a most vivid dream

So I'm home for the summer but it's in the early evening and I've just arrived back from the airport and it's orangy sort of night, where it's fading to purple, but not for another hour, so it's still in that pinkish orangish red. I have the rest of my luggage in the car and for some reason, I have 3 grams of weed and two packs of cigarettes and a lighter- I know because my pockets are bulging and I'm pretty conscious about what's in or goes into my pockets.

I walk my house and into my living room and a lot of random people are there, from who knows where. My friend Abha's there for some reason, I don't know why. The orange color seems to have carried in from the outside into the house and it almost feels like there's smoke in the house, but I guess that's the dreamlike state.

Everyone's talking about something as if it's a good thing and I'm not very interested in the conversations going on. I go to my room and discover that it's not my room anymore but like a weird sort of storage room that my parents made. I still have my bed there though. I feel panicked because of that, like because it's become a storage room, sooner or later it'll become full and shove me out.

I decide I need to smoke because it feels like my parents have tried eliminating me out of their lives completely so I go out and I take my dad's car keys. I try driving and I manage it pretty well after driving around the Walgreens I used to hang out at, but the car is malfunctioning and I can't tell which is the gas or break anymore because it's not responding to me. I manage to circle back in the direction of my house but the car is now moving by itself.

Everyone in the house comes out to see me for some reason and I try pulling back into the driveway but I crash into the other cars in there. I crash into them extremely slowly, like when you see sheet metal slowly scrunching up and whining. Like that.

I can feel looks of disapproval coming from my parents so I try to back out and make everything better. Everything the car gets in the way of, it seems to crash into. It's weird. The pedals seemed to be reversed for a second, but they just aren’t responding to me at all. I’m pushing down on them as hard as I can.

I somehow manage to pull up to a deserted curb of a park that I recognize because it's like a psuedo combination of my old elementary school, the end of my house's cul de sac, and an edge with a guard rail where a small creek ran underneath my school.

I'm decide to roll a spliff when I see a rent-a-cop a ways a way and I panic and ditch the spliff off of the guard rail. The car turns into a bed inside a house overlooking the cliff. The man turns into a cleaner. I tell him that my cousin owns this house and he says he knows, he's just cleaning. He goes downstairs and all the while, he's muttering about additional stuff like 'he's the CEO or something'.

Weird dream...

Experiences from the nursing home

I interviewed an elderly man named Robert last week at the Alden Nursing home. He was born in Chicago in 1951 and talked mainly about his time drifting as a hitchhiker with his band during the 60’s. He was very open with me about his personal life, and all of his experiences during his youth.

The things that struck me seem somewhat shallow to myself, but they were the things that I overlooked so easily, such as the fact that there was marijuana in the 60’s and that hippies did in fact smoke it, and that it did not just somehow sprout up in the last decade. It made me put that into perspective and realize which age group was a part of which social movement and I found that interesting. I’m hoping to interview him again next week to find out more about his life.

Alden Nursing Home - Part 1

My experience at the retirement home was very good. I was paired with a man named Milton Doogal. As you all saw, he picked me out of the line-up -- I didn't have to do much work at all. The common question he kept asking me was, "So what else do you want to know?" Immediately followed by him starting into another story without me asking anything. The information that he was spilling ranged back and forth between very personal accounts of life events, and an insider view of living at the home.

When I got it completely typed out, the interview came out to be 10 pages! I'm looking forward to sharing some of Milton's wonderful insight (such as how he made it to 81 and how to keep a successful marriage going) with you guys next week.