Very little separates me from my other existences; nothing but a thin membrane of consciousness you can penetrate with a dream.  I wake up and at first it is so clear I could draw you a map.  A place I've never been in this world but in the frosty condensation of memory it looks like upstate New York, until the details start to bead and run.  Can't catch it.  No lasso would do any good. 

In the dream, I have been trying to sell the locals on a plan to save the landscape and spare the view -- an octagonal barn and a Civil War era house of brick with a widow's walk are involved.  Or perhaps it's an octagonal house and a brick barn.  Or a crumbling plantation house in the Ninth Ward.  Or a duplex in Tibet -- in any case they decide to go with the box store and 500 acres of parking lot instead.  Apparently I was not very convincing.  We did not see eye to eye.  Dreams and movies help you process failure; back in this reality I don't seem to mind.  Was I out roping words or something more substantial?  

I am thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  He wrote a short story that for some unknown reason was turned into a very long movie.  Or probably there were many reasons for making this movie, which is why it was so long.  Unlike the hero of the story who went in the other direction, I was a young man when the movie began and a very old one when it was over.  

So Jim and I hobbled out and I joined my friends Rob and Carlos in a trip downtown to the Farm where we were served by an adorable waiter who reminded me of Jared Leto when he was in that other David Fincher movie, Fight Club, which I did like and did not make me feel old afterward, except that I saw it with Alan in the Cinerama Dome and a fight broke out which Alan sort of started because he complained about the guy talking in front of us.  Simul-fight. Surround-fight.

The Farm, which I suppose reminds me of cowboys, a little, is part of the new L.A. Live complex being built near the Staples Center -- the Ritz is that immense spire you see going up down there.  And no, it is not the equivalent of the box store in my dream. 

But what I was really reminded of by the movie was the story of Sheilah Graham Westbrook (1904-1988), who was a gossip columnist who had an affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald when F. Scott was still married to Zelda who was still in a mental asylum because she was out of her mind and continued to be until the day she died.  As you might imagine, this relatively short story does not have a happy ending, since F. Scott also dies in it, although Sheilah made a longer story out of it in her version which she entitled "Beloved Infidel."

Jim picked the movie, but afterward he said he wished we'd seen the one about the dog.  The End.