Sigg3.net's Notepad

Plus des temps; the joys of food on dreams
or Sunday Steampunk Dreaming

Clear your temples, people, 'cause I want to take you with me on the sickening journey of Friday food poisoning Steampunk Dreaming.
It was a Saturday so cold that the air could cut glass, and waiting with my brother for my second brother my knees were weak and my vision haunting. The night before we'd gone out to check out the streets, Blow playing Tom Waits at the Irish place, and before the night was through I ordered me some nachos.
Saturday morning with bad diarrhea, running around town to find a new cellphone, taking the tube home to puke and sleep for ten minutes before meeting my brother and rejoin the rest of us at the present. Push comes to shove and present comes to past; we had a pizza at Peppe's, half-n'-half, and went for the cinema. Fetching me some carbonated water while my brothers checked the program, the sickening butter-smell of stale popcorn grease penetrated the skull and almost blurred my balance, Alas I was forced to call it a night unless we needed to make a scene.
It was 9 pm when I got home, barely able to pull my clothes off, shaking and sweating like a junk sick dog, I put the BBC on and fell into a half-sleep from the exhaustion.

When you dream in half-sleep you half-dream, meaning you aren't in the dream - it's there in front of you, gaping over your conscious vision while your mind is still awake, and pacing itself to take it all in. These dreams are restless like nightmares, and mine took the shape of a many-sided leather ball with concave surfaces and snippets of text on all sides. As many times I turned in in the bed those three hours, as many times I turned the ball; and the length of literature I had to fathom was enormous. Some sides only had a few words or a quote, but others were compressed paragraphs or full pages; and they all bore an equal importance since conscious will ceased to impose an order.

And as the many times,
as have so unequivocally been observed,
the statements hitherto mentioned
will all together in their
comprehensive study show us coherently
what's always been expected..

and so on and so forth. Some sides were short one-liners summing it all up somehow, and whipping your attention to grasp all of it in the light of one word; "Statue." or "Status." or "Times." or "Theory."

I woke up exhausted at midnight when my brother texted me to tell that all was well and feel better. I had a cigarette and fell asleep for the second time, this time in full, finally getting some rest from the textual nightmare that very likely was a psychosomatic stimuli courtesy of the BBC.

Next thing I wake up in a threatening murder mystery.
It looks like a flat but feels like a home, there's a tree outside and a black car from the 30s. A woman in red is now alive and now dead, her body chopped into many parts but there's no blood, and two detectives with long coats asking questions.
There is more to this dream than what it seems: the fence and the hill outside looks like cardboard backgrounds, and the highly advanced insect-like robots seem to blend in without being queer. They are made of black metal and while the atmosphere is film noir I, the observer, must admit it's a mix up of centuries. The detectives' steampunk equipment with long, shiny razors and smudgy tubes are easily defeated by the robots who now, in turn, are the ones asking the questions. And I am made to watch as they flawlessly decapitate the inspector and leave his upper brain and eyes to dangle from two robotic arms, while a helicopter-like ladybug pummels his living remains with tiny balls of led from three synchronized cannons the size of a walnut and red as the devil himself.

I wake up again, it's six a.m and I light another cigarette. The world is very dark and very cold, I feel like going to the bathroom but something tells me I should wait it out. Instead I drain my lizard and return to bed. After all of this, it's time to sleep, I reckon.

As concurring with my wishes the grand finale is nothing but an adventurous vacation trip. There is me and two author friends, all three old wolves on the Real-Life scene, in a grassy countryside at summertime. I am introduced to a white colonial-style summerhouse that housed four writing friends, old men, including James Joyce and a man with a German name. It is not a real German name, but the kind of German name you'd expect from an American, so I guess we're somewhere along the Mississippi, away from the river.
It is not very clear what the four men did there, expecting alien visitors or bizarre sexual intercourse, but apart from mystified history I am shown a black egg the size of a person made entirely from painted patches of bandages; and when unveiled it reveals a similar colour to the leather ball nine hours before. The hardened fabric outer shell protects a cubic room that could fit a man's head, and inside there is a softer shroud with motherboards in old-style brown.
We are displayed these instruments with great awe, before I'm back in a flash at a train station waiting for the train to take me there (so I can see these brilliant spectacles), my friends are gone.

It is hot and dry and the old timber platform creaks when I find a bench to sit and wait amongst a number of people by one of four tracks. The train arrives but it is one of those that carry heavy load and don't stop for the leisure of its passengers, and I realize I'm also on the wrong platform.
I run to catch it on the other side while many run to jump on but before long I'm with those fifteen few who did not make it and will have to walk the part. I jog along the railroad tracks, and catching a glimpse of the old train below a hill, I cut it short and while running downhill I reach a young, blond girl sharing my mission objective.
She loves this catch-up game, I can tell she missed the train on purpose, she realizes I follow her and she sends me a smile
a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful smile
similar in sheer brilliance to that of Cameron Diaz.
With her to guide who cares if I miss a train or two? I would follow her to hell.
But she's an angel as sweet as dreams make 'em and what I can remember today is the greenness of the grass, the sharpness of the flint smell of rock in the sun, the tumbling downhill chasing each other and longing to see that smile just one more time before I wake up.
We never made the train so we had to walk the last part anyway, but I'd like to believe that during that time -- --.

I was better Sunday morn', at two p.m, seventeen hours of stinking sleep, but across the table of my nausea and diarrhea was the image of that girl smiling at me;
She gave me her name but it is only for my dreams.

• This is a child post to The joys of Mexican cuisine