Early this morning, I had the strangest dream. I had to house sit for a big-time Hollyweird producer. He was Change100's old mentor at a major studio she used to work for. He and his wife went to Maui and I got hired to house sit and take care of his animals.
Anyway, it was more of a nightmare than anything else. I kept losing his pets, specifically his daughter's Siamese cat. I'd leave a window or screen door open and their pets would escape. I'd have a tough time finding them while other feral animals would sneak into the house. There was one disturbing scene when I kicked a poodle that scampered into the house and began eating out of one of the cat's dishes. I kicked it so hard that it died on impact before it even hit the linoleum floor.
"You kicked that dog to death?" a horrified Change100 screamed. "You know that's Winona Ryder's poodle? She lives next door. She's going to be pissed."
"I'll never work in this town again," I muttered as I lifted up the poodle's limp carcass and tossed it into the trash can.
When I woke up late today around 11:30am, I went to the bagel store for brunch/lunch and it was closed. There's a random Jewish holiday today and the streets of Riverdale looked like a ghost town.
There's an elderly black guy who lives in an apartment building one block down. He used to be a bus driver and has been retired for a number of years. He had a stroke a few years ago and is confined to a wheelchair. Around 8am, he gets wheeled outside and sits in front of his open garage door. He sits there until lunch time and goes inside and comes back out again until dinner time. He just sits there and stares out into the street. It's sad in many ways. The old man is waiting to die.
His son is an odd marble. I used to think he was mentally disabled or something when I was growing up. He was about a few years older than me and as the story goes, when he was 8 or 9 some of the older kids made him smoke PCP or Angel Dust and it fried his brain. He's been seriously off-center ever since. He has a job with the city as a school crossing guard and I'll see him occasionally walking around the neighborhood wearing his uniform.
I was up until 6am after a late night phone call that lasted two hours. The only kinds of people who call me at 4am are those who are severely drunk or suicidal. Or sometimes both. This person was neither. She couldn't sleep and needed someone to talk to. She assumed that I was up due to my chronic insomnia. I was in the middle of reading Blue Blood after listening to jazz records before I settled into bed when my cell rang.
We spoke on a bunch of subjects and topics. She said that she admired me as a writer because "I have the courage to take responsibility of the talent that God gave me and the willingness to push that ability to the maximum potential."
Or something like that.
I wanted to keep talking but the sun started to come up. I was falling asleep and she had work in the morning.
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