Okay, now I'm really having a nervous breakdown. On Saturday Mary calls me and says she went jogging at 7 am and at the corner of Tennesee and Prosser there was a dead, mutilated cat. It had its intestines wrapped around its neck and was laid out on a lawn. The Animal Regulation people show up and says it's the 4th mutilated cat they've found lately. The officer says that the way the bodies are found, it looks like a human is doing the damage but they are still investigating. (He said he thought it might be a cult doing it).The officer takes photos and Mary hears someone coming out of their house saying, "Where's the cat?" Ugh!!!!

I contacted the Westsider (that little newspaper) to prod them to cover this story. The reporter found out that there have actually been 5 cats found mutilated starting June 13th (Friday the 13th). Four were found in the 90025 and 90064 zip codes and one was in Crescent Heights. So, I've been keeping the cats in at night and changed my whole schedule. Milo used to spend all night outside, so the first couple of nights he meowed for hours. I don't think he'll be able to take being kept inside all the time. I'm in a state of perpetual anxiety. I'll probably have to go back on fucking Prozac.

I'm dying in this town!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I couldn't help myself. In light of the imminent conquest of the dollhouse, I have absconded with Doggie and we are blasting off to Kicksville, USA. (I left Edward-Dog behind in the hopes Doggie's absence won't be missed). Doggie is in good spirits and riding the ferris wheel on top of G-ma's barristers bookcase if you ever need him.

Things to be thankful for even though the world is falling apart:

1. People don't get heartworms.
2. The rat Inkblot brought in at 2:45 this morning was not alive.
3. Thai ice coffee exists

To Maggie

Let’s take some time
to revel in our dysfunction
Why not? It’s three in the morning,
The peacocks and mythical rabbits
have absolutely wandered across our doorstep
and made themselves at home,
Despite our misery and baseness
violas and alyssum have sprung up in the refuse,
byproducts of your pain machine

I love you, poor creature,
We have no one else cheering us on
Those that might have are dead or gave up
Our gifted friends are building boring gypsum
mountains of personal achievement
You have a gold vein in your crappy heap of dirt
Get it all -
You can even start writing in the middle of the goddamn notebook
You’re lucky that way

Dreamed my cat, Milo, was an opera star and I had to drive him to various engagements in Germany and France in the middle of the night. In reality, Milo's more of a lounge act. Heh heh.

Jehovah's Nitwits
Dream 10/3/93


I am Dean Martin for the most part. Jerry Lewis and I get off the train in Texas or somewhere wearing black hats. We're either penniless jugglers heading for our gig at the now-cancelled-due-to-weather county fair or escaped convicts that used to be a comedy team travelling incognito.

Some well-meaning Christians have summoned two rabbis to their small town to participate in a religious conference dedicated to reaching greater understanding among the people. The rabbis have missed their stop. One of the smiling red haired Christians sees us sitting on our suitcases.

Jerry starts to have a panic attack, so I try to calm him down and explain how our plight is all a part of chaos, one of the laws of the universe. I get on a tangent. I'm trying to explain fractional dimensions to Jerry and I draw the beginnings of what is called the Koch Snowflake in the dirt, a fractal that initially looks like the Star of David. We're surprised when the Christians mistake us for two rabbinical scholars, but we play along either to con money off them or so that our identities aren't revealed.

In the car, Jerry starts to remember the snippets of Talmud instruction he had as a youth and begins to pontificate, enlightening them on Judaism, throwing in some made-up parables of his own, that to me sound like cleaned up Farmer's Daughter stories, but on another level are curiously insightful and thought provoking. They take to us so strongly that they ask us to sit on a float in their parade.

Being Dean Martin, I'm at the end of my rope and start drinking and fucking all the young women in the town. I'm on top of this somewhat inexperienced naked French girl and I start feeling her up. She's pretty much lying there like a statue while I maul her. She finally moans for me to enter her, not realizing I've just prematurely ejaculated.

Meanwhile, Jerry has found his true calling. He magically disperses an angry mob of antisemites in the town using only his wits and some very wise words. Some of the Christian women in the town witness this and are so struck by him that they convert to Judaism and Jerry starts his own synagogue. He starts to grow a beard and wears his glasses full time.

As for me, I take a few slaps in the face, and end up hooking up with a woman closer to my age who is the proprietess of a restaurant in town with red checkered table cloths. She puts me to work in her garden and I stop drinking. Now months go by when Jerry and I don't see each other.

And we thought nothing could ever break up the act.

Dream 4-30-93

Someone hands me a ten cent copy of the Socialist Worker
and there it is in black and white,
Cat Stevens appearing today and a lot of other words inside a box
For some reason a fatwa has been declared against him by the muslim leaders and he must constantly be on the move
Just like Salman Rushdie, the irony of it
I suppose the publisher figured anyone reading the Socialist Worker would not be an assassin, as capitalist bounty hunters tend not to subscribe.

I sit down in the back of this airport hanger-type place
and wait breathlessly with the rest of the lucky few
who saw the small announcement, and here he comes,
His hair is long and a lot straighter than it used to be and he is answering the grave questions from the grave audience about his plight and after a while, I finally get fed up and yell,
hey, how about a song?
and he begins to sing us a new one
but I've heard it somewhere before
Camel in an egg
Camel in an eggshell

Antidepressant Cocktail

Prozac didn't do the trick
but kept the bottom from falling out I guess
Zoloft made me a robot
Started reading Business Week and couldn't feel
Wellbutrin made me stutter
though my psychiatrist doesn't quite believe me
(it's not on the list of possible side effects)
Like Sees old-time-candies
Desipramine made me hop out of bed
but needed a little more oomph
Dexedrine like a quick cup of coffee
but the kick doesn't last, sustained release or no sustained release
New fangled Celexa and Lexepro
made me too sedate
and cry all the time anyway, what's the point?
Somewhere along the line
Concerta,Serzone, and Buspar,
most chilled my libido along with the ruminations
Ambien, always a delight

Now it's back to Prozac plus a smidgen of three others
The dreams I'm having!
I don't want to wake up
and I feel like killing everybody at the office
Our clients are Bristol Meyers, Eli Lilly, and the rest
They're relying on us to complete their dysphoria research
People say that living well is the best revenge,
but I can't seem to do that
I can get an “A” on any test, but an “F” in life
What will be my vengeance then?

Milo

Did you have a nice time running around in the crazy darkness?

It's such hard work not caring about anyone
So, what a relief for you to be so dear to me
out of all the angels ever bred

At night if I can't be alone,
a sentry watches over the museum in my head
I'm not sure if he's protecting my dreams or just my skull,
but no amount of safety glass, or prescription drugs can turn him off
He's why I never get any sleep at a slumber party
He might be why I wither around attractive men
But he's gotten used to you being close
even though it took a while

If I can't be a worldly success at anything else
at least there's this:

I have a cat loaf
I have an Australia
I believe I've reached a new level of disgust with my own filth

Occasionally I have gentle, angry humans
We're people that for some reason don't seem that special
Sometimes we touch each other like algae floating in the ocean
That's all

Dreamed about getting out Daddy's weak-ass microscope to try to look at the human cell, but all I could find was guinea pig shit smashed onto a glass slide. Opaque guinea pig shit at that!