A Living Magazine - Day 364 - Homecoming - Arlington: The Din of Erebus

I walked barefoot through a place where the ground was a glistening-wet, black, rubbery-cold membrane. It squished up between my toes, but wouldn't stick to my feet. I couldn't see anything at all but the occasional glint of light from some unseen source reflecting off the strange surface under my feet.

Far off - so far off as to be barely audible - it sounded like a man was giving a speech to an immense audience, but all I could hear was the reverberation and not the words themselves. The sounds were twisting, gnarled, dissonant remnants of a loud voice. I had the impression that the ceiling was vaulted and far above me. I seemed to be below an amphitheater of some kind.

I felt good, but there was something in the back of mind simultaneously dancing on the tip of my tongue. And, I was in between these two points struggling to figure out what it was. The distant voice faded a bit. I just kept walking. There was no place to sit. Suddenly a hot wind blasted over me, followed by a roar--as if a million people had screamed at once. And, the distant voice began again, and got louder as I made my way forward. He was yelling... What was he yelling about--angry and also proud, somehow both at once?

I noticed that I couldn't back up. It wasn't that there was a wall behind me, but more like there wasn't anything at all behind me. No space, no time, no turning around. Damn! I wished I could remember whatever was nagging at me. I knew it was something incredibly important.

Ahead, there was a glow. The undulating ground solidified into a glossy black floor.  The floor reflected giant windows and the space opened as I passed through a pure-black marble archway. Now I could hear the voice, low and monstrously loud, rumbling throughout the building.

The windows were stained glass and all distorted, sending prismatic colors in every direction. I tried to stand on my toes and make out the shapes on the other side of them. A dark form - I swear it looked like the shadow man ^{[1, 2]} - opened the small doors that were at the very bottom of two gigantic doors separating this great hall from the other side.

And, I walked through them. As far as I could see in every direction, stadium seating was piled so high that I estimated it to be a mile to the top rows--the cheap seats.

The ground was covered by a hard glossy, mirror-like surface. But it was more like a two way mirror, because light would shine out from below me, making holographic-like flames appear, then images of plants and other objects. These images were in 3-D but I could walk right through them. They were made entirely of light.

Then I figured it out. The images were synced to the speaker's words and actions, as he stood on a stage at the center of all of this. He would nod in one direction and an image would appear there, and then over there, etc... I felt like I knew this place, but also as though I'd forgotten about it. Looking up, the sky was blue but also shimmering with golden rays that came from all directions at once. There was no sun. There didn't need to be one. It was perfectly bright enough.

The speaker began talking again, and for the first time I heard his tremendous voice unfiltered by walls, but couldn't understand what he was saying. He was so loud I felt my eardrums push inward. I looked toward the center of the venue and saw that he was a very large man, maybe 20 feet tall, dressed waist-down in pure white. Walking closer, quickly now, I saw that his hands were chained, each to a pole off stage.

I couldn't believe it! From the position of his hands, down by, but held away from, his sides, his legs together, and the chains that ran up to head-level off to each side, he formed my Nomadic symbol!

Something like this.

The symbol.

He stopped talking and looked down at me. The crowd fell silent. Then what sounded like a mile-wide horn far above us all, sounded three times. And with each time, a circle formed in the images of the light around the stage. Three concentric circles had been created by the three blasts and I was just outside of the largest.

Then a blinding flash very much like I had seen and described in this blog on several other occasions ^{[1, 2, 3]} buried everything in a shadowless light.

* * * * * * *

I opened my eyes and found myself in my little tent by the side of Route 2, on the border of Arlington and Cambridge. I guessed that I needed to be taken far away from my troubles here. I was happy to have seen whatever the hell it was that I saw in that dream. But it scared me, because it was so real and so different from all I was facing in the so-called "real world" lately.

I sat up and noticed that the hernia pain was much-lessened. Now all I could think about was getting to Dunkin Donuts and checking to see if I could transfer money at PayPal. I was quite hungry and still frustrated, yet it helped me to have slept.

I got to Dunkin Donuts and immediately checked PayPal. The fucking error was still there! My blood pressure rose and the sweat began again. I had my coffee. That would be the last thing I'd buy for the next two days. I called PayPal and this time the signal was clear.

I'll spare you the initial details, but after 45 minutes, 30 of them on hold, and asking to be transferred to a supervisor (a friendly, if hardly understandable young Asian woman, named "Miah"--they farm out their customer service to an "overseas location") the facts came out. This wasn't just an issue with my account, as I had been told the day before. The "system" was down. After - I swear - 60 times of telling me robotically "Again, Missa Wall, we ah so sahhy for da inconveenian," whenever I asked if someone there had the authority to just manually transfer the funds or advance me the amount, I tried a different take.

I wasn't angry with her at all--just with this gigantic company that would not tell either of us what was going on. While I had her ear, I told her I used to have a very similar job. I'd worked through the Y2K situation in a bank call center. But that was nothing compared to how many times the system used to crash and we'd have to deal with customers like me.

She laughed a bit. I calmly told her I was in Boston and I'd had no food for the last day and a half. That was why when she said "sorry for the inconvenience" so many times, "inconvenience" sounded so awful, petty and ironic. That she couldn't even say whether the problem would be fixed by the next day or the day after, was crushingly uncertain.

I asked her whether this conversation was being recorded. She said it was. I said, "Who would be responsible if, because I don't have access to my only funds, something happened to me here on the mean streets of this city?" She said nothing. What could she say?

I'd been there at Dunkin Donuts for hours, seemingly arguing on the phone, and was occasionally getting the fuzzy eyeball from the staff. I needed to move on. Since I had no money to buy anything to eat or drink, and now couldn't work online, I was completely dead in the water. You may recall that my last SD card also died, so I couldn't even take photos. I let poor Miah off the hook to face the next irate customer. There was nothing else either of us could do.

I walked out into the bright day, and headed east toward Harvard. I decided that this would be an ideal day to get caught up reading On the Road. So, that's what I did.

I sat at Cambridge Common on a park bench, reading for the next five hours. The novel was really getting good. The farther one reads, the better Kerouac's writing becomes. I kept finding incredible phrases that he invents and so many parallel experiences with my own Journeys. I didn't just kill time. Now, as Kerouac says, "I knew time." Dig it?

I actually began to get chilly in the growing shadows of the late afternoon. The wind was blowing hard every now and then. My hunger had abated for most of the afternoon, but my stomach decided to try again. I walked back to my part of town and stopped by the patio of the Dunkin Donuts to try my luck at PayPal. Not knowing if anything had changed, it became a Schrodinger's Cat. I set up the transfer and said, over and over again, "Is the cat dead, or alive...dead, or alive...?" The goddamn cat was still dead. Ugh!

Where I turn onto Route 2 from Mass Avenue, there are always between one and three panners working that intersection. I pass them each morning and evening on my commute and say hello. They each choose a direction and when the light is red they hold up rickety cardboard signs and slowly walk between the cars--their captive audience. I have not yet once seen someone actually give them any money. But it must happen, or they wouldn't be there every day. It is the only intersection I've seen this happening at in this part of the Boston area.

The reason I mention this is, because every evening on the utility box adjacent to the intersection, someone leaves bottled water, granola bars and other snacks. Sometimes there are coins left there too. Most of the time, no one eats all the stuff and it ends up falling over the side onto the ground. The city hasn't learned to put a trash can there yet.

I was quite hungry myself by the time I got to Mass and 2, and the panners were gone to the shelter for the night. There were several granola bars on the utility box, and I grabbed one, but left a handful of pennies (all I had left). I ate it on the way to the sleep spot, and After not eating anything for over 24 hours, it really felt good to have something in my stomach. I felt an easing of my anxiety.

When I got to the sleep spot, I used the very simplest setup for the tent--two tent poles in the tent, with no tarp under. It was still pretty early, so I climbed in and read more of my book. My eyes were straining a bit, and I remembered I had the air lantern from Melinda. Pulling it out and setting it up, I was able to read for another two hours after dark, finally shutting it off around 11:30 p.m. and going to sleep.