Strange Days

These are the kind of days I live for. I like it when things go weird.

It started off with strange dreams. Some memorable snippets include:

• My dad moving his tractor so that the river would flow freely and unpolluted for the first time in five years. It had been parked in the middle of it with a bunch of fire wood in the loader bucket.
• My mom having a medical emergency and getting loaded into a white van full of vintage stereo equipment and driven by some stereotypical sleazy 70's guy with a mustache so that she could be taken over 'the mountain' to 'the city'.
• Three small black and yellow cobras wrapping themselves around my arms, one on my left and two on my right. They were biting my knuckles and wrists causing me to howl in pain in the moon lit desert.
• I go to a broadcast center and get shown around by a gal on her lunch period. She starts off as a sweet, plump, brunette. By the cafeteria she stops at a full length wall mirror coated with cocaine dust. She licks the mirror rather ravenously, becomes a petite blond, and says, "A single mom has to do something to keep her figure." By the end of the tour she has a mohawk, facial tattoos, and head tattoos. The right side of her head is done up like an American flag. The left is a bright green and black diagram of the human brain. She is now emaciated, gaunt, sickly.
• As I'm arriving for an interview with Bill O'Reiley/Lars Larsen or some such right wing entity, I notice the security is tight. Every single window, every single gap between every single brick, has a sniper rifle pointing out of it. My escort drops me off and promptly runs away frightened. I need to be searched before I can enter. The security guard is an extremely butch lesbian with her shirt unbuttoned half way down her chest so I can just make out a nipple as I approach from her side. She starts to search me and takes out a large metal forceps to remove my piercings. As it touches my septum ring I bat the forceps away and grab her wrist. As I talk I spit blood on her face. "I wore my piercings through oral surgery and an appendectomy. They do not need to come out." I feel myself exiting the dream state, waking, and decide that I need to yell one more thing at the dream entity. "This is America, Goddamnit!" A squirt of blood comes out of my nose and stains her bleached white teeth.

My day at work proved weird as well. Prior to this job I entertained the notion of karma as plausible. I don't normally call it by that name anymore. The idea has surfaced as many different things in various cultures. Mojo, juju, luck (both good and bad). I now tend to identify this previously intuited phenomenon with quantum psychology/physics. In particular I refer to the part of the Copenhagen interpretation which states the observer can never be separated from the event. I see it quite often at work. Many machines run better just by having me observe them. I've watched other people struggle with very real problems that no one else seems to have with the same machine.

That's what happened today in spades! One operator who runs three machines kept having me bounce between two of them. I would work on one while she would run the others. I would fix a very real problem, then watch it run for a few minutes to verify the fix. Then I would go to the other machine to fix a problem. As I start to fix that one, she approaches the machine I just fixed and it breaks in a whole new way in under a minute. I finish up my work on the one machine and return to the other. As I am fixing that one, the other machine breaks down again in yet another way as soon as she approaches it. This went on for over half the day. I watched. There was no intentional sabotage. The last hour I worked on her machines turned into a staring match. She would watch and it would break. I would watch and it would run fine. If we both watched, it ran kind of crappy. I had to give up. My only advice was for her to stop looking at the machines. As a Russian immigrant it is hard enough for her to understand some of my everyday speech. There was no point in trying to give a layman's description of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics.

And the machines started talking to me today. It was extremely surreal. Of course I couldn't understand them because I don't know their language. But it definitely sounded like language. They were speaking sentences. I have on many occasions used ritual invocation to 'fix' machines. That involves me chanting a bit with the invocation of the Machina demon. I've always thought of it as a focusing exercise. Clear the mind, start to think mechanically, and suddenly an idea for a fix is in my head. A fairly logical process arrived at through occult means. But today the machines spoke. That was weird.

And I like weird.