustic looking piece of suburb.  The driveway and parking lot were gravel and dust, and there were largish deciduous trees all around.  Probably this was preschool?

I remember making gingerbread houses for xmas.  I’m not sure if we used legit ginger pieces or the cheapo version, with graham crackers, but the icing was good enough.  We built them around trimmed down milk cartons, as a mold.  Seems like an advanced craft for somebody who had only been walking for a few years.  Of course, there were hand turkeys and all the usual shit.

There was a playground with some pretty good-sized equipment.  I remember the centerpiece of it was almost like a house.  I could stand up to my full height under the platform.  I wasn’t a total misfit, but I was very outnumbered by girls.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I played Bosley to some Charlie’s Angels at some point, of which my sister was one.  Hey, she was a biracial angel years before Ella Balinska was born.

Again, I feel like I had a girl or two who were fascinating me and I didn’t understand why yet.  Not precisely, but I was kinda precocious in this regard.  One of the girls looked kinda like me with light eyes and buck teeth, but had short black hair*, and another one had long brown hair.  Maybe I was more interested in the brown-haired girl but got along with the black-haired one better?  I have a dim memory that I might have gotten as far as baby-styled “going steady” if I’d stayed there much longer.  We never did stay in one school for long, as it happened.

We’d play tag with these rules.  The person who was “it” knocked on the playground house and the people inside say, “who’s there?” It says “Big Bad Wolf.” We say “What do you want?” It says “Colored eggs.” We say “What color?” and It has to guess. When they guess the color you were thinking, you had to run out of the shelter and get chased?  My recollection breaks down here.

We had a cat at some point and lost it.  I forget the cat’s name but think it was orange tabby.  This bothered me enough that when a teacher told us about prayer, that was the first thing I prayed for.  No dice.  Further, while I could conjure a vague white glow when I closed my eyes and did the rigamarole, I realized that I was just imagining it, and that stopped it cold.  When you tell a kid about prayer for the first time, there’s probably more clever ways to do it, ways less likely to result in atheism.  They blew it and I was an atheist for life already.  Not long after that, I remember realizing I didn’t even remember the missing cat – not really – and was disturbed by the fact.  Growing brains do weird things.

There was a school play where I had to perform as a shepherd, with a crappy sheep hook made out of paper towel rolls and constantly falling to pieces.  On the night of the play I don’t know if I even got in two words before I turned bright pink and laughed until they removed me from the stage.  Earliest memory of this tendency I have, but it’s still a thing.  Usually happens in situations where I should be afraid, and am on a subconscious level.  Like the ghoulish humor I fell into when my husband had his gall bladder removed and was all messed up.

There was another school-esque situation we were in for a minute, in a more urban location.  Where that one had been gravel and grass, this one was beauty bark and concrete.  More shadows from neighboring buildings.  I didn’t get along with anyone but don’t remember fighting.  Just remember an enforced nap time that I was usually awake through.  And breaking a finger for the first time.  I’d gone off alone and was finding the cool metal of the front gate appealing.  I ran my little hand inside a groove there, and when it opened automatically for a car, snappo.  Not a serious break, but enough that the staff should’ve done something about it sooner than they did.

Lastly, I remember another school which tried to teach us American Sign Language.  This was more like a regular school so probably first grade.  I was ahead on English skills so it felt like baby school.  I fancied myself an artist but I was the only one in class that fucked up our papier-mâché Easter eggs, by not putting enough mâché on that shit.  I probably cried.  I recall starting to hate school about then.  I remember this school was racially diverse and had those big tires on the playground you could hide in, maybe monkey bars? but little else.

These were the only schoolish experiences I’m pretty sure happened when we were living in that housing project.  I remember nothing of the teachers except that they were women.

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*Wow, it’s really weird with these memories of memories, how removed they are, trying to feel your way back to something like this.  Maybe her name was Iris**?  And for the life of me I can only picture her as looking like one of my own childhood pictures with darker hair and more colorful clothing.  Eh, small enough kids all look the same, so probably not all that inaccurate.

**There are mandolins in that song?  I didn’t remember that.  Why didn’t I remember that?

Life List: Baltimore Oriole

This is going to have a lot of bullshit and filler because the fact is, I’ve never had a view of a Baltimore oriole that was worth a shit.  On a last-minute birding drive with my brother, we hit up a scratchy sun-blasted park where some big cool owls had been seen.  In our allotted time there, we did not see those, but I did glimpse these black and orange birds shying away, high in a tree, colors much less impressive in yellow sunlight than they would have been in more neutral circumstances.

I did another one of these posts about the varied thrush – another orange and black bird, that actually lives in my area.  I like their overall look better than orioles, which could be cause for regional pride, but comparing the two in photographs, I realized our local birds are much more drab.  Because fucking of course they are.  PNW is drabland, safe for even the sparkliest of vampires.

So, another famous North American bird only glimpsed in passing at a distance.  What can one say about that?  Remember those educational products they sold to parents in the ’80s?  The green plastic box with postcards of unusual animals inside, with information about them on the reverse sides?  I had one of those with an oriole in it.  Much less memorable than the cuscus.

I used to be semi-aware of baseball cards as a thing to do, which made me semi-aware of the stickball team from Baltimore.  Hey, I’ll tell you everything I know about Baltimore.

You ever see the movie Long Kiss Goodnight?  God, it’s such a great entry to the genre of bullshitty action cinema.  Easily as good as Die Hard, though more self-aware and maybe too elaborate to be quite as iconic?  Any given Samuel Jackson quote from that movie ranks up there with his dialogue from Pulp Fiction, or better.  Geena Davis was perfect.  It might be the best cinematic use of her talents ever, as good as she was in Beetlejuice and A League of Their Own.  And hell, the Orion-bankrupting Cutthroat Island.

That’s all over the place.  Forget the digression.  Important thing, her character was named Charlie Baltimore.  She was so cool a rap lady took the name, altered to Charli Baltimore.  I wonder if she was repping Balti?  For my money the most hilarious moment in LKG was when she got in a car wreck with a stag, and while it lay dying, she did the action movie neck snap to put it out of its misery.  She action movie neck snapped a specimen of motherfucking megafauna.  Hahahahahha!

What else?  Internet funnyman Brian David Gilbert is from Baltimore and shows some civic pride in his series of Dances Moving comedy shorts.  His partner and collaborator Karen Han reminds me too much of the first girl I remember crushing on, haha.  Hoo.  Forget I said that.

Baltimore has, from my point of view across a continent, some fun quirky cultural things to it.  Old Bay Seasoning.  A wacky coat of arms.  One of those East Coast local accents that we don’t get out here…

Anyway, Baltimore.  And some shy little binch of a bird hiding from me in a tree in a hot-ass place I don’t ever want to be again for the rest of my natural life.  Kansas.  I’d rather go to Baltimore.  Living a thousand miles from the ocean is just fucked up.

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Tales from the Ghetto: Excursions

Still writing about the earliest epoch of my childhood, in mid-California suburbs. Now, I don’t remember having seen Karate Kid back then, but I must have, because one year I wanted to be a The karate kid for halloween.  Ralph Macchio was a barefoot king, and by gum I would be barefoot as well… but no, mom kibosh’d that shit.  I felt like the costume was ruined.  Probably my tender feets were grateful tho, especially as this was before plastic bottles were more prevalent, and there was broken glass fuckin’ everywhere.

This post is about excursions, trips, jaunts even.  Things that didn’t happen at home.  Some of this was in the homes of family members I didn’t really know.  I think my aunt Margaret was one, my aunt Pat was another.  I remember little about them from that time, but Pat’s condo had exercise equipment and a refrigerator full of one of the early diet pops – Tab.  I wonder if it contributed to her colon cancer later on, or if that was just the same mutation that was likely to blame for mine.  Only known LGBTetc person from that generation of my ancestors, a Frisco dyke as they say.  I did see her again as an old lady, slept in that same condo one night as a bald-headed starving artist.  Exchanged some awkward emails with her when needing a favor; did not pan out.  She was a privately cold and publicly difficult person to get along with for more than brief times.  My brother got along with her better, while living in the Bay Area for college.

Back to the kid years.  At some point we were at a family member’s house with a swimming pool in the backyard.  My brother almost got himself drowned, not sure how.  My dad remembers the incident as him arriving to see that our mom, who was supposed to be watching us, had her nose buried in a book and missed it – that  he had to dive in and save the boy.  I don’t even remember him being there.  In my mind it could have been our mom that saved him, but I’d trust his memory of this better since he wasn’t six years old.

I recall seeing the drawings by a cousin, a teenage boy who drew nothing but cars.  I was plenty impressed.  There’s a picture from around that time of me sitting on the couch with a teenage boy and I feel like there was some implication from someone somewhere at sometime that the kid was up to no good.  No idea who this was or how true that was.  Pretty sure it wasn’t my Bay Area hipster cousin Dave, who looks like Dave Gahan, tho I think he does work on cars.

There was a lot of dry grass in the world, yellow and scratchy.  In my grandparents’ driveway I got stung by tripping and landing with my hand on a dead bee.  Same driveway where I lost a fingernail in a car door.  I just remembered my grandmother had a red volkswagen bug.

We went to a family reunion with a bunch of people I never knew and will never know.  Again, it was a situation of wealth, the cornucopia opened for all the little goblins who stole into the banquet chamber, and I was left for years afterward associating the term “family reunion” with nice food that I wasn’t allowed to have.  It was in a large park with green grass and covered picnic areas, with heavy wooden beams.  Frisbees flew.  I don’t even remember now what the nice food was, aside from watermelon.

We went on at least one, possibly more excursions to mountains and forests.  On one such occasion I almost got hit by a car, running across a road – one of those roads that curves around a hill and has no need for crosswalks or sidewalks.  Mom yelled on me.  On another trip, my dad got a tick on his ass, and my mom got it out while we were standing around, looking away.  There were big trees and a big wooden suspension bridge there.  Might it have been the famous Redwood Forest?  My dad has a deep voice and at some points in his life has successfully come off as Joe Coolguy, but I remember many more occasions of him suffering humiliations and defeats.

For that and other trips, I remember the car we were in – a big rusty white station wagon I’ve previously mentioned.  Once again, my midj’ing of it:

I remember vaguely sleeping in it, with the back seats folded forward.  Car interiors now tend to be plastic; this was unyielding and cold metal.  A thin sleeping bag doesn’t much improve that, but it’s fun to feel adventurous.

I might remember more bits and bobs about this part of my life sometime, but for now, one last thing that stands out for me.  We used to go to a big drive-in theater.  In my memory it was much much larger than the late-surviving one from my town of Auburn WA, which finally shuffled off the mortal coil in 2012.

I don’t know how old I was, but I must have felt like a non-presence in the back seat – some assumption I would pass out hard enough they could watch whatever they wanted without forming lifetime memories in my skullpiece.  Guess again, fools!  I remember impressions of a racecar driver movie with one brief scene of full frontal nudity.  Was it Stroker Ace?  There was one with Kenny Rogers, right?  Why am I imagining there was one with John Denver?  Don’t @ me bro.

I will also cherish the memories of memories of Dolly Parton and co-stars doing weird adult things in Nine to Five.  I’d put Dabney Coleman in bondage too.  Understandable…  As much as the movie was ostensibly about ladies getting revenge for dude malfeasance, in retrospect it feels like a masochist’s wet dream.  Who’s been a naughty boy?  Don’t hurt me ladies.  Wink.

We watched some kind of Disney movies too.  At some point in my life, I’ve seen Snow White, Cinderella, 101 Dalmations, and The Rescuers, any one of which might have been in that theater, as far as my brain can work out.  But more memorable is what I was not supposed to be seeing.

Looking out the back window while some kid movie was playing in front, I saw an adult cartoon that strains believability.  I don’t think it was Fantastic Planet, though you’re going to want to tell me it was.  It was much pervier.  In my faint baby memories, it involved cartoon colored people in a fantasy environment, with their naughty bits all hanging out, and sex scenes.  No, not Heavy Metal either.  In my head, the plot was about somebody losing his turquoise cartoon wiener and trying to find it, like the story of Detachable Penis by King Missile, long form.  At some point in the 1990s, I came across a likely suspect for this movie at a Suncoast Video in the Supermall.  I thought for sure I’d remember what it was called this time, but no.  Suncoast went out of business and I never saw it again.  Back to KinderTrauma with my ass.

flashing lights on this video

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Dreamposting: All Hell

I had a dream last night with nothing remarkable about it, ultimately.  I’ve worked as a security guard pretty often, and in customer service at walmrat, and more recently in phone-based customer service, and this dream rolled up all the work anxieties in one.  In the dreams I’m ashamed and worried about having lost my current job, the only office job I’ve ever had, and the only work I could possibly do to afford my mortgage.  But I’m also relieved to escape from having a job that is so emotionally and intellectually demanding, to liberate my mind after years of running it ragged.  But I’m also worried about keeping the new job, because nobody told me what I’m supposed to be doing or where I’m supposed to be going.

The environment was a combination of more than one place I’ve done security, rolled together in a sprawling campus.  Everything was more fucked up than it had been in real life, cluttered and disorganized and half destroyed.  There was a wing of one building that was literally missing walls, looked like it had been firebombed, but that the fire was extinguished by that expanding crash foam stuff.  This was probably inspired by the video game Mouthwashing, and by the experience of seeing sloppy unseen elements of construction like insulation foam.  The parking garage was glutted with boxes of unknown merchandise that needed to be sold, but there wasn’t enough staff to sort it and get it to the shelves.  Guys were trying to move it around with forklifts or facilitate people getting in and out, but there was barely enough room to move.

We had post rotations to keep ourselves awake and out of trouble, back when I did security, and I just kept cycling through the whole complex, looking for some random guard to relieve of duty for however long, before someone replaced me in turn.  But it took me forever to find anything, exhausted and unable to think clearly.  I wonder if you can be too tired to think, even in a dream.

The main thing of note in this work anxiety dream was the overload of environmental detail.  And how apparently I think the world is so fucked up and ludicrous under crapitalism that people will literally keep working a day job for the man, even in a disaster zone.

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