April 12, 2004

• Since it's spring, I've been thinking about a housemate from years past who kept his given name but changed his last name in standard west coast hippie fasion to be Dancingshadow.

  Now, I don't have a problem with people changing their names, and as adopted last names go, that one's not so bad. It just doesn't describe him very well. It's like if I adopted the last name Perkyactive. (I met a friend of his named Laser. By contrast, Laser is the most perfectly-named person on the planet.)

  But the point here is that Bradley the Dancing Shadow is a springtime entity to my mind, because the guy can tear up a plot of land and transform it into an astonishingly magical garden space. Doing this sort of thing is as natural to him as breathing. He'd drown if he somehow wasn't allowed to do it.

  The two main things I think about when I think about Brad are the punk collective warehouse he helped run in Oakland, and the beautiful garden at the Outpost (the house where we were housemates), with Brad constantly digging and planting stuff. The rest of the housemates pitched in, too, but I was too overwhelmed to help out. I've always regretted not being more involved in that project.

  The other thing about Brad is that he would go to sleep in strange places. Like, out on the deck, fully clothed, with only a thin blanket wrapped around him. It wasn't like he just nodded off while outside; he had planned to sleep there. Or the time the whole household went to Discovery Park to watch the Perseid meteor shower, and he fell asleep there in the sand wrapped up in that same thin blanket. When we decided to go back home, we had to figure out whether to wake Brad up or not.

  If I were going to write a fictional account of the Brad experience, it would include a sort of worshipful approach to the process of going to sleep. As if the process of going to sleep were the momentum and vector of your arrival into the dream world. Which, I suppose, it actually is.

  Anyway. I bring up Brad because it's spring, and I think that if Brad were here, for one thing he'd want to tear up my landlord's flower beds and improve them, but also he'd want to sleep in the thick, unmowed grass, under the stars in the newness of spring, moonlight beaming dreams into his brain. Wrapped in his thin blanket.

  • 7:02 am
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