HIGH-RISE TAIPEI

Scaffolding.
Monsoon rain whites out city drone.
Unhanging of laundry.
You + I.

FACELIFT

Spring cleaning.
You look fine.
Nice ass.

DEATH IS FREEDOM, GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, POOP MODEL

Era: Stalinism.
I: Russian intelligentsia prisoner of the political sort. Male. I appear like bald Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn just short of his release from the Gulag, gaze stripped of hope and dignity.
Location: Underneath a medieval stone castle immersed in sewage water, accompanied by two others: an unmemorable buddy, and an eccentric Golum-looking fellow.
We are discovered by a lady security guard. They kill off my friends. In a desperate attempt to survive, I climb up a tower, towards an opening. The outside is gray. It is the first time in a long time I see dry and sky. This fills me with such happiness and hope, I refuse to descend to the despondencies of prison. I jump out of the tower, serenely plunging to my death.

Era: Present
Location: Anywhere in Russia, where the youth frolics about bucolic landscapes on bicycles in numbers.
I: Am Johanna. A student of architecture, and I'm assigned to a group of progressive students who make beautiful models of concrete mixed with their own shit. I'm concerned over the best way to transport my shit in ziplock bags from home to studio without gaining stares. My fellow group mates encourage me to sell excess shit to the proletariat for $1.00 in dollars.

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME

FIRST-YEAR ROOMMATES, CLOSET SHOWER, CHILDHOOD HOME

While I take a shower inside the closet of my childhood room*, my first-year roommate is getting prepared for a date with a man she had met in Germany. She asks me all the questions one girl asks another when she anxiously readies herself like a sacrificial lamb for the alter, eyes fixated on nothing more than her own reflection: "Does this swirly top work better than that less swirly top?", "The jeans, should I stuff them inside my boots like a hooker does, or should I not, and be more modest? I should not, huh, since I really like this kid." These are questions of importance if you are still an active participant of the Mating Seasons.

After my roommate leaves*, I am still showering inside the closet**. I receive a phone call from one of Ryan's sister's friends, who screams into my end of the receiver: "How dare you hurt that man!", and hangs up. I furiously punch numbers into the dial-pad. Oh! But the audacity!

Besides being the Summer Olympics opening, dear Reader, 08-08 is also Chinese Father's Day. Thank you for reading.

*For the kill. Rawr.

**Not an easy task; I am trying my best not to spoil my childhood clothes with water.

RAIN, END OF BIKE RIDE, HANDLEBAR TAPE

A chiaroscuro of a dark evening when the sun has just completely set.  My eyes, however, can still make out a little more than just the silhouettes of things.  It had just finished raining or it was about to rain.  There is a group of us, and we had just completed a 60-miles bike ride; I was feeling great.  We waited in a melancholic garden where some goofed by the swing-sets. 

Ryan surprises me when he brings out my bike and I see he has re-taped my handlebars with something brilliant like the grips on the woman's Electra cruiser bike.  It reminds me of a Pucci pattern.

TERRORISTS, INFIDELITY

I fell asleep listening to the evening news.  Two sticky kittens dipped in refined petroleum were found abandoned in the gutters of Taipei.

In my dream, I am perched on a calciferous cliff in San Pedro with my coworker, Uncle F.  We are standing beside his humble, somewhat New English seaside dwelling.  He recounts how his daughter's body was shredded into pieces of detritus by a grenade tossed hastily into the same home by a young terrorist.  I sympathize.  

We crawled on our bellies through subterranean caverns gushing with petroleum.  Above is where irascible terrorists reign.  We crawl into an acquaintance's  small home.  After everyone leaves, I stay and do It with my friend.  It is only afterwards, however, that I remember I am in a relationship. I remember his member is a lesser crimson red.

CRUISE, ACADEMIC LECTURE, BOMB.

My memory begins with a vertical* search for somebody--perhaps somebody Important--inside a lavish vacation cruise ship with chandeliers and sensational staircases.  I remember riding elevators covered in mahogany.  I walk into a darkened lecture room resembling a Spanish-colonial sunroom** where an elegant woman with long brown hair is teaching astronomy.  There is a projector.  My brother's there, so is (a bored) Ryan , as well as some topless collegiate*** boy sporting below-the-knees swimming trunks who shamelessly gropes my legs.  

The subject of the lecture transforms from astronomy to something like A Retrospective: Ethnic Rifts and Civil War in India.  I become a small blonde boy about age 12 flinging molotov cocktails into a gray afternoon, running and hiding for my life... 

*As in I going up then down then up the vessel.

**Like the one from childhood.  La terraza.

***Your cliche.

STROLLING, WAITING.

We were in a group of about +/- 10.

Group noise. 

Languid afternoon just after an indulgent feast.

Broken skies, wet grass, and crisp air.  The way it smells after a gentle tropical shower.

We walked to the family doctor, sitting for hours in a brown and yellow waiting room.  The doctor never arrived.  We leave, and stroll through grass fields flanked by white-washed 12-stories concrete apartments where I took Chinese lessons at Mrs. Zhu's.

We stood below A.H.'s parents' apartment with colorful and brightly lit panelized facades.  They are leaning casually against their balcony, explaining it was they who usurped the doctor away.  Their indifference and inconsideration vexes me.  Someone has a broken hip, you see?

Hi Friends, 

We're back.

WOMAN-KILLER ON THE LOOSE, CITRUS FIELDS

Summer afternoon.

Dust.

Lust.

Lines of orange dwarf trees, perfectly pruned.

Red electric fruit-picking carts with white roofs.  One swerves violently into view, agitating a brown cloud.  Two cops, looking retro and somewhat comedic--except in their own eyes--, don aviators accompanied by ironically misaligned mustaches.  They spill out of the cart: one cop good, the other bad.  The latter chases after a fieldworker in a wife-beater, knocks him over the ground, and threatens to cut the man's throat open.  His cholera is assuaged only by his partner's constant plea to not murder an innocent civilian.  The cop and the wrongfully accused glare at one another in disgust... 

They are looking for my ex-lover who is on a mission of ire to slice me.  The bad cop must really dislike woman-murdering men.

HYDRATE.

It was gray* and there were hills and I was thirsty. I drank glasses and glasses and glasses of water incessantly.

* FUN FACT: GRAY VS. GRAY
Gray: adjective
Grey: verb

NOSE HAIR.

All I remember is: they kept on growing and I kept on trimming away.

HIGH SCHOOL, DEATH BY DROPPING, CHINESE RESTAURANT

I'm in high school again. It's raining and gray. I think I was circling around our library to find parking but there was a school function like a play or a P.T.A. meeting or something. In my dream, space was unnaturally crowded. Then, my mother and brother were hanging precariously onto the edge of a balcony at the school's entrance. I couldn't hold onto them any longer. After a bit of thought and my mother's persistence I decided to fling my body as well into the pit they had fallen into.

I flopped onto a giant egg carton the size of an olympic pool, making a sinister sound like: blop! crunch! My brother had died from the fall. He'd broken his clavicle and bled to death.

Then we went to get some dim sum at a restaurant that once was lacquered red with flowing red curtains. It was softly lit by halogen lamps.

CYCLERY

All I've been doing in my dreams for the past couple of nights is building and repairing bicycles.