Chapter 1 

Dreams come easily in the city of dreams. They are mad dreams of cities that never are, perfect people unstained by the world, a world of easy relations that become like glass for fear the ease will be disturbed. Dreams written and stated on street corners. Dreams of all the emotional effluvia one is trying to escape from; that which takes down rather than lifts up. That which pummels rather than strokes. Terrible dreams of women in the past who one has wronged. Terrible dreams of parents let down or involved in secret societies tinged in darkness. Dreams of vast snakes choking the life out of one. Dreams of endless apartments next to water where there is lovemaking and fights on the ledge above the water. Dreams of cats coiled up in a nautilaus of steel like a shell at the beach.

"You've said it exactly," he was telling me and not soon enough, "Ideas want to cover their shame. But, when one has worked long and hard at presenting ideas without a cover and simply letting the shame mix in with the pleasure of having a potential audience....then something happens."

"Yes, it is a sad argument. But unfortunately, in this country at any rate, ideas are merely irritants. And if you want my personal opinion it's a good idea they are an irritant. We have an old peasant heart that believes the mind tricks itself more times than it fixes itself."

"Oh but you know walking around here is like walking around a hatchery for new life; it's struggling plasma emerging in all the forms that can possibly occur. Forms not yet set by circumstances and, oddly, completely formed by circumstance! It goes both ways, there is no up and down, top and bottom; no "hierarchy of being." One guy is a mumbling anguished possessed idiot, another man is the stoic professor working at the Rad Lab dreaming of some increment of change that will throw the world in a wholly different direction. He perceives (once his experiment is complete) how those in the community will use it. Perhaps he has no general trust of the community but then there is the government after all. Just about every weird fantasy is lived out, yes, it just jets from them like a fine spray."

David Eide
January 24, 2014