Dream Log: Keanu Reeves/Siddhartha/High-Powered Lawyer

I dreamed I was Siddhartha, the prince in India who was going to renounce his wealth and become the Buddha; and also Keanu Revves;

 

and also a high-priced lawyer in Manhattan. I moved back and forth from the prince's ancestral palace in ancient India to present-day Manhattan, but after a while I stayed in Manhattan. The ancient prince was about to leave his family's palace to wander and seek enlightenment, and the attorney was about to leave his wealth and position behind to do the same. Ray Liotta was also in both realities: in ancient India he was one of the prince's most loyal servants, and in present-day Manhattan he was the attorney's loyal assistant.

The differences between the two times and places seemed unimportant. In both, Ray was very upset that Keanu was about to leave. "Let me come with you," he asked, not for the first time.

"We've been through this," I/Keanu/Siddhartha answered. "I need to go alone."

"I'm going to miss you."

"I'm going to miss you, too," I said. "But, to some extent, we can choose whether missing someone is painful. We can choose to be happy thinking about what was good in that other person." (I have no idea whether any part of this post resembles Buddhism in the slightest. I have no wish to offend Buddhists with this post.)

I also reminded him that Maura Tierney, another attorney in the firm, was staying. Ray liked her a lot.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was/was playing a defendant represented by the firm, a whistleblower who had exposed very bad things done routinely by a very big company, charged with criminal theft of documents belonging to that company. It was late afternoon, the jury was about to return. The other attorneys were already in the courtroom. Almost the entire firm was in the courthouse except for me. I was going to set out on my quest for enlightenment after the verdict. I rushed over to the courthouse, and then realized that I had neglected to put on a shirt.

Maura Tierney had a car and drove me back to the firm. By the time I was properly dressed, multiple texts had infomed us that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been declared innocent, so instead of rushing back to the courthouse, Maura and I waited for everyone else to join us at the firm for a party. Caterers began to arrive and set up shop. It was getting dark. It was one of those old Manhattan offices with a lot of exposed hardwood.

I said to Maura, "You know, Ray's crazy about you." By the way that she blushed and looked away, smiling, it seemed that the feelings were mutual. Which in turn made it seem that right now, with a party in celebration of having won a good fight about to get underway, would be an excellent time for me to go. I slipped out via the stairs and the alley. It was cold, my breath billowed out in big clouds. On the sidewalk and out in the street people were in a big hurry, typical for Manhattan. I, on the other hand, didn't know where I was going, so it made sense for me to just stand there, except to jump up and down when I needed some warmth. After a while I decided to turn left. Left was east. I started walking east on 42nd Street.

Dream Log: Knocking Around In Los Angeles

At the beginning of the dream Philip Seymour Hoffman and an actress and I were working on a scene in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. But soon the Paul Thomas Anderson movie had vanished and we were just three people at night somewhere in greater Los Angeles in a place that looked like it might have been a private college. Lots of ivy. I had gone from an actor in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie to being homeless.

Hoffmann had a car, and he said, "-- well. I'm outta here. Unless somebody needs a ride? I'm going downtown." The actress and I both took him up on the offer of a ride. I hid the fact that I was homeless, implying that I lived downtown. I figured it might be easier to hustle up some means of surviving downtown than out here in the boonies. As we drove off Hoffmann asked me where I lived downtown. I don't know LA very well and I couldn't think of a name of a street downtown, so I made one up: I said, "Grand Bridge Street."

"Never heard of it," Hoffmann said.

"Few have," I replied. "It's a short street about 6 blocks from the Bonaventure, just a couple of blocks long."

"Near the Bonaventure. So you live in a high-rise?"

"Actually, no. Grand Bridge Street" -- I almost forgot the street name I had made up -- "is surrounded by high-rises, but it's all very old buildings. The building I live in is condos now, but I think it was a hotel originally. I'm judging by the size of the lobby."

"Was it possibly a townhouse to begin with? Single family?"

"I've wondered that myself. I don't think so. I think a townhouse would've had higher ceilings."

I had been thinking about how Hoffmann's character in The Talented Mr Ripley, convinced -- accurately -- that Ripley was some sort of imposter, had sadistically questioned Ripley, played by Matt Damon, as to just who he was and what he was up to. But now it occurred to me that the real Hoffmann seemed quite nice and not suspicious of me. Also it occurred to me that Ripley was covering up crimes like murder and fraud, while I was covering up homelessness, which at the present time is actually not a crime in every part of the US. In my waking life I have at times -- some times when I was homeless and some not -- pretended I belonged somewhere when I didn't. Not in order to commit what most people would consider crimes, but, for example, in order to use a bathroom when I was homeless because I didn't want to urinate or defecate in the street. Maybe it's a professional area where everyone in the place is supposed to be wearing an ID card at all times and I don't have a card.

I wonder what they thought of me. Maybe some of them noticed, consciously or subconsciously, my lack of an appropriately-displayed ID.

Maybe some of them quite rightly surmised that I was a homeless person who would rather not relieve himself outdoors, and had no problem with that. Maybe some were concerned about my well-being, for no other reason than that I was a human being who might be having problems, and were ready with helpful advice and even more, if the opportunity arose to help. There are such people. Unfortunately, in most places there is not an ID system in place to distinguish them from the ones who would like to have homeless people arrested, for trespassing, or for any other reason or excuse which might present itself.

When I was homeless I spent a good deal of my energy and thought trying not to appear homeless: by washing and brushing my teeth as often as possible; by wearing clothes which were as clean as possible -- and also, in some cases, by not telling the people with whom I socialized that I was homeless. I was very anxious to avoid awkwardness. I honestly don't know, in retrospect, if greater openness about my homeless status would have helped me, hurt me, or had little effect on my well-being.

When I go into a place without an ID where everyone is supposed to have ID's, I act as if I belong there, as if I run the place. The theory here is that people will notice my bearing, and so have little attention left over to notice the lack of an ID, or figure I was a big shot who didn't want to be bothered right now about his ID because he had important things to do.

I also don't do disruptive things like peeing all over the restroom floor or raiding a refrigerator -- things which might cause ID's to be examined more closely.

This seemed to work in the dream when we stopped before we got downtown so that I could go into a place I didn't belong in order to take a pee: Someone saw me. I heard him start to approach me to ask me who I was and what I was doing, and then stop when I ignored him instead of looking up nervously. I heard him stop, and then turn and go away, as if he was thinking, Well, I guess he belongs here.

Repeatedly, I was in the men's room in that place -- seemed to be a station in the electric grid -- and wanted very much to pee, but couldn't. Eventually I figured out that this meant that I needed to wake up and go pee.

After I got back to sleep I was in downtown LA the next day, on a sunny morning, and it seemed I was no longer homeless, but running a very successful one-man business making head shots and resumees for actors. In the course of that one morning my business grew so much that I had to expand, hire more photographers and rent a bigger office. Then someone offered me seven figures to buy the whole business, and I gladly sold out, because, although it was far from the worst work in the world, it was not really what I wanted to do. Homeless to 7 figures net worth in less than 12 hours in LaLa Land.

I DON'T Think Our Culture Lets Celebrities Get Away With A Lot --

-- *shielding myself from the pelted rocks and garbage* -- that's right, that's what I said. I'm used to idiots getting happy every time they hear about a celebrity getting arrested, and assuming they have every right to know the salary of every professional athlete in the US, and not thinking about how convenient that is for the owners of professional sports teams, and related parasites like shoe companies and college and high school athletic departments. The way most fans fixate on the money being made by the athletes, without whom, of course, sports would not exist, very conveniently prevents them from even wondering how much money the team owners and the other parasites make. Great scam for the parasites. They don't have their financials in the headlines. Would you like it if your salary were published as if the public had a right to know what it was? I'm used to people who haven't spent a half-hour on their feet or eaten six ounces of vegetables in the past month, and who therefore look like Jabba the Hut, nastily mocking the looks of, oh, say, Scarlett Johansson or Matthew McConaughey. I'm used to loathesome little worms who have absolutely no sympathy for people who literally cannot step outside without being swarmed by the press, and who literally can't throw anything away without some creeps pawing through it -- I'm used to all of that. I don't like any of it but I'm used to it. But this screed about supposed privileges of celebrity by a certain Rev. Galen Guengerich, rife with leering fantasies of celebrity appetites and allusion to Greek tragedy, took even jaded me aback. Dixit Guengerich:

"this tendency to excuse libertine excesses by talented people inverts our moral hierarchy"

What?! Did I just slip into a time warp to the 1890's? Demon rum, "libertine excesses" and "our" moral hierarchy? Really? Rev Guengrich, you Unitarian member of the Council on Foreign Relations you, why don't you ask Robert Downey, Jr, to name one celebrity you didn't, just how this "buying your way out of trouble by being famous" thing works. (I realize you probably won't ask him, not F2F anyway, but if you do, and you're not frail or particularly small, I hope he punches you in the face!) (And it's very selfish of me to wish that, because if he punched you, Downey, with his long criminal record, would probably serve 30 days or more.) To name a celebrity you did name, why don't you ask Roman Polanski about the things he's gotten away with, the next time he's in NYC. Oh, that's right -- he hasn't been in the States since 1977, and probably won't be coming back soon, because the cops here still have a hard-on for him. To name two more people you named, why don't you ask Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Winehouse about the stuff they got away with -- oh, that's right, you can't, can you. You could ask Lindsey Lohan, who went from being crazily adored to pathologically hated in such a short time that it makes me worry for Jennifer Lawrence, how being a big shot made her impervious to anorexia -- no, wait, don't ask her that. She almost died from anorexia.

But you're right, of course: only showbiz stars abuse alcohol and other dangerous drugs, molest children, starve themselves and crash their cars. No, wait, that's not right at all. It's gibberish. Everything you're saying is gibberish. "We" don't have a "moral hierarchy," you and I. We have two very different ways of regarding morality. And we're only two people. And the 3rd-to-last sentence of your screed is so garbled that I don't know whether you're condemning American Hustle and Wolf of Wall Street as "glorification of exercises in excess," or praising them because their "excess" is "somehow redeemed or shown to be destructive." Do you? In any case, it's great to see that someone is on the case, that someone has not allowed himself to be distracted by things like real violence and racism and climate catastrophe with attendant famine, and instead is zeroing in on the true danger of our time: naughty movies. And don't you worry about a thing for yourself personally, you're going to be just fine: if those gigs with the Unitarian Church and the Council on Foreign Relations don't work out, there will still be many a street corner in Knoxville and Atlanta and Topeka and Boise where you will be able to thump a Bible and fit right in.