.....living with scott in an aptartment. he's looking thru a stack of graphic novels, comic books, for ideas for a job or adventure or something. i'm almost a bit upset that he thinks he can find solutions in visuals that contain so many big-boobed women, but keep it to myself. i rifle thru them and take one with me to the living room.
.....it's about a green baby, born premature and kept in an extra-small incubator, it's so tiny. the nurse wants to make money off it, putting it up for show, since the parents disappeared. the doc doesn't like this idea. they leave the room and the troll baby starts to grow, breaking out of it's incubator and climbing out, scrambling around the nursery. it's out of the book now, scrambling around the apartment, along the railing by the staircase that goes downwards.
.....i don't like where this is headed so i close the pages. the monster doesn't disappear, so i roll up the magazine and smack it against a hard surface. poof! it's gone. people are coming in the front door now, scott's friends from LA, mostly people i don't really know. scott comes out of his room to greet them. we all decide to take a walk, but let's pack a pipe first. i grab a lighter and flick it, but for some reason scott had put plastic over the top of it, and for some other reason i figure my teeth are the perfect tool for removing it. i get the taste of melting plastic in my mouth and it's foul. try to spit it out, but there's no sink in the room, no bowl, no cup, so i'm just spitting into my hands. people are a bit grossed out, somebody tries to make a distraction by pantsing one of the guys. so i get inadvertantly mooned by a skinny black guy. he doesn't make a big deal of it; it's not embarassing and it's not funny. it just is.
.....i step out the door onto the landing of a staircase, we're in a second-floor apartment. i lean over the rail and spit into my hands more, which now also have ice in them, scraped from the fridge freezer, so i can wash my hands. i make a snowball and toss it high in the air, and it hits the passenger window of a taxi cab just down below. the people getting in/out don't notice, and it takes a while for the driver to step out. he looks around, sees me, keeps looking around. it's the middle of summer. where'd the snowball come from?
.....i go back inside, pack the pipe, i've got the lighter, let's go walking. down the road a ways, there's a bit of a crowd. standing in a loose circle, they're surrounding a unique display case; it's made from smooth polished branches and trunks, raw wood, with glass encasing a tertiarium of sorts, built like a table, 2 feet off the ground with the encased terrarium about 2 feet high, maybe 4 by 8 feet, half filled with dirt, with a small furry creature living inside. the critter, a baby something, is free to come and go thru small openings at either end. all of a sudden a massive platypus comes out of nowhere, scrambling over the edges and trying to get at the little guy. it's climbing all over the case, chasing the baby critter which is inside, and i'm not sure of it's intentions. does it want to cuddle the baby or eat it? besides that, i thought they only existed in australia. and how is it holding on to the underside of this thing? like a spider. what the hell?
.....we all move on, leaving the crowd and the case behind, walking thru a quaint residential area. lots of greenery, not much of a paved street, more like a massive sidewalk. i'm trying not to spill the pipe this whole time, but even with my thumb over the bowl, bits of it are falling out. we arrive at scott's parents' place, an old white house at the end of a gravel road. there's hills around, long green grass, scraggily shrubberies, tall trees. a small valley in the back yard, and up the other side is an ancient broken wire fence, half gone and invisible. let's smoke the pipe? amazingly, it's even fuller than when we left scott's place.
.....somebody says scott's mom is in the backyard. i wanna go say hi. we walk around back, just scott and i, and she's working up a small hill beside the house, pruning the trail or fixing the fence. she's a bit frustrated with it, but still in a pretty good mood, cheerful, happy to see us. but this lady, this isn't what i expected. she's a skinny white woman, with jaw-length auburn hair, curly, a lightly wrinkeled face, wearing a flowerly summer dress and garden gloves. this is his mom? and there's his dad, a skinny white man with a white man's fro. he welcomes scott home, and after a bit of small talk, lights his rollie and then tells scott there's a bunch of plants just beyond the half-assed fence for us to harvest. weed i'm assuming. he wanders off to help his wife and scott and i sit down on a bench beside the house.
...that's your mom?
..yeah.
...but she's white.
.....he tells me about how this woman, his mom, was really good friends with a black girl in college, but this girl didn't practice safe sex. she had a baby, and left him, and this white woman took care of him. he was crying as he told me all this, like it was either news to him as well or something he'd always been ashamaed of? but i know this isn't truth. i know what his mom looks like, and that she loves him; large black warm lovely anita. this must be a dream. this is a ridiculous dream! i feel like if i talk about it tho, i'll wake up, and i don't want to wake up, if i wake up i can't control the dream. but i don't know how to get lucid. i simply comfort scott as he tells me he was adopted, but have a hard time feeling any sympathy since i know his tears are for naught.
.....this isn't reality. i put my arm around him, his green t-shirt stretched tight over his broad shoulders, and just sit with him.
oddities abound
