THAT EVENING

It's Halloween weekend. Our band unloads at the Ocean Ale House. Big noisy cabaret. They're running late, no time for a full sound check, so I tell their engineer "Set all our instruments low & vocal mics hot." We're not a typical bar band and a normal mix never works. He looks skeptical but does it. (During our set, Mike's guitar still booms a bit on two songs, but this mix sounds way cleaner than last time. I'm learning. Be assertive with sound engineers; they frequently get it wrong.)

Opening: FRANKIE WEST, a sexy folksinger with twin braids. Her whole family came to hear. Her songs are good, but she swallows her mic so the lyrics come out mush--lose half the words. At break, I suggest she pull back and sing louder to compensate. She didn't want to hear that. Turns back to her family praising her uncritically. Clannish. Oh well!

THE KRELKINS: our turn!

• Bernal Heights Haunting, on exorcising a ghost in Mike's home, bought on discount after a bloody suicide. I heard it tramping around and felt its bloody-minded presence; truly creepy. But why did Mike have to set the tale to the tune of "Beverly Hillbillies"? Aw-shucks deniability, I guess. Undercuts his own true story.
• Dawn's Dream--my friend Dawn dreamt she found happiness in a dumpster, where she belonged, with the other garbage. (Her angry boyfriend at the time was into putdowns...)
• Flying High--on riding a UFO. I get to play the passing satellites. And sing "Om" a lot. Channel your inner hippie!
• Archeology Site Grotesque--a spooky marimba song telling a dream of mine. I was a thousand-year-old ghost... haunted by a smarmy TV archeologist. The living are such pests!
• Doesn't Really Matter Anyway--our only punk song--surrealism breaks out all over town, but we adapt. We put on our happy faces and sing...
• Turn Around (a cover--it's by They Might Be Giants). Bouncy, cheerful lyrics on human evil. Creeps me out--and I have to sing it!

Afterward, Poisoner shyly asks to swap CDs with us--so hesitant, when I thought he was the best act tonight! Later, I find the studio recordings on "Mutant Sex Monsters" even stronger than his live set. He underestimates his own music.

Wait--he was effusive about our set. Do we underestimate our music, too?

THAT NIGHT

I'm in a mythical kingdom where magic works. Its southern provinces bulge into a shallow sea, like Sweden below Stockholm. The land's in trouble... political and magical both.

I'm on the shore, sitting on the deck of a little diner out on a narrow rock point. Start at the flat gray sea, and shiver. Cold breeze.

We asked for help some time ago, by sending our champion swimmer across the strait to one of those low isles on the horizon. Seems odd to me; no boats? Evidently not.

But it works. Help comes, only minutes later. Strange help--a mermaid with two braids. She looks like Frankie West. Swims up just underwater, fast as a torpedo--and doesn't haul out, but swims on right through the stony neck of this point. I saw no arch--either an underwater tunnel, or she can swim through solid rock.

I'm alone in the gray sea, over a mile from land. No one near--human or mer. On the horizon, low islets gray as the sea. No, that big one the north is different. Glaciers calve into the sea! Brr. Better swim south instead...

...toward that city with the pyramids. Tall, narrow, curving pyramids. Castoff tusks of a mile-high mammoth? Ivory towers on acid?

In minutes I'm near the harbor! I shouldn't be; I must be swimming fast as a motorboat or a dolphin. Not a current boosting me; I change course, and whatever direction I swim, islets zoom up. Or seem to--maybe it's all a movie set and those hazy isles are just felt cutouts moved by hidden puppeteers. The Sea People?

Or am I really that fast? Maybe so. I feel cold, but not hypothermic; I should be fainting by now. Guess that spell DID help! I have at least two mer-powers--insulation and speed. Even if I lack a visible mer-tail.

I wonder what magic they'll teach me in Pyramid City?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Hard-to-meet merfolk:
  1. The hero of Rachel Gillig's fantasy The Knight & the Moth speaks to a water-sprite, who won't talk--just bites.
  2. In Marie Brennan's In Other Lands, xenophilic Elliott makes a peace treaty with angry merfolk by trying to speak their language--very badly. But since no one else even tried, they listen...
  3. The New Yorker discussed the stars of Splash with one exception--Daryl Hannah as Madison, the mermaid herself. Sexism, or specism?
• Attractive, skilled, but clannish: Frankie West, not wanting to talk?
• South from Sweden to port with mermaids: Copenhagen, with its harbor-statue of Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Mermaid" (rather fiercer than Disney's Ariel!)
• Timid, yet a champion swimmer: I'm also reading Ali Hazelwood's Deep End. Injured Olympic-class highdiver broke her nerve along with her back...
• Puppeteer, background cutouts: The Slow Poisoner used cutout felt "puppets" to illustrate the stories he sang.
• Given magical powers, swim a cold choppy sea: our gig on Ocean Avenue! We adapted our complex repertoire to a noisy, difficult commercial venue. If I felt a bit chilly, lonely, wave-tossed and anxious... so what? In iceberg waters, that's success.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites