quarter after five: dream log

[dragonlady7]

There was a wacky hijinx movie that was also a slasher movie going on.
Meanwhile: a hip young New York City friend of my actual acquaintance was talking with enthusiasm about something she'd done, and I don't remember if it was supposed to be in a blog or in person. Apparently there were these gongs set up in [some fairly central but downtownish neighborhood park in NYC, apparently near Chinatown], set up and you'd make offerings to them and hit them, as part of a summoning of Spring ritual. And they had little offering-fires near them, but the one near the biggest and most famous gong had gone out, and this friend of mine had been the one to relight it. She was speaking (or writing, I don't remember) with great delight about how she had done this-- but she was doing so in a most frustrating way: someone who had seen it done, or heard tell in more detail, would completely understand, but if one had never seen it, one would not know. (Something like, "So then I did the prayer with the earth-wind-fire, you know, and then the other one, the usual.") The point was that it was meant to be a moving tale of the signs of spring that had been meaningful to her growing up, and remained so, and her delight at being able to reinvolve herself in them.
I was frustrated, and slightly annoyed, by how carefully I was excluded from being able to understandthis, as a non-native New Yorker who had never encountered this uniquely New York ritual and phenomenon.
I countered by composing my own tales of spring in my decidedly un-chic, completely lacking-in-mystique native area. Z, or a dream stand-in for him, was helping me come up with and compose this. I had started on a whole humorous essay about the ritual of the spring musical at rural high schools, greatly exaggerating its importance.
I planned on having a punchline to the effect that, but really, the way we knew spring is coming out in the sticks where I grew up was that, you know, we actually had some nature, and observed it sometimes.
It was going to be terribly witty, and gently needling, and all of that; it was going to be a rhetorical triumph. I was not so much smug writing it as captivated, as one is while writing: it was deeply satisfying, as it really is in real life, to have a perfect punchline planned out to an essay like that-- though it's possible it wasn't an essay, but a monologue I planned to deliver. Again, I'm really not sure.

Meanwhile there still was some wacky-hijinx thing going on, which had a twist ending I noted but barely registered, as it wasn't nearly as witty a twist as it thought it was.


But then Remi decided, as is her custom at quarter after five, that she had to alternately bury the cat food dishes loudly (she'd managed to find something audible to clink against one of them), and eat from them. A noisy burying session woke me, her claws in the linoleum. I angrily sat up, throwing back the covers. She listens for this, and comes running in, purring. I hissed at her, and lay back down, horridly grumpy. I hate being woken at this hour.
She immediately went back to digging.
So I got out of bed, picked up both cat dishes, emptied them into a bowl, put the dishes in the sink, filled them with water (they need washing anyway), and put the bowl full of cat food into the cupboard. No cat food at all.

Unfortunately, this means that now Remi is sitting silently, content that I'm awake because she wasn't hungry, just bored, so she's totally filed this away as a successful technique, as she feels rewarded, and Chita is yowling all over the house because she wants to be fed and go outside.

I can't fucking win.

But I was getting a lot of writing done before a desire for companionship (and a hope that I might get a little somethin-somethin) led me to go to bed instead. (I didn't.) Well, that and the fact that I was really sleepy, but normally when I'm actually writing I ignore cues like that. So I got up partly to get back to that. For the first time ever, I actually have a start-to-finish, clear idea of how Barbarians_Novel has got to go, and the finale actually has some bearing on the rest of the book, unlike every single other draft I've written.
Unfortunately I can't judge whether the balance between the various POVs makes any sense at all. I think I have to finish-finish a draft first, and that keeps eluding me. How the hell do people come up with coherent and cohesive plots? You'd think I'd know by now.