![[May I make a request of you, my reader, of whom I am very fond? If you’re on a reasonably high-speed connection, please click the photo above and watch the animated gif I made from ‘My Winnipeg’ before reading the below. You’ll see.]
—
A Final Scene from February 2010, the Month I’m Not Sure I Didn’t Dream
Lots of things happened in February that were dreamlike and uncanny. Many of these things were arm-punchingly wonderful. Unreal city. Others were arm-punchingly terrible/gutting. Between these two poles, middle ground was difficult to locate.
I wish I could tell you about all of the things, or most of them anyway. I want more life. I want more words.
But I didn’t want this fever-dream of a month to end without noting something that happened late last Monday night, after the El Perro Del Mar and Taken By Trees show. After this, maybe the most magical/haunting show of my life (“BLUE MOON”!!!), I decided to take the Clark Street bus home.
Recently a much-threatened-but-never-before-enacted mass transit doomsday came to pass here in Chicago. Operating funds were slashed. This mainly affected the buslines. Post-doomsday, buses come much less frequently, especially in the small hours of the morning. So they are now more apt to be packed, even at hours when they would have been desolate places before.
So Monday night, or Tuesday morning, I wait a long time for the bus to come. Such a long time. This is OK, I am warm from the afterglow of an astonishing show. Finally the bus pulls up. I board, and a wave of heat hits me, first facewise then bodywise. This is the hottest bus I’ve ever been on. And everyone on it—there is scarcely an open seat—is in their nod, drifting off. Such a hot bus. Everyone so sleepy. Sleeping riders sleeping hotly, in their nod, in their drift. I take a seat and watch them, marveling. It is almost precisely like all the interstitial train scenes in My Winnipeg, the movie that has haunted my February. Nodders surround me. Sleeping riders nodding.
I wrote those words as an outside observer, which strongly suggests I wasn’t sleeping myself. But what I felt most strongly was a sense of connectedness with all these swaying sleepers. What I thought was: Maybe I am sleeping too. Maybe each individual sleeping on this bus is dreaming themselves awake, dreaming themselves watching the others sleep. Maybe we were all calling this reality into being, making it manifest.
Did the bus have some leak in its exhaust system? Was this some collective gas-vision we were all having, nothing more than the play of carbon monoxide molecules on brain molecules?
So warm, so drowsy, swaying together.
These are the kinds of weird thoughts one has in February, somehow both the shortest month, and the longest month. One wants March to arrive, to break the spell, to wake one up, yet one also doesn’t.](http://assets.fallingandlaughing.com/movies/my_winnipeg_sleepy_train.gif)
[May I make a request of you, my reader, of whom I am very fond? If you’re on a reasonably high-speed connection, please click the photo above and watch the animated gif I made from ‘My Winnipeg’ before reading the below. You’ll see.]
—
A Final Scene from February 2010, the Month I’m Not Sure I Didn’t Dream
Lots of things happened in February that were dreamlike and uncanny. Many of these things were arm-punchingly wonderful. Unreal city. Others were arm-punchingly terrible/gutting. Between these two poles, middle ground was difficult to locate.
I wish I could tell you about all of the things, or most of them anyway. I want more life. I want more words.
But I didn’t want this fever-dream of a month to end without noting something that happened late last Monday night, after the El Perro Del Mar and Taken By Trees show. After this, maybe the most magical/haunting show of my life (“BLUE MOON”!!!), I decided to take the Clark Street bus home.
Recently a much-threatened-but-never-before-enacted mass transit doomsday came to pass here in Chicago. Operating funds were slashed. This mainly affected the buslines. Post-doomsday, buses come much less frequently, especially in the small hours of the morning. So they are now more apt to be packed, even at hours when they would have been desolate places before.
So Monday night, or Tuesday morning, I wait a long time for the bus to come. Such a long time. This is OK, I am warm from the afterglow of an astonishing show. Finally the bus pulls up. I board, and a wave of heat hits me, first facewise then bodywise. This is the hottest bus I’ve ever been on. And everyone on it—there is scarcely an open seat—is in their nod, drifting off. Such a hot bus. Everyone so sleepy. Sleeping riders sleeping hotly, in their nod, in their drift. I take a seat and watch them, marveling. It is almost precisely like all the interstitial train scenes in My Winnipeg, the movie that has haunted my February. Nodders surround me. Sleeping riders nodding.
I wrote those words as an outside observer, which strongly suggests I wasn’t sleeping myself. But what I felt most strongly was a sense of connectedness with all these swaying sleepers. What I thought was: Maybe I am sleeping too. Maybe each individual sleeping on this bus is dreaming themselves awake, dreaming themselves watching the others sleep. Maybe we were all calling this reality into being, making it manifest.
Did the bus have some leak in its exhaust system? Was this some collective gas-vision we were all having, nothing more than the play of carbon monoxide molecules on brain molecules?
So warm, so drowsy, swaying together.
These are the kinds of weird thoughts one has in February, somehow both the shortest month, and the longest month. One wants March to arrive, to break the spell, to wake one up, yet one also doesn’t.
