Dream Log: Marathon in San Francisco

I dreamed that a marathon was being run in San Fransisco. The route of the race was marked by a series of blue rectangles printed onto the surface of the roads and sidewalks, apparently in some sort of temporary ink, which formed a blue dotted line which one could see for quite a ways ahead. San Fransisco has a lot of long steep hills,

and this race was being run over some of the longest and steepest ones.

One could see the route for a long ways ahead if it wasn't blocked. The problem is that all sorts of things and people were blocking the route. I stood on one hilltop and saw that on the next hilltop, pedestrians were all over the blue dotted line. I ran there and yelled at them to get away from the blue line, that the blue line was the path of the marathon. Some of them moved when they heard me, some of them apparently didn't hear me or didn't care.

Some runners came up behind me. They clearly saw what I was doing and appreciated it, and started to join in with me in urging people to stay clear of the blue line. This made me extremely upset. I begged the runners to just keep running. The whole point of what I was doing, I told them, was for their run not to be interrupted.

But they didn't seem to care much about what I was saying. Also, I wasn't entirely sure whether they were actually in the marathon. If so, it seemed that they were not among the leaders. I looked but I couldn't see any numbers on their shirts. And they were wearing shirts rather than racing jersies, and in general did not look anything like world-class marathoners, in apparel or in physique.

There was a large-scale documentary film crew there filming the marathon. They had piles and piles of boxes of their equipment blocking the blue line. I frantically picked up these heavy boxes and moved them clear of the line. I was beginning to get very tired from all of this exertion, and very discouraged by what definitely seemed to be a very uphill battle. Also, I began to wonder whether the leaders of the race had passed through long before, and maybe that's why nobody cared much about what I was doing or saying. Also, I wasn't sure, but I thought maybe that I actually wasn't working for the marathon, on a paid or even an official volunteer basis. And I started to wonder whether all those other people might be right not to care much about what I was doing. If the main part of the race was actually already over on this part of the course, then, suddenly, all those other people's behavior made a lot more sense, and I was the one who was being unreasonable. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: Love and Theatre in New York City

I dreamed that I was a young man in New York City some time during world War II, and that I had been drafted. I was one of a long line of men, most of us wearing knee-length coats and hats, moving from room to room in some enormous building full of varnished wood, as we were processed.

As a group of us were sitting in what appeared to be a lecture hall, with chairs bolted to the floor and desktops which folded away beside the chairs, I saw a women whom, in waking life, I knew thirty years ago.

Then suddenly it was the present day in New York City, I wasn't being drafted, the woman and I were still young, and we had just fallen in love with each other. She was a member of a theatre company, and got me an audition for a play she was starring in, a big-time play, a play on Broadway. I got the part.

After my successful audition I talked to an old man who had a cart on the sidewalk from which he sold fine reeds for reed instruments, mostly for saxophones. It was about the size of a hot-dog cart, and the reeds were piled up inside a glass case. Many of the best sax players in the city got their reeds from this guy, and he was wealthy, just from his income from the cart. He had long, wild white hair and a long white beard. I asked him why he never got a store and moved his business inside. He didn't even try to answer. Instead, he just shook his head and gave me a look that seemed to say: If you don't already understand why I don't want to move off of the sidewalk, I don't know how to explain it to you. It was a friendly look, not a disdainful one. Then he said, "Excuse me for a minute," and turned away and did some business with Branford Marsalis.

I've dreamed many times that I was in New York City. Many times before I lived there for a few years in the mid-1990's, and many times since. In some of those dreams the city has looked much as it does on waking life; in some other it has looked nothing at all like the real city. Last night it looked pretty similar to the real city, but much more beautiful. The architecture and the streets and sidewalks and staircases of stone or concrete were grander, and there was some sort of a sweet, mellow glow to everything. In real life the light in New York City can be very beautiful at moments, but in this dream it was even better. Better than this picture. This picture was the closest I could find to how things looked in the dream. It wasn't that everything looked expensive in the dream. It was something else:

The day after I got the part in the play, I was scheduled to attend a rehearsal which started at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and I was running late, and I was downtown, and the theatre was in midtown, about 40 blocks away, and I was moving slowly, because I was carrying two 50-pound barbells which I had just obtained somehow. The terrain between downtown and midtown was a bit hillier than it is in real life, and there were some huge outdoor staircases to be climbed, and going up all of those steps with an extra 100 pounds was really difficult. It became more and more clear that I was going to be late.

After I woke up, I realized that in that sort of situation in real life, I would just have put the dumbbells down, written them off, and got on the subway, or, if time was really pressing, hailed a cab. But in the dream, none of those things seemed to be feasible. In the dream, the dumbbells were much, much too valuable to even consider putting them down. In real life, dumbells cost about a dollar a pound, sometimes less, and scale pay in a Broadway play, if I'm correctly informed, is currently $2,034 per week.

I was an hour and a half late to the rehearsal. (And my arms and shoulders were killing me by the time I got there.) I assumed I was going to be fired. However, the next day, the woman with whom I was in love went roller-skating around Manhattan with several other actors and two skating bears. This attention-grabbing behavior signaled that I was with her, and that if they fired me, they were going to have to fire her, too. So they didn't fire me.

Before that day's rehearsal began, this wonderful woman gave me a big hug and tried to explain to me that, although my new 50-pound dumbbells were really cool and all, if I were in a situation like that again, I could afford to just let them go. She wasn't really getting through to me on that point before I woke up. Then, of course, I knew she was right.

Unconvincing Concern

It's interesting how all of these concerns about pollution produced by electric vehicles (often referred to by the cool kids as EV's), and environmental havoc caused by the production of wind energy etc, are brought up by people who were never one bit concerned about the environment before EV's and alternative energy were allegedly harming it. Strip mining, oil wells and refineries, coal-powered electric plants, elimination of wetlands to build condos and golf courses, whatever, they're just fine with all of that, but a Nissan Leaf? OMG THE LITHIUM MINING, YOU MONSTER!!!!! A wind power station? OMG YOU'RE GOING TO KILL ALL THE BIRDS!!!!!

Yeah, right, your concern is so touching and authentic. PS: Wouldn't a bus pass beat driving any kind of car? I suppose it would depend on the kind of bus and other factors. Well, there are plenty of very smart engineers and scientists we can ask about that and other things. And we can check to see whether they're funded by oil or coal companies. I've been thinking about getting a bus pass. The buses here are biodiesel hybrids. I would rather that they were all-electric and charged 100% from solar and wind, but they're not. Yet.

And by the way, yes, a certain amount of pollution is caused by manufacturing the batteries which power electric vehicles, but that pollution is typically offset several times over by the emissions avoided by driving an electric vehicle over the lifetime of the car. In some cases, it's offset by the reduction in pollution during several months worth of driving. Also, the emissions caused by manufacturing those batteries are steadily sinking, in significant part because the people who manufacture and drive electric vehicles actually care about the environment and are constantly learning about such things and improving their practices.

And that thing about windmills killing birds? Yeah, turns out that doesn't really happen. Strip mines, on the pother hand, and oilfields, and refineries, and oil and gas pipelines, and emissions from gasoline- and diesel-burning vehicles? It may shock you to learn that all of those things actually do harm birds, and other animals, and plants too.

Reprint Volumes of and pertaining to Valerius Maximus

Valerius Maximus published, around AD 30, a work known as factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novum (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Words). A miscellaneous collection drawn from Roman history, it was intended for use in schools of rhetoric. It was immensely popular during the Middle Ages; however, modern scholars have mostly found it to be rather dull and poorly-written. I think it's quite possible that my grasp of Latin is not yet refined enough to be offended by Valerius; however, the crude patriotism of which others have complained is clear even to me. Also, Valerius does not name his sources, which is frustrating for moderns, who often pore through ancient Roman encyclopaediac works chiefly in order to find bits and pieces from the works of other authors whom they find more interesting. I gather from scholars that it can be inferred that Cicero, Trogus and Livy were among Valerius' chief sources.

I have a reprint copy of the Teubner edition of Valerius by Friedrich Kempf, the 2nd edition published in 1888, which in addition to the entirety of Valerius' lengthy work contains late-ancient summaries of it by Julius Paris, Januarius Nepotanius, and another by an unknown author, attribued, Kempf assumes erroneously, to Julius Paris. The original late-19th century Teubner editions such as this one had large, easily-readable type which extended right out to the edges of the pages; this reprint has type of about the same size, but it s much larger than the Teubner because of very large, and, to me, at least, completely unnecessary margins. Who knows, maybe some other people love the huge margins in reprints like these, and write copious notes in them.

The cover of my reprint volume has a picture of a green bicycle on a sidewalk leaning against a nondescript urban wall, which suggests that no-one at the publisher can read a bit of Latin or has the faintest idea what this book is about; on the other hand, they somehow managed to correctly print the authors' names in the nominative Latin and the editor's name in German on the cover, while the authors' names are in the genitive on the title page and the editor's name there is latinized, so who knows. Maybe they had a library card to copy from for the cover, and wouldn't even be able to find the title page.

I have another volume from the same publisher, reprinted from the third volume of an earlier edition of Valerius ("EX EDITIONE JOANNIS KAPPII," the title page says, and I won't pretend that I know whether this means that Johann Kapp prepared this volume in addition to editing Valerius in the previous volumes, or that someone else, unnamed, prepared this volume while referring to Kapp's edition, or something else.) which contains none of the primary text, but notes referring to words and phrases in all nine books, plus some passages from later authors about Valerius' life and work, plus an index, all in Latin, published in London in 1823 by Valpy. The notes on words and phrases from the nine books are sometimes references to alternate readings found in manuscripts other than the readings in Valpy's edition; but mostly they are definitions of the words or explanations of the meaning of the text. The margins in this reprint volume are perhaps a bit less huge. I must confess, I like the various and rambling nature of this thick volume of notes about Valerius. It's not entirely unlike the rambling nature of Valerius' work itself.

Once again, the author's and editor's names are given correctly in the nominative on the cover, while they appear in the genitive on the title page. The cover photograph of this volume shows windows against a black background. Windows which are not ancient, but which open onto a hilly landscape which, I suppose, could possibly be somewhere close to Rome.

Dream Log: Ben Affleck Dissed By Young Whippersnappers

I dreamed that I both was and was not an Average Joe/Good Guy/Everyday Hero character played by Ben Affleck in an action/adventure movie. I was the Average Joe, but at the same time I was just me, just watching the movie. Affleck had stumbled across a crime in progress, being committed by characters played by actors in their 20and early 30's, who were probably famous, maybe even as famous as Affleck, but to me they were all kind of a blur because of their age. They were holding Me/Affleck prisoner because I/he had seen what they were doing.

And as if that weren't already bad enough, they were making fun of Affleck because he was old to them.

Ben Affleck, who just turned 47 yesterday, with Ben Affleck's abs and guns and buns and Oscars. The father of Jennifer Garner's children. Seriously, who did these whippersnappers think they were?

We were in a mostly-empty high-rise downtown in some city, like a new building which hadn't yet filled up with tenants. There were lots of rooms painted white, with no people, no furniture, no rugs, no anything. The younf movie stars were committing some sort of large-scale robbery, using both guns and computers. They weren't paying much attention to Affleck, who repeatedly escaped their custody, but only briefly before they caught him again. Sometimes Affleck got as far as a white-pained stairwell, sometimes he actually got outside of the building, into alleys where truck were loading and unloading or onto crowded sidewalks. I/Affleck felt like I/he was getting closer and closer to actually getting away, and coming back with cops and sweet, sweet justice.

One of the whippersnappers was particularly snarky and unpleasant, and apparently more evil than the others too, because he thought they should just kill me/Affleck and be done with me/Affleck before I/Affleck escaped and got them into trouble, but none of the others seemed to want to go that far. They were all like: get the job done, cut me loose and disappear. In the course of repeatedly escaping and then being captured and brought back to the HQ, I/Affleck was talking to these more reasonable members of the gang, trying to turn them against their murderous or would-be murderous cohort. Affleck felt like he was beginning to get through to some of them. They were decent kids, not murderous. They had just gotten caught up in a bad situation. Some of them even started to ease up on the stupid remarks about how Affleck supposedly was old.

Then I woke up.

The More I Learn About Tesla, The More Appalled I Become

It's hard to talk sense to fanatics -- maybe impossible. If you criticize anything said by any New Atheist, you are immediately denounced as a fundamentalist believer, whether you actually believe that God or gods exist, or not.

If you criticize anything about Tesla or Elon Musk, the Elon fanboys immediately accuse you of being in league with Big Oil, CNBC and the German automaking industry. Tesla doesn't publicize the fact that many of the parts of their cars have been made in Germany, by Bosch or Daimler or other companies whom they publicly diss. If you try to bring this up with the fanboys, chances aren't they won't hear you, because they'll immediately begin drowning you out (and perhaps also drowning out their own attempts at rational thought?) by calling you a liar and repeating the company's talking points.

So I don't know whether I'm going to change any of the fanboys' minds. This is addressed more to the general public about the fanboys, than to the fanboys. But if I do change some of their minds too, well wouldn't that blow my mind.

Tesla is worse than most car companies, because they're more dishonest, and more ruthlessly dedicated to squeezing every last penny they can out of their adoring fans, and giving billions of that revenue, yearly, to Musk. Who is always referred to as Elon, as if he were everybody's pal. He's not your pal.

Tesla is so dishonest, they can't even tell you how much their cars cost, and the fanboys are so hypnotized that they'll insist all day long that Tesla was never misleading about their prices. The Tesla Model 3 is known as the $35,000 Tesla. The only problem is that it actually costs $44,000, except that it actually costs $49,000, except that it actually costs $50,200, except that it actually costs more than that. Realistically, $60,000 or more. But the hypnotized fans who've actually payed this much for Model 3's will tell you that they haven't. There may actually be some $35,000 Model 3's -- a dozen or so. In Canada. Since early in 2019. Or maybe that was just another lie.

Back in 2017, when Tesla began to establish the lie of the $35,000 Model 3 in the public consciousness, they got the figure of $35,000 by taking the retail price, subtracting the Federal and state rebates in California, and then also figuring in the fuel cost savings. (Fuel cost savings compared to what? I'm sure the fanboys don't care.) Tesla says they're not an average car company. By God, they're not. A normal car company will actually state the retail prices of their vehicles.

Tesla is supposedly a liberal, Leftist, humans-before-cash company. But they're completely union-free, and the low-paid employees routinely work 80 to 100 hours a week. Less humane than the big carmakers, while claiming to be really good guys. Press cameras aren't allowed inside the Fremont, California factory, but they can get close enough (briefly) to the perimeter fence to see the campers of employees in the parking lot. From the factory to the camper and back again -- or is the camper home?

The people most likely to shout down any and all objections to Tesla's practices -- the employees, the shareholders, the owners of the vehicles, and very often two or all of the above in one person -- are the very ones I and other critics are trying to help, by pointing out how they're being used.

Dream Log: Nashville

Last night I dreamed I was in Nashville. I've only been in Nashville once, just passing through, and I didn't go downtown, and last night night's dream was all in downtown Nashville, and I have no idea whether what I dreamed resembled the real downtown Nashville at all. In my dream there were a lot of new buildings and newly-built broad sidewalks which looked much like what is in many downtowns. In this city I dreamed, there was a lot of positive energy. I suppose this is because I've heard many people, by no means all of them hard-care country and western fans, say that they like Nashville.

In the beginning of the dream I was in a darkened conference room in the midst of a bunch of people in suits attending a PowerPoint presentation. I, too, had a suit, but my clothes were scattered over several chairs, and I was having some difficulty putting them on. I didn't look like myself, but like a small wiry man with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses and a moustache. After I had finally gotten dressed, a women executive sitting behind me asked me how I, as a talented writer, would address the issues currently facing the world. I only knew one person at this meeting, and I assumed that he must have told some of the other that I was a writer. I answered the woman, saying that my writing contained many more questions than answers, and that I hoped at least that some of the questions were interesting.

After talking with several of the executives about my writing for a while, I was in a mall. There were several bookstores in this mall which concentrated on books about art. I looked at some of these books in several of these stores, until, in a very small bookstore, a shelf-load of these art books came crashing down to the floor, and I ran away because I was afraid someone might think the accident was my fault.

There was a chapel in the mall, which had stained-glass windows which reminded me of the art books.

I went from the mall to another building, in which I was afraid the building security might throw me out if they thought I didn't belong there. I went running up and down the halls and did a lot of calisthenics. In the dream, this made me think I would appear less suspicious to the building's security.

My brother appeared and we both did a bunch of crunches. Then we walked around a corner in the hallway and stood before a big mirror. My brother said that he had been just going and going for decades and that he was exhausted. I said, "So stop." I meant: take a little rest. The way anybody would say to anybody who'd said they were exhausted. Whatever my brother thought I meant, he got angry, cussed me out and left.

I went outside and stood on a broad sidewalk, surrounded by big glass skyscrapers on a cool cloudy day. Then I woke up.