It’s been clear to everybody for a long time but nobody really let me in on it: I spend far too much time on my own. I am Kafka’s Bugman. He shut himself up in his room and developed strange fancies. This is the pitfall of the exiled. My brain is pickling. All of my thoughts are brine-soaked. I will call it a phase I’m working through. When I was in art school, a long time ago, our assignment was a self portrait. Our professor told us our homework: look at yourself in the mirror for as long as you can stand it. Try not to take breaks. Try not to get distracted. Try not to avert your eyes. Search out your face. The physiognomy. The wrinkles. The scars, the freckles, the flaws. This homework, for the people who took it seriously, freaked out nearly everybody. It also freaked out my roommates. I looked at my face in the mirror for something like three hours. Afterward, I got really drunk. It was really disturbing.

This is called SnappedShots for a reason. I’ve been looking at my face for not quite six months. And I’m going a little batty. No question. But I can see it for what it is, I think. And if I am Kafka’s Bugman, I will crack a window, I will open my door, and I will clean off some of this sticking bug slick.

Meanwhile, another indulgence. Another dream. I can’t help but write it through. It was just so, so apocalyptic.

I’m in a familiar place. I’m beginning to recognize that I recycle bits in my dreams. The archetype this time was the empty city. Or nearly empty city. It’s a city that doesn’t exist. But I’ve been to it many times. It’s the commonest city in my land of Nod. It looks perhaps like the Blade Runner city and it’s colored like a comic book. It feels, rather than looks, vast but, yes, nearly abandoned.

I’m standing in a highway cloverleaf halfway up into the landscape of the city. It’s midday. I’ve got a camera. There are factories, grey metal behemoths spewing forth billowing ash grey columns of clouds into an otherwise technicolor sky. The pollution is also beautiful and I busy myself snapping images. I am unaware of people or cars or any citizens of my Nodopolis. A flash. Like a camera. But the flash is from the sky. Orange. Tall, columnar, billowing, beautiful, bright, radioactive orange rising up, being born over itself higher and higher. My conscience becomes like god or like a director and rises up. A shockwave pops out of the orange column. Another column. Another shockwave. The pillars of orange and grey are beautiful, meanwhile. The shockwaves are dilating blossoms of energy, bounded by a white ring, expanding, expanding, breaking windows, tossing trees, cracking concrete, despoiling.

Not mushroom clouds. Not like I’ve seen on TV. Taller, like Greek pillars. And when they reach maximum height, the top bubbles and froths, like a Corinthian crown. I am not gripped by fear. Not exactly. I am almost always detached in my dreams. Still, I feel like I need to protect myself. And I switch to survival. I get down on the road, lying prone beside a stopped and empty car. I grab another car, and pull it closer along my other side so I am sandwiched between two cars. It seemed neither unreasonable nor impossible that I moved the second car.

Still, perhaps after the initial shockwave passed over me, I break into one of the cars. The doors were locked but it was a matter of little strength and only a little more dedication getting into the car. There is a sleeping woman in the passenger seat apparently unaware of everything. There is also a round, fat, black child in the backseat. More doll than person, as blissfully unaware as the sleeper.

I commandeer the car. I intend to outrun the shock, the pollution, the poison. It isn’t like The Day After. There is no nuclear snow. And the car still has power. Panic populates the city. Like ants out of an anthill. There are people, yes, but not citizens so much as obstacles. Meanwhile the bruised yellow sky, the collapsing orange columns, and dilating shockwaves like water drops on a pond. Most people, in cars, trucks, bicycles, are trying the primary way out of the city. But I already had it worked out that that way would be locked up. I also deduced that that’s the direction there would likely be more hits if there were going to be more hits.

I decided to go north. There was nothing north to destroy. And I knew this city well. I knew easy ways to get out through the north while avoiding the ravaging shock waves. On my way out, I collected other people. We created a caravan.

Hmm? Either we got out or the dream transformed into something else. The end is altogether insignificant. It’s funny that my dreams make a champion out of me. Perhaps in our dreams we are all the hero, the protagonist, the champion. But that doesn’t work out. We can’t all be the protagonist.

What sounds like a terrifying dream was really supernaturally beautiful. That’s what I remembered when I pulled myself out of bed.

SS