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Because the sun is much too sultry and one must avoid its ultraviolet ray
Yale's spam filters are in dire straits lately, so I'm deleting twenty-odd useless messages for penis enlargement each morning, but at least this way I can join in the game of amusing spam; today's favorite was from Starlin Gay and entitled "Your health! Moss-woven!" And I had an advertisement for "diphthong consent" from Jacob Schmidt, which is at least a more believable spam name than Starlin Gay. In this decade, at any rate.
Last night's An Ideal Husband was excellent. The play really comes to life in its second half, when all the chararacters' entanglements have tightened on them in unforeseen ways; the five principals are all very good, but Derek Stone Nelson was note-perfect as the drawling, dandyish, unexpectedly levelheaded Lord Arthur Goring, on whose resemblance to Lord Peter Wimsey my father (rather than my mother, whom I'd always known loved the books; that was neat) remarked at the intermission. The production's running only through June 24th, so I strongly encourage any of you who are in the area to pick up tickets before there are no more. They are affordable tickets, too. Don't miss out.
Under the cut is the only dream I remember from last night, for which I intend to hold![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greygirlbeast and Sirenia Digest responsible; at least, for the part with the tentacles. But the rest of the sea-stuff is just my natural default.
I have been looking for her for months, or the man who I am in this dream has been; sometimes I'm him, and sometimes I see over his shoulder. It's one of these dreams where multiple layers of story fuse, so that I become simultaneously character and spectator and actor, but the kind where I don't know what happens next; so I'm surprised to find her in this glass-walled room full of sunlight and zoological posters on the white-painted concrete wall behind me, the unlocked door where I came in, laminated taxonomies of flounders and starfish and deep-sea monstrosities whose names I don't even know. There is some discussion of reproduction—jellyfish bells, clouds of roe, anemones, how sea urchins mate. Only seagulls cross occasionally the immense, summer-drained blue of the sky beyond the glint of the walls. I can't prove that the men who allowed me into this room are the same ones who made her disappear, who punished her for whatever we both knew that I can no longer remember, even in the dream, but their suits are as neatly, stereotypically black as government agents and they stand at idle attention as I approach her tank. It's set up like an exhibit, the kind where children can pet skates and rays or dip up starfish and sea urchins out of a cold tidepool, but past the dark rocks that jag up out of the salt water in imitation of a sea-chewed coastline, the bladderwrack and mermaid's hair that sway in the constant slap and wash of manufactured waves, she's all that's in there. I can't tell if she recognizes me. She looks thinner, paler, her hair in seaweed strands and glistening as though oiled to her shoulders. She stands to her hips in the surges that boil from between the rocks; when their tide comes in, white water threshes about her waist. But I kneel down, or he kneels down, this man who has been sleeping in doorways for her, I have, and in the seconds when the bubbles clear and before the next wave pours in, you can see through the magnification of glass and water precisely how she has changed—the handful of thin tentacles, seaweed-tough and whippy, ridged like an octopus' suckers and purple as sea urchins' spines, that spring from her sex and double back on themselves to work within her, tirelessly, and the salt drops on her face are not only from this artificial sea. She is crying and coming and she has been changed like Scylla in the myth, monstrous from the waist down, her love turned on herself. I cannot remember what secrets or betrayals or accidents are repaid here; what we have done to deserve this. Maybe my half of the punishment is to see her like this. I can't remember if she says my name.
And with that, killingly hot as it is outside, I must mow the lawn. Record temperatures in Boston since the 1920's, I am told. And we haven't broken this planet, have we? No, it's all fine. Everyone knows that global warming is an omen of economic prosperity . . .
Last night's An Ideal Husband was excellent. The play really comes to life in its second half, when all the chararacters' entanglements have tightened on them in unforeseen ways; the five principals are all very good, but Derek Stone Nelson was note-perfect as the drawling, dandyish, unexpectedly levelheaded Lord Arthur Goring, on whose resemblance to Lord Peter Wimsey my father (rather than my mother, whom I'd always known loved the books; that was neat) remarked at the intermission. The production's running only through June 24th, so I strongly encourage any of you who are in the area to pick up tickets before there are no more. They are affordable tickets, too. Don't miss out.
Under the cut is the only dream I remember from last night, for which I intend to hold
greygirlbeast and Sirenia Digest responsible; at least, for the part with the tentacles. But the rest of the sea-stuff is just my natural default.I have been looking for her for months, or the man who I am in this dream has been; sometimes I'm him, and sometimes I see over his shoulder. It's one of these dreams where multiple layers of story fuse, so that I become simultaneously character and spectator and actor, but the kind where I don't know what happens next; so I'm surprised to find her in this glass-walled room full of sunlight and zoological posters on the white-painted concrete wall behind me, the unlocked door where I came in, laminated taxonomies of flounders and starfish and deep-sea monstrosities whose names I don't even know. There is some discussion of reproduction—jellyfish bells, clouds of roe, anemones, how sea urchins mate. Only seagulls cross occasionally the immense, summer-drained blue of the sky beyond the glint of the walls. I can't prove that the men who allowed me into this room are the same ones who made her disappear, who punished her for whatever we both knew that I can no longer remember, even in the dream, but their suits are as neatly, stereotypically black as government agents and they stand at idle attention as I approach her tank. It's set up like an exhibit, the kind where children can pet skates and rays or dip up starfish and sea urchins out of a cold tidepool, but past the dark rocks that jag up out of the salt water in imitation of a sea-chewed coastline, the bladderwrack and mermaid's hair that sway in the constant slap and wash of manufactured waves, she's all that's in there. I can't tell if she recognizes me. She looks thinner, paler, her hair in seaweed strands and glistening as though oiled to her shoulders. She stands to her hips in the surges that boil from between the rocks; when their tide comes in, white water threshes about her waist. But I kneel down, or he kneels down, this man who has been sleeping in doorways for her, I have, and in the seconds when the bubbles clear and before the next wave pours in, you can see through the magnification of glass and water precisely how she has changed—the handful of thin tentacles, seaweed-tough and whippy, ridged like an octopus' suckers and purple as sea urchins' spines, that spring from her sex and double back on themselves to work within her, tirelessly, and the salt drops on her face are not only from this artificial sea. She is crying and coming and she has been changed like Scylla in the myth, monstrous from the waist down, her love turned on herself. I cannot remember what secrets or betrayals or accidents are repaid here; what we have done to deserve this. Maybe my half of the punishment is to see her like this. I can't remember if she says my name.
And with that, killingly hot as it is outside, I must mow the lawn. Record temperatures in Boston since the 1920's, I am told. And we haven't broken this planet, have we? No, it's all fine. Everyone knows that global warming is an omen of economic prosperity . . .
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