Voicemail on 202X-XX-XX
Hi, um [unintelligible] so you were in my dream and I wanted to tell you before I forgot. It was weird? So for example I can place most of my memories in time. Like, I remember exactly when I deep cleaned the garage because of what else was going on and who I was in that moment. But I couldn’t tell you when I watched every season of Lost, other than it was in the last three years. I couldn’t even tell you if it was before or after the pandemic started. Um and this dream was weird because it felt like it should’ve been the first kind of thing but it was the second instead.
We were driving. Or I guess we had been driving. It was something that had happened in the past, but I didn’t know when. We had been driving on this like old wooden gold rush bridge over all these fields next to the ocean, and we were in a town where they were selling my baby teeth in stalls on the side of the road, and the signs all said “Welcome to the Artichoke Capital of the World.” Um so I guess the fields were artichoke fields. And I guess, conceivably it could have actually been the artichoke capital of the world. There’s probably not a lot of competition. [Speaker laughs] I remember really liking that they called it that. How you find something you’re good at and hold onto it with everything you’ve got.
And I don’t think I want to be a person anymore. Or like I want to be a place. I want to be the Artichoke Capital of the World.
Um but we were kind of nowhere and you looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Tell me how you’re doing.” And how I normally respond to this is, I tell the truth and say I am doing bad. Not even in an interesting way but in the same way everyone I know is doing bad. I am doing subpar. [Speaker laughs]
Wait, wow, fuck, is “subpar” a golf term? Is “par for the course” like a golf metaphor? Did they trick us into using golf-speak in our everyday conversation?
I don’t [unintelligible] we had, there was a golf course near where I grew up. Even after the drought started. Like the reservoir went dry so they told us to cut down our water usage, and me and my ba filled the bathtub with buckets, and we would water the blueberries growing on the balcony with only the dirty shower water that had collected there. So much pee built up in the toilet because we tried not to flush it. Like legitimately gallons of pee. Um and I never saw anyone on the golf course, but they kept watering it, they kept it this rich woozy shade of green that no real thing has ever been. [Silence]
I think one day I’m going to drive out there with a trowel and a box of matches. Or maybe I will tear the grass up with my bare hands. I will smother it in seeds, coast live oak and madrone and manzanita and sagebrush and sunrose and farewell-to-spring. So much life it chokes you. Let the HOA irrigation system feed its own lustral strangulation until you can see it from town.
And I’m dreaming, so they don’t catch me, or I guess there isn’t a me to catch. Maybe I am dreaming still. Seething carnal sunlight and I want to be I want to be I want to be I want to be I want to be I want to be