SALGOOD SAM's WORK DIARY

I've been having particularly intensely vivid narrative dreams lately, a bit unusual/rare for me though not unheard of, and even more unusual, they have stayed with me for some time after waking. Last nights was apparently a study in the fallacies & hypocrisies, according to my subconscious, of some of the dominant masculine stereotypes set for me in my youth by the males I was surrounded buy. In this case bikers and pious religious/philosophical idealists. This is a summery picked up by me upon waking, and not something necessarily obvious to me during the dream.

I dreamed that I was at a family reunion. Most of the people there were not actually blood relatives though, I was raised somewhat at a distance from my actual extended family emotionally speaking. My parents were still in the rebellious stage of their lives when they had me so even though I liked my Grandparents as a kid the tensions of their relationships with my parents coloured my relationships with them and my other relatives. My father was frequently battling with his mother and had all but disowned his dad (those two were divorced as well and estranged at the time). My mother was still butting heads with her mother as well, and the emotional bonds of her clan have always struck me as somewhat tenuous, possibly due in part to her fathers' officorial outward aloofness/seriousness/distance. To make things worse, they themselves, my parents, broke up with each other when I was 3. So their respective best friends were our extended family more than my exceedingly large clan of uncles cousins grand”blank”s and other blood relatives, many of whom I never met anyone much more than once in a given 4 years.

So I dreamed that I was at a family reunion, no actual people from my life there but stand-ins for a lot of the types that would be expected in a Hollywood casting of that crowd of hippies and beats, artists, intellectuals, & activists, outcasts & self styled societal outlaws.

There were a good dozen there but two stayed with me past the fog of dream land long enough to be documented accurately. The Biker and the Religious Philosopher. The second interestingly seemed to be played my a fellow comic artists I made the acquaintance of last fall who is not exactly the person played in the dream, his name was different and the dream persona is nothing like him. But given that: He is a very thoughtful guy who was raised, and I believe still considers himself a Quaker; And that his oeuvre is dream stories; He was a bit of obvious superficial casting by the folks of central casting in dream land. The first was an amalgamation of individuals I have know who fit the type.

The Biker was a Biker, leathers and long hair, no helmet and a loud barking muffler on his hog. A Marblo Man of the first order, self perceived outlaw to the bone.

The origin of this player comes from my father, who himself was a motorcycle mechanic and café racer fanatic (not exactly the biker stereotype of the late 60's early 70's, more like that portrayed by Brando in The Wild Ones but less wild and mixed up) who did business and made friends of sever such individuals. After his early death (on a bike) a few of these guys made a point of checking in on me at least a few times a year to see if I was ok and hang out with me for an afternoon. My many uncles. In truth they were pretty complex bunch of guys. The one true Biker of the bunch was even a bit of an exception to the type. Or more actually, the most true to the myth. A loner with no gang affiliations, truly intellectual and chivalrous, socially both gregarious and shy. But as a kid I was taken with the superficial aspects of these guys, and they became in my mind for a time one of the main templates for masculine roll playing. The other two were Latino Machismo and The Deep Thinker.

In my dream I've forgotten what happen with the Latino player but The Deep Thinker was cast in this case as a religious philosopher. There were a number of these guys in the extended family of friend of my parents I grew up with, many as they aged abandoned the philosophies of there childhoods to adopt Buddhism, Islam or Hinduism, a few were Born Again and a few adopted ideas like Quakerism. There were many Existentialist and other various schools of thought. Some of these guys stuck with it through the years, some didn't. But in there youth they all had fires in their bellies and bright lights in there eyes.

In my Dream both were named James. James(1) the biker was fairly strait forward, a Biker. The masculine loner man's man. James(2) the Religious Philosopher was fairly inventive. Dream land invented ‘the hard way'. A slightly camp neo Christian idea that seemed to be represented by flashes of James2 standing with arms outstretched in a gothic hall surrounded by others in the same pose, standing on a white marble floor with rain/water showering down over them, heads turned up to meat it. This hardly constitutes a philosophy but it was the short form icon provided by my dream.

At the reunion I spent the most time talking with them. It's all mumble now sadly, I recall it being some interesting dialogue. We all ate cheese and crackers, compared notes and told jokes. James2 shared a few insights and James1 contradicted most of them with short whit. Things wrapped up and everyone went there separate ways. The city was a single road that seemed to be a conglomeration of all the main drags of my life. It strikes me as being particularly like the area of the Beaches in Toronto that I grew up in, at the far end of Queen st East. 4 lanes with parking, lots of hills.

At this pint my dream seemed to be making a point. James1 rode off on his bike. After a time his facade started to crumble. I became sensoraly aware of the bike shaking and vibrating under him, rattling itself to bits. This is actually not entirely fiction, old Harleys and other early American hogs ridden by bikers have a big problem with mechanical vibration. But in the dream it was drastically exaggerated, the barking muffler eventually all but fell off and was dragging along behind it, still barking. The chrome flaked and peeled away and the leather dried up and cracked. James1 himself was rattled till his bones became brittle. His insides rotted from fumes and smokes, his outside dried and tanned like a hide, hair bleached and starched and all pretence of masculine untouchable faded to the truth of a lonely old guy with a broken prop. This all passed in time lapse, taking several dream days lasting a few minutes each.

Finally he pulled up in front of a Grocers, dismounted and walked into a door on the left of the shop to enter his home, exiting the dream. Dream logic informs me in advance that the grocer in question has a history of being hyper paranoid about tasters, folks who take a grape or nut to taste, sometimes to check the produce before buying, but certainly often just to eat it. He's taken to carrying a yardstick and wickedly snapping the hand of any offender. Apparently this act of violent revenge deeply offends James2 two, follower of the hard way. So we arms himself with an air BB gun filled with holly host bullets and stands to one side waiting for the Grocer to take his wrath out on some old lady who's overly zealous in checking for the firmness of the avocadoes (in his defence she squashes a few in her hands before he takes action). He takes aim and fires, declaring some sort of righteous sanction of his actions according to such and such deeply held ideal of ‘The Hard Way'. The blessed bullet had a profound effect on the Grocer, laying him low with a wound to the ear.

Time does some funny dream things here and there are some events that follow, not necessarily all having to do with James2 that I've lost the thread of. Eventually we get back to James2 and being righteous he thinks nothing of passing the vanquished Grocers store. Suddenly the Grocers brother in-law comes out brandishing a large revolver and shoots James2 in the chest. This woke me up.

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