But the colors of you will go on

Most of last night was nightmares, the densely plotted kind I'm left remembering in fragments: a very wealthy, well-connected family, a museum of antiquities on the Boston waterfront, a man whose head was alive only; the rest of him was an articulated wooden jigsaw, like a sculptor's mannequin beneath his clothes. He had an anonymous, boyish face, straight murrey-colored hair. I had seen him murdered, thrown down through the jagged, decaying basements of the museum, his body wrenched and battered apart as it broke through each rotten floorboard or dust-swathed surplus shelving, screaming long after he ran out of lungs. He was immortal, but not in the handily reconstituting Baccano! style. I had seen his head suspended by a thread, salt crystals freezing like stalactites at the raw edge of his neck. He was some kind of retainer for the family; he killed for them sometimes, but equally often he bought groceries, kept track of acquisitions, wrote grant applications. What happened between him and the daughter of the family lay at the heart of the dream, but I cannot remember if it was romance or murder or nothing so easily classified: some complex line of pain and loyalty that did not survive waking, only a foyer of pink granite, escalators, glass walls with a view of the harbor, a gigantic hydria in a polished corner of the second floor: black-figure on one side, red-figure the other. I could not identify the myth it contained, but neither could anyone else in the dream. I leaned on the rail overlooking a reception among the Egyptian monuments and talked with the man who was nine-tenths dead, who was not once associated with Orpheus. You could never see what was wrong with his hands so long as they were in motion; holding a cigarette or a champagne flute, they became uncanny. I trusted him more than anyone else in that world.

And I have no idea why I should have dreamed any of this, because I spent the evening with two of the people from Boston Song Sessions I've been seeing glancingly at Arisia for years, and it was lovely. We got takeout from the Kebab Factory, including stuffed mushrooms and lamb sali boti; I made the acquaintance of their library and their two cats¹ in about that order (and then I talked to them). We traded Kipling settings. They fed me homemade brownies and rum balls and lots of tea. I got home without becoming a Shackleton casualty of the arctic wastelands of Somerville. Nothing to do with severed heads at all, except maybe insofar as the Mabinogion came up once or twice in conversation—but so did some really, really good music. Go know. Maybe I'll dream about demonic Morris dancers tonight.

I am off now to captainbutler's birthday. It had better not be starting to rain. "Sleetpocalypse" just sounds funny.

1. They are both LaPerms, a breed I’d never heard of. One is indistinguishable from an ordinary orange-and-white housecat beyond his rexed coat and superfeline reserves of patience and affection. The other is a calico with crinkly fur, a bottle-brush tail, and the shortest legs I’ve ever seen on a cat, thereby inspiring in onlookers the reaction my God, that's the largest woolly bear I've ever seen—I'm so sorry, that's your cat. Did I mention her whiskers are squiggly? I'd have asked for photographs, but they might have constituted exposure to lethal levels of cute.

The island we raced to, deep under drifts of snow

Actually, the nightmare was the three-plus feet of frozen solid snow my father, my brother, and I have just spent the last three hours shoveling off the roof. Several layers of roof, actually. It was already compacting to slush by the time the rain started and it only became icier and more sodden as the afternoon went on—needless to say, I have not yet gotten to captainbutler's. (I dropped off his cake and his present. Then I shoveled.) I'm drinking very hot tea.