Dreamt

Jascha Hoffman - "Some Hungry Guy"

2011-08-10T02:30:00.000-04:00

2011-05-29T11:36:00.001-04:00

Jeremy Irons stars in a cyclical biopic about my fate as a framed man. In the first act, I am a rich and powerful man, greeted by Miranda Richardson and Kate Winslet in a convertible, an irresistible mother-daughter team. As I slip into the back seat, with my bodyguard next to me in drag, the ladies in the front seat put on their male wigs and mustaches. The next morning I wake up in captivity. Most of my organs have been stolen, and I am trapped in an unknown high rise, at an unknown time and place, facing trial for deeds that cannot be disclosed to me for security reasons. The trial is a sham, but it is not clear who it is intended to deceive. To cement their case, the prosecution shows footage of my career as a rich and powerful man. For the first time I consider my own guilt—or worse, that I may have colluded in my own framing.

2010-10-18T21:11:00.000-04:00

I can't tell whether D is angry or distracted. J turns out to be some fat kid on the street.

2010-10-05T11:45:00.000-04:00

After the threat seminar, L guides us around a deep mud trap. We park at her house, which is filled with fine porcelain relics. I can feel an old kinship coming back strong.

2010-10-01T11:47:00.020-04:00

Tobin leaps through a large glass window. We are shocked; he was not supposed to fall through. The height is a certain killer. When we find him, hours later, in the shallows of the river, he is lucid, though a little subdued, with a hole in the small of his back that is just beginning to bleed.

2010-09-15T18:50:00.000-04:00

Into the harkness with a dungeon.

2010-09-04T10:36:00.002-04:00

It turns out the black dog is not dead; they had just told us that to ease the sting that came with giving her away to another owner. Walking her to the beach, we pass a cat's carcass submerged in the wet sand. Two passenger jets are floating on the stormy tide, with two blue plastic helicopters there to rescue them.

2010-08-26T12:55:00.001-04:00

Party on the submerged airplane wing.

2010-08-24T12:53:00.001-04:00

Hang gliding up through winter crags, I ration eggs.

2010-08-24T12:52:00.001-04:00

Let's talk about the shock of losing my grandmother again.

2010-06-21T01:50:00.001-04:00

"I am your dog," says the body of a woman as it walks from the wreck of an car accident where the corpse of a retriever lies smoldering. "I am your dog."

2010-05-18T09:25:00.000-04:00

When I return from a long early shower, the musicianship class is moving from marketing to promotion.

2010-04-18T13:33:00.002-04:00

At the reception, my mother urges me to take a bite of the brisket Courtney Love has on a styrofoam plate.

2010-04-17T16:23:00.001-04:00

A rhino named Natalie.

2010-01-15T18:40:00.000-05:00

A wake for my grandmother, a month after her death. She lies in a pod, built into a panoramic chamber, her corpse just long flaps of skin. Then the pod closes and I am ushered back in to the party.

2009-11-18T10:45:00.000-05:00

She shoots herself. Once for show, and once for real. And after she shoots herself for real, she shoots you.

2009-11-02T12:51:00.001-05:00

At the shore, I'm combing the surf for mammals taken in by the tide. First a stray possum, then a few kittens pawing out of the wet sand. And behind a sandbar, submerged in shallow seawater, the possibility of a grandmother.

2009-10-20T12:55:00.000-04:00

I walk by a continuing education school where an algebra lesson is underway. The sign outside says: "Regular class: $95. Isaac Asimov, $150." "Might as well spring for the Asimov," I think to myself.

2009-09-25T17:34:00.001-04:00

A red-headed friend sings an anthemic folk song. "It sounds so simple," I say, "but it's nuance all the way down." Most of the songs on her album have faux-naif redundant titles like I WAS A SRIROCCO AT THE ROCKY ROCOCO BAR BEFORE COCO CHANEL WENT CUCKOO FOR COCOA PUFFS. The demos have already been animated with fast bright talking woodland animals. She leaves for the Obama speech but sends a handwritten note inviting me to learn the songs so I can tour with the band.

2009-09-23T17:44:00.001-04:00

A classmate bikes by and yells, "Truce!" I give him the finger and walk into a poetry seminar. The professor is at the blackboard. I dictate a stanza that ends, "Together we could rule the world."

2009-09-23T17:43:00.002-04:00

At the high school assembly a hippie-looking man steps up to the mic to ask a question. "I am Cheeseburger Jesus!" he begins. I move on to the next symposium.

2009-09-09T08:27:00.001-04:00

Grandma got pregnant again.

2009-08-08T13:05:00.000-04:00

In the first of man investments he must believe to be recoupable, a San Francisco tycoon has rented me a rehearsal studio across from the Dudley Co-op, complete with railroad kitchen and upright piano. So I begin to gather some instruments for my first double bill: Jascha vs Jascha.

2009-08-05T12:33:00.000-04:00

Before I can load out my music gear on the steps of the public library, I am drafted into service on a Soviet passenger train. At each stop I switch cars, but the scenarios of compulsory service are unlimited.

2009-06-22T14:49:00.000-04:00

As my hair grows long, I try to recall the term for thinking two things at once.

2009-06-13T09:57:00.000-04:00

Loren shows me a little box on the floor that serves as a sort of AutoTune for the baroque musician. After setting the key and pitch, one can chose from a dozen kinds of tuning: just intonation, Pythagorean intonation, equal temperament, wolf temperament, etc. Then when you plug your electric viol into the box, he explains, no matter how out of tune you play, what comes out is purely consonant. Brilliant, I say.

2009-06-12T09:35:00.000-04:00

At the art cult, which I assure my friend Jesse we are just visiting for the evening, everyone is paired up and made to look identical, then set loose on the dinner party. Jesse drives back up the hill to his recording studio, while I am swept up in the action. I stay for several weeks, becoming more and more curious about the ultimate aims of this band of gypsies, and worrying that my straight demeanor will cause the the others to assume I am planning to betray them to the public. When Jesse returns, restless to get back to his final mix on the hill, I can tell that I have already been converted.

2009-06-05T08:59:00.000-04:00

Hiking back out with my parents and brother, who explains his theory of natural selection in meticulous detail, until I get it. Wearing only my undershirt in the trailhead parking lot, I spot a cop car.

2009-06-04T09:51:00.000-04:00

Driving a city bus home along mountain roads. I'm the only passenger, sitting about halfway back on the left, but I'm also the driver. It's an exhausting task, this backseat driving. After taking the wrong fork I am forced to stop at a steep rest area. That's where I see a long and knobby beaver, exhausted, splayed out in front of the coach. He fidgets, not quite dead from exhaustion. This is my pack animal, I think, as the other buses gather below.

2009-05-25T19:16:00.000-04:00

Step away from a marathon art party to join my brother at a well-lighted ATM. It's actually more of a slot machine, with a deck of old cards stashed where the deposit envelopes should be. As he locks in a solid win, I wander past a storefront that has been rented to promote a forthcoming novel by a Salvadoran writer. I pay it the highest tribute I can muster at that moment: urine.

2009-05-25T19:11:00.000-04:00

The only passenger in a silent jet that must circle around the block hundreds of times to burn off fuel before it lands. On each circuit we pass through the breezeway of a white mansion where a conference is underway. I have been invited to speak.

2009-05-14T13:26:00.000-04:00

Sitting on a top bunk listening to the desert stories of a group of travelers who seem to know one another. I stay silent for lack of context. During a lull, I finally squeeze out a question about the terms of engagement in this group. And the red-haired leader, a married woman just a few years older than me, climbs on top of me so that her hair brushes my lips. Our eyes locked, she tells the group to take a short break.

2009-05-13T08:53:00.002-04:00

An exhaustive self-inventory, muttered into the eternal dictaphone.

2009-05-11T08:53:00.011-04:00

Man leaps down from the balcony of the theater, climbs over rows and rows of occupied seats, to bring an accusation to the stage. But the ceremony is already breaking up. Repeat.

2009-05-04T09:41:00.000-04:00

After a harrowing walk on the seaside hills, I don't want to venture out again, even in the armored terrain vehicle. But someone has to go foraging for provisions. The next morning I want to play keys with the full summer camp band. But to truly feel rhythm, I'm told by Bjorn, I must learn to breastfeed a child—or at least a piglet. Convinced I'm working at a disadvantage, I resolve to suck an egg—or at least a kiwi.

2009-05-03T11:00:00.000-04:00

Perched on the roof of our barn, working through a twelve-course tasting menu, slightly worried about the fall, while the chef's children deliberately perch on the gutter and slip themselves down.

2009-04-29T09:18:00.000-04:00

Visiting my old elementary school, I tell a ten-year-old girl that her method of inquiry is much like mine. She seems bored. We are marched into the hall and lined up single file to watch a group of children eat their lunches. Evidently our own needs have been neglected. On the way to the bathroom, which is nothing more than a ceramic urinal, I complain about the headmistress to my mother.

2009-04-25T10:56:00.000-04:00

Perched on a billboard, the editor and the intern perform a one-act riddle about homemade explosives at the hospice. It ends with not one bang but two: BANG, BOOM.

2009-04-22T09:14:00.000-04:00

Ramon and Jessica ask me to play a short solo on a many-colored glockenspiel. My heart lifts.

2009-04-20T08:48:00.000-04:00

Stepping off the company plane, I must park a Volkswagen Golf.

2009-03-05T03:09:00.000-05:00

There are two ways to use a crowbar. You can use the bent side to knock a person out, and you can use the forked side to puncture the skin and even the guts. To my horror, which I suppress, the man in the gray suit selects a homeless man and, behind his double-parked luxury car, does both.

2009-02-27T12:55:00.000-05:00

On the airplane, we turn back just after liftoff. I blame the two young black men seated behind me, inexplicably and shamelessly.

2009-02-22T21:03:00.000-05:00

Flashing back through the last thirty years of my life in five-year increments, until I vanish at the moment of birth. Then flashing forward through the rest of my life in five-year increments, until, at the great age of 85, I give up.

2009-02-16T12:56:00.003-05:00

A red rubber ball moving through an invisible Rube Goldberg machine.

2009-02-07T13:03:00.003-05:00

As a rookie fact-checker for the Brown alumni magazine, it takes me forty-five minutes to discover that the name of the university president has been misspelled. But I do get some respect for it.

2009-02-06T12:26:00.018-05:00

We sneak into the rotunda to catch a few seconds of the film, which is a Victorian farce. On the way out we see dozens of keystone cops and button-down nurses preparing for their entrance. The theater manager whispers, "Some sort of a ruse." Later, after crossing a street that turns out to be a highway, I come upon a stranded tanker trailer and police car. Each are hoisted and dragged by its own swarm of half-naked partygoers who have worked their way underneath, like ants under a banana. It seems to be a movement. Not wanting to get involved, especially after seeing a real tank around the corner, I climb in a large wicker basket headed for the roof. A few moments of high-definition lucidity as I float aimlessly up, sinking from time to time, powered only by commitment to the dream, in what must be a tenement alleyway at dawn.

2009-02-03T18:38:00.013-05:00

After I swipe my farecard in the subway, but before I can get through the turnstile, two black teens push past me coming the other direction. I am intimidated so I sneak in through the gate and ask the Arab attendant to let me pass. Since he ignores me I tell him a folktale in French, which pleases him. It's a few minutes before I realize that he doesn't want anything from me, that I am free to go.

2009-01-31T11:45:00.012-05:00

During the ice storm Loren and I wait over an hour for a table at the rickety thirty-story hotel. When the music is almost over we are led up the stairs to an elevator which opens on a tiny balcony with a table for two which opens on a musty twenty-nine-story atrium. The food never comes, and when it does there is only bacon and potatoes, no eggs. So I strike out into the storm with a mechanized sled that has a weedwacker attachment to smooth down the ice in front. At the coast I ditch it for a sort of waterbound snowboard which, as a favor to the owner, I ride along the frigid coast to the depository. No choice but to walk back.

2009-01-13T10:26:00.000-05:00

Young Indian couple in separate cardboard boxes on the highway at night. As I haul them to the median it becomes clear that they are speaking perfect English on their cell phones. They are grateful for the service. Later, I find that dream-reading is a reliable source of typos.

2009-01-12T09:15:00.001-05:00

Target practice from the chairlift.

2009-01-11T10:24:00.000-05:00

As my family waits in bulkhead seats on an interplanetary flight, I take the next shuttle to their craft, but am stuck in the pod with a man who must be some kind of spy. I ignore him.

2008-12-30T07:53:00.000-05:00

On a walk in the park we see fuselage and tail of a commercial jetliner, moved chaotically by currents and gusts, severely close to the ground, with a team of engineers stationed on its surface to keep it from crashing by holding on to some improvised rigging. Clearly many have already died, and many more will soon. We keep walking.

2008-12-28T09:15:00.000-05:00

Started off innocent enough, but the end is not worth repeating.

2008-12-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

Inviting my grandma to a party across town but we can't get her past the door to her apartment. Later Rafe's new Slovenian girl explains the difference between commitment and a bicycle.

2008-12-25T17:38:00.001-05:00

A wall-to-wall collage of film festivals.

2008-12-24T09:26:00.000-05:00

Down the cliffside in a crowded Brazilian gondola, it occurs to me that flip-flops would have been a better choice than the rubber flippers I am wearing. Later, President-elect Will Smith leads us in battle against the insurgents.

2008-12-08T10:57:00.000-05:00

A black-hat Jew teaches me how to imitate the brass-band music emanating from a tiny, tinny Victrola.

2008-12-08T09:54:00.000-05:00

A platform that sweeps me up into the grassy hills and out over the bay, where it deposits a narrow wooden buoy among the waves. So this is reality television.

2008-11-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

Stepping off a long dirt road, I am forced to tell a nymph to buzz off before stepping onto the subway, which is actually a railcar going the wrong way. She is not pleased.

2008-10-28T11:53:00.000-04:00

I forget to rent a car for my brother's wedding, and it's pouring, so I wait for an elevated light rail through the Berkely hills, but since it doesn't come, I take another train from the same platform, which lets me off in the hills of Kensington, where I wander for a while, drenched, until I find my cousins Anna and Jesse, both younger than I remember them, and reversed in birth order, but very understanding, and dry.

2008-10-26T23:29:00.000-04:00

Buying a third baguette for Grandma at the bread counter. She greets a train labelled SPENCER in green lights.

2008-10-24T09:36:00.000-04:00

Steve is expecting me but I put off the trip so long I have to wait for morning. Once there, after nibbling my own finger clippings in his kitchen, I lop off my own thumbs, painlessly. But then, for fear of disturbing him in his deicate state, I cover the tiny cold thumbs with starch white paper.

2008-10-19T09:27:00.000-04:00

Inkjet drafts of unfinished poems on the Girls in Trouble table.

2008-10-18T09:32:00.000-04:00

Dad is sure we'll be rained out, but Mom knows it will take the pressure down.

2008-10-06T09:18:00.000-04:00

The jeu de paume court is taken by my brother, so I browse the foreign language aisle and get distracted by the work of a pair of surreal Turkish cartoonists, brothers, each one trying to outdo the other.

2008-10-03T10:36:00.000-04:00

Just before bed, I decide to order in for some hard drugs. They are are shaped like fountain pen cartridges with acupuncture quills at the end. My lover asks me to cancel the order, but I remain calm. She leaves.

2008-10-03T08:55:00.000-04:00

The flight to the Holy Land is full--and they have no idea where they're going.

2008-10-02T09:21:00.000-04:00

Off a cliff in a chair and down to the sea below.

2008-10-01T09:23:00.000-04:00

At the fair, some woman has filled a set of giant Coke bottles with plastic straws in different numbers and arrangements, making for a kind of bottleneck pan orchestra.

2008-09-29T09:30:00.000-04:00

From the high cliff we see the whole school swimming out to sea. My brother leaves for the airport with a cassette mix I made him, grumpy. Earlier, grandma doesn't grasp that the hotel banquet is her own 90th birthday.

2008-09-28T09:11:00.000-04:00

A traveling love affair with Audrey, from which I wake to tell the betrayal to my ex, who takes it hard, from which I wake again to a hillside bus with Alicia, with whom I must perform in an hour, after the driver takes my coin on exit, with no preparation, only a setlist and a settling calm.

2008-09-27T09:13:00.000-04:00

We cannot pack our baby wallabee, I am told, although on inspection he looks more like a baby lemur. So myself and my brother, and my best friend and his brother, we prepare to roll out in a rented minivan. I invite crazy Andrew but it is clear he is scared to leave home. Earlier, restless sleep beside the father as the brother waits outside.

2008-09-23T09:29:00.000-04:00

I will my way through a sequence of book covers, each with misspellings more egregious than the last.

2008-09-22T09:38:00.000-04:00

My lover dreams that, in the deli aisle, we see a die-cut hash mark made of beef, shrink-wrapped. "Meat trivet," she tells me urgently. Then she seems to wake and tell me, once again, "Meat trivet". When she really wakes up, she decides to tell me everything.

2008-09-21T09:31:00.000-04:00

Through an old-fashioned front-loading washing machine's glass door there stretched TIDE-like capitals pronouncing: DETERGENT JOURNALISM. Just another foul-mouthed anthology from the folks at Harper's, I assume.

2008-09-20T20:35:00.000-04:00

A gaunt Nordic man pulls me aside in a strange mix of begging and robbery. Later, my lover tells me she is trying to be tender now because it will hurt less later.

2008-09-20T09:33:00.000-04:00

Woken by a wash of light, I squint my way to the underwear drawer to dig out a red sleeping mask, then stoop back to bed. Woken by light, and realizing I had been dreaming, I dig out a red sleeping mask and fall asleep. Woken by light, dig the mask, fall asleep. Light, mask, sleep. Light, mask, sleep. Until finally I just bury my head under the pillow and try not to dream.

2008-09-17T09:14:00.000-04:00

At my Sunday School class, which is now all grown up, I have forgotten how to plug in my keyboard, and don't know the songs, so I never start the set.

2008-09-10T10:24:00.001-04:00

A sea voyage in fragments.

2008-09-08T15:23:00.001-04:00

My mother tells me that her father died. "When?" I ask. Twenty minutes ago. She didn't know she was supposed to tell me. Later, I notice that the fall issue of the New York Review of Books has a full-page ad for candy on the cover. "I know exactly how this happened," I announce. No one asks.

2008-09-05T08:05:00.000-04:00

My father convinces me to postpone my trip to travel with him on Sunday. This allows me to put on a fashion preview for my grandmother.

2008-08-25T10:39:00.001-04:00

I wake to a Siamese kitten on the windowsill, five stories above a Brazilian slum, hissing at a little tropical bird.

2008-08-25T10:30:00.002-04:00

We huddle in pairs on the floor. The next morning there are stiff corpses on the deck, lined up head-to-toe with twine. They have been killed by the gentle whip that tickles. We could have spoken up to save them. Instead we lie to the investigators and tell them our parents did it.

2008-08-25T10:28:00.001-04:00

He jumps up with red bands along his stretchy yellow legs. It turns out my brother was right.

2008-08-09T09:46:00.002-04:00

The tiniest studio apartment in purgatory, which is essentially a toy kitchen covered by a loft bed, belongs to the same woman who offered to give me a voice lesson.

2008-07-28T08:32:00.003-04:00

Chasing a gelatinous black toad through the house where I grew up, until I trap it between two hats and proudly present it to Loren, who points out correctly that it is actually a venomous scorpion. He scolds me for not killing it immediately, which I then do. My father lives upstairs.

2008-07-26T09:40:00.001-04:00

Late, at the wrong track, at the wrong station, with the wrong ticket, to the wrong city of Boston, but I persist in search of the right train.

2008-07-12T10:02:00.001-04:00

Down in the goathouse.

2008-07-10T10:02:00.001-04:00

At the sanatorium of dreams, no one has insurance. I'm told that the line marked "Nightmares Only" will be shorter. When my turn comes, I shout up to an unseen woman on the mezzanine. She tells me to keep on dreaming and come back next week.

2008-07-04T06:58:00.002-04:00

Test tube poured on the rest room floor.

2008-06-23T10:44:00.001-04:00

I notice that the new issue of Wired magazine comes bagged with collectors' edition of the new Adrian Tomine novel, in sizes ranging from two inches to fourteen inches across, with cover price varying accordingly; a brilliant fundraiser. Later, we are seated directly to the side of the stage where we can see nothing. Waiting for the curtain to rise, I conceive a new instrument: half autoharp, half accordion. Its chord buttons mute some strings and also push air from bellows through metal reeds. The result is a bright sweeping plucking, or a sonorous wheezing, or both at the same time.

2008-06-23T10:30:00.002-04:00

In an apology for the practice of self-delusion, I lead a tour of the dorms. At first the crowd seems sympathetic to my explanation that in even the most rational society, harmless misperceptions will accrue to large-scale fantasies. To restrict naive lying would be to curtail basic rights, I say. A man who looks like Alan Dershowitz is not convinced: establish a system of incentives that will guide us toward the truth, he says. All else would be mere chicanery.

2008-06-21T07:14:00.000-04:00

Mistakenly fertilized by a coworker, I quit and consider my options.

2008-06-20T10:16:00.002-04:00

After a border collie knocks a slow softball pitch out of the park, we are forced to look for a designated hitter. Cut to an aerial pan over a row of bodies at the morgue that settles on the bloodied face of former president Richard Cheney.

2008-06-10T10:35:00.002-04:00

The whole extended family tames and then swims with a benevolent swarm of amphibious dinosaurs as I look on from a vertiginous overpass.

2008-06-04T17:17:00.002-04:00

My elder cousin tells my grandfather that her newborn son will be a rabbi. As he takes in the news, his face grows flush with a kind of chubby eagerness, and I assume he will live forever.

2008-06-02T11:31:00.002-04:00

At the beach, which is more like a desert, we have left unattended on our blanket a pile of three manuscripts, the topmost of which is an unpublished essay by Garry Wills with a title something like, "VIOLENT CRIME: WHY WE CANNOT KNOW WHAT WE KNOW, BUT WE DO KNOW THAT WHAT WE KNOW IS EITHER HARD TO KNOW OR UNKNOWABLE." While we are busy chatting, a wiry Algerian nonchalantly walks over out blanket and takes the pile of manuscripts to his extended family a few feet away. When I walk over to confront him, he returns with one silent finger extended like a gun.

2008-05-26T11:33:00.002-04:00

Full-fledged patent-ready business concept, vanished. Later, a canal-based performance of King Lear suspended several stories over a fresh-water reservoir. I miss most of the rehearsals but crawl on just in time for opening night.

2008-05-21T08:48:00.002-04:00

Duped into sharing a hotel room on the 18th floor with the editor in chief, I have to pretend not only that I've read the article on Lincoln and Obama, but that I understood it, and beyond this, that I LIKED what I understood. Exhausted, I take a van ride with friends to an oceanfront fountain. Later I call for our annual air-conditioning and heating duct cleaning, but I've been put through to a Greek restaurant, whose waitress says she'll send one of the busboys anyway to see what he can do. Dina just barely waits for me to finish before heading out the door: after all, I'm twenty minutes late again.

2008-05-20T08:47:00.000-04:00

Green, actual, point-blank Guatemala.