April 7, 2020, DC> Guess all this dream archiving is inducing REM activity... last night we was a wedding organizer in Σum Asian country. We had no clue what we were doing + din’t even speak the language. There was a long elaborate bridal train/procession that we had to coordinate passing thru a crowded market. We got to these spiral stairs + got blocked, had to stand in a Q. The wedding reception was on the top floor + folks in line seemed to resent the wedding party people as decadent elitists. If we tried to get by or say we was going up they would say “well la di dah, aren’t we all?” We told 1 woman we was the wedding planner + she said we shd be up there, that we should say sumping, but we din’t speak the language + din’t want to attract attention to ourself. 

> Then we was walking along railroad tracks + there were these crazy hill-billies driving by in a beat-up pickup. They stopped to harass some family out for a walk + we noticed 1 of them had a gun so we yelled to the family. The guy (wearing overalls + a straw hat) said it was just a toy + tried to do that military twirl + dropped the rifle + it went off + the family started screaming + the hill-billy said he was just joking. We started to run, trying to find places to take cover, but it was like once we started to run, it turned it into a sport for him to try to hunt us, so he took chase, taking pot shots at us. We was able to trick him + hide, then jumped on top of him + made him cry uncle. That was all we needed to do... we didn’t call the police or take the gun away. 

> Then we was at the beach w/ sum ppl, don’t really remember who they were but evidently we knew them in the dream. There were also train tracks dat ran along the beach. We had been w/ Kevin earlier but he went to go do something + we agreed to meat up later. We were on the same flight about 5 hours later so figured we shd touch base, but our phone was all weird + we couldn’t figure out how to text him. All the screens had been rearranged + auto-updated w/o us asking + there were all these emoticons + alternate gimmicky things like 3-d analog buttons skeumorphed to make it seem retro. We were wasting a lot of time trying to figure the new phone interface out, navigating thru the screens, then figured we should just call but we couldn’t find the green call button anywhere. Eventually this guy we were with was like, shouldn’t u call your brother? And we said we was trying, but there was no call button. He was messing around w/ our phone + couldn’t figure it out either... we figured worse came to worse Kevin would just take the train to the airport + meet us there. 

> In the ℝeel moondough, we found Sportswriter by Richard Ford in a libuery boox so figured we'd give it a try since seems it's his most famous book. We've read other stuff of his over the years + never really got what the hype was about + now we still don't understand why he's so well regarded... at least back in the 80s he was always lumped in w/ other American greats like Carver, Delillo, McCarthy, etc. But after reading ~50 pgs of Sportswriter we think he's plain boring.

> We also found The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes in a boox + picked it up reluctantly. We never bothered reading Barnes cuz he seemed too mainstream for our tastes, but we found ourselves completely sucked in... maybe it has something to do w/ our age (the narrator is an older clueless loser), or maybe it's cuz Barnes is British so even tho his writing is rather conventional (at his best u might compare him to Coetzee, or Thomas Bernhard) we found it refreshing, especially as we haven't found that many Brits whose writing we admire (besides Ballard). Or maybe it's cuz Camus's claim that the only worthy philosophical problem is suicide is central to the book. Or maybe it's cuz it also dwells on record-keeping + the unreliability of memory: "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." Not a lot happens, mostly the narrator (his thinking dat his epitaph should read: "Tony Webster — He Never Got It" perty much Σum him up) ruminates over trivial details of past fumblings + failures to try to make sense of what his life amounted to. His self-deprecation is not even funny, so not sure why we were even intrigued to keep reading, except that at no point did it feel forced or verbose, Barnes somehow made the mundane compelling thru shear honesty. Or maybe this COVID isolation has maid us despirate for an escape into another moondough other than our one.