Dream of Meatloaf

Dreamed last night that an underappreciated skill was hunting live meatloaf. Most people, I learned from this dream, were unaware that meatloaf roam the wilds of lightly forested regions of South America and in Oregon. They are 4- and sometimes 5-legged creatures which, on account of their half baked constitution, survive mostly on their smarts and not on hunting or attack skills. Meatloaf purchased at grocery stores and in restaurants is usually captured by means of a meatloaf trap, a small motel-like roomlet into which the meatloaf is gently coaxed into thinking there will be some gravy with which to slather herself. The meatloaf’s head is severed, or rather removed. “Sever” is too strong an act considering how the meatloaf’s head is easily removed with something sturdier than a plastic fork.

The meatloaf’s diet is omnivorous. Their innards have been found to be filled with anything from chopped peanuts to raisins and even mushrooms.

…

haha…

Walked to Rockefeller Center and back, as I did also on Sunday. I left one printout from WAYD on the bridge, that one from one Sheila, from whom I have not heard in years. We used to have quite the online correspondence, and her WAYD postings were legend. People wrote to ask if she was some kind of NPR contributor or published storyteller. I never knew, and I never said I knew. She just kind of disappeared on us one day. It had something to do with an aborted hookup at the Sam Wong Hotel in San Francisco, and that is the God’s honest truth.

I came back over an hour later and Sheila’s WAYD was still there. So I placed a couple more, for those whose appetites whet at the prospect of unexplained statements like this with no concrete attribution and, depending whether I actually delete it altogether, no online explanation or citation. I have to divine a simpler way to print them out. At present and by original intention they are printed on scraps of paper which I cut from sheets of common legal sized paper. I mainly chose that paper because it has been sitting in a pile for years and I will probably never use it otherwise. Want to burn though some ink, too, and get some satisfactory use of that POS king sized printer/scanner I so came to loath.

Speaking of loathed I discarded an old ADF A3 scanner, a gadget into which I poured high hopes but finally gave up on. It was used (to be fair, it was quite used) but it should still have fucking worked, at least for a little while. I might have digitized 30 or 40 pages with that thing before it just said no, not gonna do that any more, don’t know why so you have to waste your hours and come to hate your life trying to figure out why I don’t fucking work.

On top of dumping the scanner I also unloaded 5 of 8 fat and heavy volumes of library copies of The Etude Music Magazine, copies I thought I would dismember and destroy and feed into that aforementioned ADF scanner. The scans would, I fantasized, come through at a pace infinitely faster than the flatbed method.

But the dream is dead. I don’t even care any more and I prefer to send those volumes of that magazine into the wilds of a local thrift shop, where misguided buyers can spend $10 per volume (5 times what I spent on them, minus shipping) with the thought that they are rescuing from the gallows of oblivion a quaint and precious obscurity from classical music’s “simpler time.” When really, these volumes turn up daily on eBay and other places. Whoever sold these behemoth stacks of paper and cardboard covers to me must have been as relieved then as was I now to just free up the damn space that they were hogging.

And I still have 3 volumes to unload.

It’s not like I needed them, you know? I have individual copies of every year of that magazine, copies which are easier to handle and scan than these encyclopedia-like tomes.

It is funny how, when even the prospect of moving to another apartment or city presents itself, no matter how hypothetically or half-assedly, my first thoughts are always the same: What will I do with those old magazines? How will I make sure they are taken care of? I must have about 800 of them, counting duplicates. Much of the older copies are scanned of their editorial content but not their music. I think the pre-1930 issues are the most valuable both on content merits and any possible monetary value (however remote the possibility of the latter might be). So I expect never to scan later editions, in part or in whole, although I may have scanned the 1950s stack one night in a drunken spree.

Truth be told, as far as scanning flatbed versus ADF, the former is simply the better way to do it. Efficiencies of the ADF technique are mostly lost to pages getting chewed up by the scanner. This is not entirely the scanner’s fault. The pages of these old magazines are, you know, old. That was why I thought the relatively clean and tidy pages from the bound volumes would work better. But I don’t see how. I would have to spend months if not longer destroying the volumes, separating the pages, trimming all the chaff from the inside of the pages that had been separated from the binding.

As an individual it is not practical. Machines and such exist for this but my inquiries into what it would cost to have these books shipped off for scanning proved that, given the value of the content itself, the job would be prohibitively expensive. It was simply not worth it.

So away those extremely heavy library bound copies go, into the maelstrom of the thrift shop free-for-all.

…

A complex scene of paranoia played itself out last night. I’ll talk about it later, since it suddenly feels like too much to type. Suffice to say that I imagined the next door neighbor, who lives in the house where he was born, was disturbed by the sound of me taking a shower last night, and he was going to call the cops, or else get the angry landlord of my building to do it. I honestly thought I heard the angry voice to the landlord outside a few minutes after turning on the shower. I have to let it run several minutes sometimes for there to be any hot water. This time, unlike most times I shower at night, I left the window open. This, from what I can tell now, seems to have turned on the motion or movement sensitive lighting in the back yard of the house next door, which is but 20 feet away from my shower window. Without glasses on I went into the bathroom and, realizing I had left the window open, went to close it… not for any reason, really, since I’ve showered with the window open many times. It just seemed too breezy and cold to be showering by an open window.

I noticed the lights on in the back yard outside, and I swear I saw the man who lives next door running around in the back yard looking toward my window.

Long story short I believe it was actually the neighbor’s dog running around back there, an the no cops were called. That’s how bad my vision is without corrective lenses.

OK, that was enough to type of that high strung interlude.

I slept barely at all through the night but forced myself to stay down until 11am. I repeatedly assumed one of three positions. Back, and one side or the other. It felt like I was sleeping on the surface of a lake, a surface which was firmer and more trustworthy than the surface of regular water, but nevertheless possessed of a crispiness that made it hard to let myself go. There were also those electrical jerks, hipnonic or whatever the word was. They were out like sparklers on the 4th of July.