Everyone in a particular residence had died and was waking up again, because they weren't really dead. They were waking up as zombies--hundreds of them. But God was angry with them, so he whipped up this huge black tornado and flung and spun them all around the funnel, women and men and children, intending to set them back down later.
While he was doing this, he checked the offices to see if anyone was left and spotted a single startled janitor, pushing a broom in the empty building. This guy--an appealing, nebbishy fellow, resembling David Nabbit--didn't really have anything to do with the dead folk. He wasn't dead. But God randomly pulled him out as an example, asked him to make an accounting of himself, his happiest moments. The guy explained that, when he was young, one of his happiest memories was of going out with his eighth-grade boyfriend. He used to eat warm things, like ham sandwiches, and then breathe a sealed kiss against his boyfriend's neck until all the heat was gone. His boyfriend timed these things as a personal heat record. In the middle of the recitation, God seemed to get kind of bored and just sent the guy flying up in the air, right out of his shoes like the rapture into Ham and Cheese Kiss Heaven. (There was a label: Ham and Cheese Kiss Heaven.) God said he wasn't sure if this was a particular heaven made only for the man. It was possible, God mused, that the man led a whole club dedicated to this idea, that there were more fetishists out there with this peculiar joy. God explained how he knows everything, except for some things he doesn't know, which apparently he keeps from himself, in accordance with a privacy clause.
There was a lot more to the dream, which was freakish and disturbing, what with the zombies, but I can't remember any more than that. However, what woke me up from this dream was a power outage that zapped the apartment and presumably the city beyond. Huh.
I had the hugest crying jag last night I've had in years, maybe decades. Gasping, hitching sobs, screaming with muffled hysteria into pillows, nearly hyperventilating, throat so raw when I was done I couldn't swallow anything without choking. Insufferable loneliness.
Earlier in the evening I watched the director's commentary of The Usual Suspects. It wasn't bad. I saw the entire film again, filtered through the voice-overs. Even more abstract, and somehow it seemed to roll along faster, as if it were a shorter film. Funny.
I've been meaning to mention for a while now: in the elevators of my office building, everyone respects the powerful, unconscious laws of proxemics, and will unfailingly rearrange themselves at equidistant points whenever someone gets on or off. It's uncanny. I've been watching it for weeks. Two people will always move to stand on equal sides of the elevator, as far apart as possible and yet parallel; with three people you usually get two in the front corners, and one person standing in the middle back, or an inversion of this; with four you get classic die-face arrangement, with everyone taking a separate corner; likewise with five.
I wonder if this happens everywhere. I bet they've written studies on it. Googling "elevators proxemics" gives 43 results. Not a whole lot, but a page on Designing Places for People is kind of interesting, as is a paper called In and Out of Elevators in Japan.
It's three a.m. and God has woken me up to write this, apparently. I don't feel the holy spirit, though. I just feel gritty-eyed and sleepy.
A new chapter of Take This Longing was posted a few days ago. A match of reader to writer kink is always an amazing satisfaction to find. Satisfaction is actually a bland, four-syllable word. Some of the words in this story come right off the page striking hot, like a match head flaring in the brain, setting off a line of fire right down to the dearest bodily part, the cookie, the furrow, the hatchway, the Altar of Hymen, the brat-getting place, the cat, the cake, the Cave of Harmony, the cockpit, the jam-pot, the jazz, Lady Jane, the womanhood, the wound, the sally-port, the pumpkin, the novelty, the mouse, the modicum, the matrix, Love's Pavilion. I think you know what I'm talking about.
I'm not sure I trust this book of Slang & Euphemism.
I may have to have pancakes tomorrow morning.