If you're a Roman history nerd like me, OldNFO has some nice photos from his recent side excursion to Herculaneum.
Meanwhile, I'm recovering from dream fatigue, having had one of those nights with a series of dreams so long and involved and detailed that you wake up in the morning amazed to find that it's only the next day and you haven't, in fact, slept your life away.
Demolished and/or damaged buildings featured heavily in them, from the half-finished warehouses towering over a dilapidated fairgrounds, that my ex- was complaining the local government insisted must be built with 50% recycled lumber from torn down buildings.
Later in the dream, I won a trip with a new time travel adventure tourism service. In this case, the trip was to Berlin at the end of the war; apparently they had determined that in this one small building (a basement beneath a surprisingly anachronistic parking garage) absolutely nothing had happened back in 1945, and so they fitted it out with some basic creature comforts and then the lucky(?) adventure tourists would be sent back to hunker down and... I don't know, I guess listen to Götterdämmerung in 160 dB THX surround sound.
Marko had also won, and was bringing along a bundle of moleskines and fountain pen paraphernalia, apparently to take notes for a short story involving werewolves eating Nazis or something. Of course all kinds of typically weird dream stuff happened, mostly predicated on the idea that two relatively sane people would leave a little basement where they'd been assured they'd be safe and go walkabout looking for a book store in a city being shelled into oblivion and crawling with sinister jackbooted yayhoos stringing up anybody who didn't look like they were actively and enthusiastically repelling Bolsheviks.
Anyhow, at the end, I remember everything had gotten real quiet for a while, and Marko went out into the little stairwell leading up to street level and was peering over the lip out at the street, saying "Hey, do you think it's stopped?" while I hissed from the safety of the basement "Get your head down! Have you not read All Quiet on the Western Front?" But we got back to the future okay and did pretty well on eBay with some antique books.
In a basement?
ReplyDeleteLots of problems fighting in a basement. First, you're in a basement.
Shootin' Buddy
Adventure time travel dreams, huh?
ReplyDeleteSo, Tam; how did you react to Ray Bradbury's death?
Trying a new brand of sausages for dinner, are we?
ReplyDeleteDamn woman! The FDA and DEA are gonna declare your mind a Schedule One substance.
ReplyDeletePlease forward recipe of what ever the Hell you had for diner.
I've had those mornings.
ReplyDeleteToday was not one of those, but did involve 500% more scorpions.
Perhaps part of your soul now inhabits the Day by Day comic strip world, and is feeding you signals from therein.
ReplyDeleteCould be worse, your soul could have gotten stuck in the editorial page cartoons of the NY Times.
Heh. You thought that was strange?
ReplyDeletePhilatelists were actually mailing bundles of letters out from the Berlin post office to their friends and relatives, in order to make sure they had a letter in their collection with a Berlin cancellation on the date of the fall of Berlin.
The posties thought they were all fucking nuts for crawling out of their basements once a day to mail out empty envelopes.
[i]"Philatelists were actually mailing bundles of letters out from the Berlin post office to their friends and relatives, in order to make sure they had a letter in their collection with a Berlin cancellation on the date of the fall of Berlin."[/i]
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great way to celebrate January 20, 2013. Do we have an Obama stamp yet? I'd love to have one with a big Cancellation Mark across it on 1/20/2013.
" You kill it, you clean it." If that ain't Classic Tam right there, I'll eat my kevlar beanie. Who wants a wing? engine? Hellfire missile? JohninMd(help?)
ReplyDeleteTam, if you could bottle whatever it is that makes you have such amazingly detailed dreams - AND REMEMBER THEM! - you'd make a fortune.
ReplyDeleteTam,
ReplyDeleteBombed-out Berlin is a metaphor for Obama's second term here in America. Not pretty, and the jackbooted yayhoos are in training now.
The safe basement that doesn't feel that safe and doesn't make the world around it any safer is the Roseholme cottage, that you aren't convinced will weather the coming changes except by luck and happenstance. Not a reassuring thought.
Read some SharonAstk.com. Bake the neighbors a hot dish, make the local community your second family, help assure that all your neighbors are among those surviving the coming economic, political, and social collapse. What could it hurt?