March 14, 2011

Memory from Rome. A girl stops me near the Colosseum and asks me to sign a petition against trucks. Trucks? I say. She nods. What’s wrong with trucks? Have they been rattling the ruins or something? When I get to the petition I see that she was trying to say “drugs.” This turns out to be a scam anyway. Once you sign the petition the girl says, “ I have survived drugs. I’m two years clean. Wouldn’t you like to contribute to my further progress? Forty euros. I have change.” I did so, of course, because I fall for everything, but the same thing happened at every Important Site, and the scammers were targeting specifically those people speaking English. I guess we’re soft touches, or perhaps have certain advantageous delusions about drug use. Many things in Rome were scams. Often at restaurants I did not get what I had ordered, and I was charged too much. I knew, but didn’t care. It was a not-very-hurtful game which I was willing for new friends to win.

Odd rehearsal last night. C has created two factions in the bass section, one for him and two buddies, one for me and G (because G is oblivious to the whole enterprise). C thinks that politicizing the dynamic within the section makes up for singing the wrong notes.

More extended narrative dreams last night. In one that survived even my getting up in the middle of the night, I was an arts leader in a small town which had been attacked, unsuccessfully, by fundamentalists trying to equate art with vice. No outcry of outrage followed their expose, but rather a bright and gratifying light cast on our efforts in national media. One boy was a hold-out for the Fundies, and in the dream I was trying to wear him and his father away into rationality on the subject. The boy was a talented artist who refused to develop his gifts because he was convinced they were Satanic. At the beginning of the dream I was hugely fat, and through it I slimmed down dramatically. This was part of the plot, but I forget how.