The Antisocial Socialist

But first, a dream, because it is the best dream I have ever had in my life, and because the book part of this post amounts to "go read it."

( no one wants to read about your dreams )

Onto the book post.

Just finished: Nothing. The book I am reading is 800 pages long.

Currently reading: Most Famous Short Film Of All Time by Tucker Lieberman. This continues to be excellent and weird. Guess what! It was officially released yesterday! So you can also read it.

One of the pitfalls of a lot of very po-mo, clever novels is that they're so intellectual that they don't hit you on an emotional level. This does. It's a very small story—a man gets a strange email and his boss doesn't listen to him. He fails his friend, who asks him to sell a car, and the friend stops talking to him. He tries to act ethically. It never feels like an intellectual, literary exercise—it's grounded very much in queer longing and Millennial despair and it's very affecting.

Anyway. Go read it.

Who is sick of Disappointing Covid Dreams? We are living through times of apocalypse and revolution and I don't know about you, but most of my dreams are too dull to report.

Until they got so gross last night that I almost didn't post this except that my brain tortured me with it and now I'm going to torture you with it.

( TW: disgusting body horror and bodily fluids )

 I was a PhD candidate in Occult Studies. I couldn't find my thesis advisor and needed desperately to talk to him. His work involved regular research trips to Hell, and when I finally tracked him down, he had a scorched-looking woman with him. He introduced her as his new wife—she was an undocumented immigrant from Hell, and we needed to hide her from the authorities until we could claim refugee status for her.

Weirdly, I know exactly what that dream is about, and it's not what you probably think.

 Almost right on schedule, my first back-to-school anxiety nightmare of August. It was not as bad as most, probably because I've been in school-anxiety-mode for a year now and my brain hasn't had a stretch of not being stressed out and anxious. Anyway, it was almost interesting so I'll share it.

First day of class. My classes, as per usual nightmares, were huge, and the kids kept drifting in and out and coming in late and wouldn't stay still or give me their names. One girl had recently lost her brother in a shooting, another had lost her mother three weeks earlier. Her mother's grave was located right beside the classroom, and she had brought several large bouquets of purple lilies that clashed with the red and white flowers on the grave. She kept getting up to shift the flowers around, or curling up in a fetal position to cry.

The principal had decided that class would begin with a personal address from her, and so I was supposed to wait until she arrived to start. But she was late, and the kids were already complaining that they were bored, so I did an icebreaker activity. It was called Millennials Are Killing X and you had to go around a circle and say a thing Millennials are killing and why. For example, "Millennials are killing the housing market because they spend on their money on smashed avocado toast and lattes. I thought it was hilarious but the kids didn't get it, and then I remembered that the Millennials had been years ago and the kids didn't know what they were.

When I was a kid, I used to have a recurring dream about packing a suitcase. That was all there was to the dream—I had to leave my home very quickly, and pack enough to be away for a long time, probably forever—but they always felt ominous. I was leaving in a hurry because I was being forced out of my home, and if I didn't leave, I'd die.

These dreams stopped as I got older, replaced with more traditional anxiety dreams.

Lately, I've been having them again. I blame America.

It's been awhile since my dreams have been properly apocalyptic, but this one made up for lost time.

( cut for the uninterested )

I must be reading too many Left Behind reviews.

( Miss Tabby goes to Heaven )

I had a dream last night about a golem made of cornflakes. I don't remember much else except that his girlfriend eventually came to terms with it because it was better than him being completely dead. Except he was then ground into cornmeal so she tried to at least make a pancake out of him.

A sentient pancake. That fell apart when she put also sentient orange jam on him, because her baking skills left something to be desired.