THAT DAY

Saw the film A Clockwork Orange. Alex the Beethoven-loving murderer gets brainwashed--both Beethoven and violence sicken him. That doesn't work out well.

Then read Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick. Creativity is all very cool, but what about honest repairmen? Surely mending the broken keeps civilization running too. Trust Dick to point out how snobs devalue the working class. Less flashy than Clockwork Orange, but subtler too. The Pot-Healer finally tries making his own art. It stinks. Of course it does. At first. Patience!

Read The Rescuers and Miss Bianca, kids' books by Margery Sharp. Not great stories, but great ink drawings by Garth Williams of a brave, clever, sexy mouse courtesan I'd like to marry... if only I were the right size.

Then study Pogo by Walt Kelly. Full of animal characters--vivid motion and emotion. What a cartoonist! This time it's Mademoiselle Hepzibah the skunk I fall for.

THAT EVENING

At my cartooning class at College of San Mateo, I try drawing Pogo, Albert the excitable 'gator, and Hepzibah. I struggle just to get the basic look of the characters. Can't capture Walt Kelly's dynamism or Garth Williams's expressiveness. Not by a long shot. Sigh!

Seems hopeless. But... it took them years to master their art too. Patience!

THAT NIGHT...

I scrawl a Pogo comic on a shed wall, as I'm told of Good (and Bad) immortals; then, atop a cliff, an old Italian friend & I meet a Pogo Demon, who gives my friend a strange boon since he's the longest-lived mortal on Earth: turns us both to cloudmaned levitating horses! Fun. Though our herd stampedes--chasing, hating that Ranger who always confiscates our clover. I contemplate A Clockwork Orange as we skim over

Benicia Ridge; slaloming through tree tops holding our horse-altitude as the scree drops. Downslope, wind-sheltered, eucalypti rise. So tall their crowns barely ebb--a mere six yards below us air horses on our fog divans. But to the ball courts where tennisers pause to stare up at floating palominos in the air... a forty-odd-yard fall.

Exhale, drift down, land wary. Ready to bound through a fence-gap back to ether when a scary Silversuit descends. Inside, an ancient Inuit. Dead of course. Unlike fog-horse, when these aerial Suiters die,

They drift on wind like snow, till dwindled, dry, their mummies randomly touch down. There the Groundsman takes them. Where we go even angel horses don't yet know. Meantime, around our regatta herd, silver death-reminders dot the sky.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• We're flying horse people: Pogo's swamp of talking animals, plus Miss Bianca's mouse people. Though none of them fly.
• Tennis players below: I think of tennis as a yuppie game, so it may mean worldly success or everyday games of competition.
• Silver suit: white/silver statues in A Clockwork Orange? But they looked more like pilots' pressure suits or spacesuits. Exceptional people, soaring into the heights? Ambition, heroism?
• The old Inuit adrift: echoes how Inuit elders walked out on the ice to die when they became too much of a drain on resources. Not sure what this means--tough-mindedness, sacrifice?--but as a floating horse I found it spooky. Preferred our horse-way to fly. Low, gentle, quiet.

• I THINK this dream was reminding me what my healthier college peers didn't know, but which illness had already taught me; we're fragile. Mortal. So take care of yourself, treat yourself gently, live long and slow, float don't rush around; for time and experience (those demons that kill us all eventually) will grant you magical benefits not given to the fast-living, earthbound majority. Not even to those heroes in pressure suits who soar too high. They drift and dry.

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