Incarnations

Strange, stupid dreams this a.m.

In one I am reading a Ben Katchor comic in which two men are standing at a window, watching a truck approach. They watch and watch across 4 or 5 panels, exchanging words which Katchor crafted to be forgotten. The men continue to stand in place as the truck plows through the window. This causes the paper on which the comic is printed to explode. A truck busts through, tearing the page apart, barreling through the room in which I was reading this strip.

I may have been thinking of Ban Katchor on account of a recent visit to Strand bookstore. I was surprised and even a little irritated to see that not a single book by that great comic author was to be found in the comics or graphic novels section of Strand.

I think the last time I saw Katchor on a bookstore shelf was when I spotted the “The Cardboard Valise” at the Brown University bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island. I had already pre-ordered the book so did not buy it there. I seem to remember seeing a CD or multimedia disc of some sort to which Katchor contributed at the MoMA store within the last few years.

At the Katchorless Strand I thought of John Irving who, in “The World According To Garp”, wrote that friends and relatives of Garp would go to bookstores and, leaving fake contact information, order dozens of copies of his books, never intending to buy them. They simply wanted to keep Garp’s books on the shelves.

I considered doing something like that at Strand by ordering a dozen copies each of “Hand Drying In America” and “The Beauty Supply District”, but I thought better of it.

In another dream this a.m. I was in the kitchen of the house where I grew up, making out with a woman unknown to me. Unknown family members stand by, watching from miles away though they are physically present.

We stop making out and the woman claims she sees eyeballs in the window, peeking in through openings in the curtains.

No one else sees these eyes but everyone believes they are or were present on account of the unknown woman’s detailed description of the eyes, the stupid smiling mouths underneath them, and the jelly-like giggling movement the free-floating eyeballs made.

The eyes were not physically connected to the mouths, and there could be more eyeballs than would exist in normal physical human heads with 2 eyes, 2 ears, one nose, etc. These eyes moved where they wanted and sometimes smiled multiple times, stupidly, at whatever they beheld.