Monday, June 08, 2015

Weird dreams of Roky Erickson and Chris Walter

Two dreams, the relationship of which is unclear:

In one, I am hanging out with Chris Walter at his apartment (not actually his apartment, but some other place I cannot identify easily, though the layout is similar to my girlfriend's parents' previous home in Victoria). I look for something to eat in his fridge. There is very little - Jen and Frank aren't around. So we go out, and end up at a bar, where he asks me to ask the barman if they have a certain kind of de-alcoholized beer (and again, though my waking brain knows that Chris' brand of de-alcoholized beer is Beck's, it just substitutes something else out of indifference to details. My dreaming brain doesn't give a fuck about details, apparently). Turns out they don't have his brand, but the barman gives me a strangely shaped "sample glass," more like a dessert cup, with their brand of de-alcoholized beer in it, and asks me if it's okay. I try it, it's fine by me - kind of like a wheat beer - and I turn and tell Chris what it is and he gives me the thumbs up and tells me to get exactly four ounces of it. I have a hard time imagining what that would look like, but I oblige.

Maybe it was four quarts...

That's not the most interesting dream, though it does give me an idea for interviewing Chris about this Real McKenzies' project of his, which I'm supposed to have been working on all the while. So there's that.

In the second dream, I'm at a Roky Erickson concert with my girlfriend (who actually saw Roky with me a couple years ago at the Electric Owl, where I shot this bad video with her phone). There's a second show, billed as "an intimate evening with Roky Erickson," at a different part of the casino, and I go all the way and buy the second set of tickets. We're not sure where to go, but there's a huge long lineup, so we stand in it, until we discover that it's the lineup for the new Spiderman movie. Oops. A helpful casino employee points our way down an escalator and we arrive at a small lounge. Oooh, this really is going to be an intimate evening.

The evening progresses like this: I get angry with the people sitting next to us for making too much noise and poking me carelessly in the side. My girlfriend gets a little worried that I'm going to overdo it (which she's witnessed). Then Roky takes the stage. He does, I believe, "Stand for the Fire Demon," and then, Vegas-style, walks out into the crowd, sitting at one point in my girlfriend's lap as he sings. He looks healthy and beautiful, 30 years younger than he actually is. My girl gushes, says "I can't waste this moment" and takes out her cellphone and takes a close up picture of Roky, who just smiles shyly. He then moves on - I slap him gently on the shoulder and say, "we love you, Rok!"

But Roky has other things in mind. An emcee explains that there are two girls who are being forced to do slave labour at the top of an escalator where mustard, ketchup, and relish have spilled, and we have to help them clean it. Our job is, one-by-one, to slide down the escalator, wiping up the mustard, ketchup, and relish as we go; whoever gets the most on their body has the honour of "liberating" the girls from their slavery - which presumably means replacing them as their slave. Roky, who designed the exercise, looks on happily as we all commence to slide down the escalator, getting coated in mustard, ketchup, and relish, getting as much on our bodies as possible (don't ask me how one slides down an escalator; maybe the stairs were flattened for this particular activity? My brain fudged this detail too). I score 26, which is high - most people get 20 or 21. My girl finishes after me, and remarks that that's the last time she's going to dress up to see a Roky Erickson concert. I was wearing far more casual clothes, which proves to have been a wise choice.

That's about all I remember from the dream.

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