THAT DAY

The sun's gone dim and sickly yellow. The smoke from the Paradise Wildfire is dense today. Toxic, too; that's not wood smoke but car, house and people smoke. Stay in, seal the windows, run an air filter, and still feel stuffy.

I finish and illustrate the dream-poem Off Dover, a half-sestina on biking across the English Channel. Jesus walked on water--I was just a fat-tire half-Jesus.

I can't seem to do anything BUT drift. Here in wonderful mono-reality. Where I can't go outside.

Try Shannon Hale's autobiography, Real Friends. Painful for me. Big sister bullied her; and a school bully had a clique that spread lies about her others believed. Though Hale wasn't an innocent victim; bossy with friends, obsessed with stories. She and big sis had anxiety and OCD tinges making friendship difficult. She says "got better as I grew into the wider world of adulthood."

I don't think I have. Narrowing, if anything. Letting friends drop away.

Watch an anime: Miss Hokusai. Edo, Japan, 1814. Her famous dad, Katsushika Hokusai (of the Great Wave) is so art-obsessed he's irresponsible. Mom walked out on him. Little sister's blind and fragile, lives with nuns, thinks dad rejected her, thinks she'll go to hell when she dies, which'll be soon...

Miss Hok paints too. Paints too well. At night, her painting of Hell leaks monsters. Dad adds a Buddha; hope as a safety valve?

Dad hears rumor that a local courtesan's neck stretches when she sleeps; her head goes exploring. He poses as a ghostbuster, claims he cured himself of similar ghost-hands. (Later Hokusai laughs, says he lied, the hands were just from a Chinese ghost story he read... "but it got us in.") She allows dad and Miss Hok to watch her sleep, see if it's true. Yep! Ghostly head goes roaming...

The world isn't what it seems.

Miss Hok, like dad, draws porn for cash. But she's told her porn is pretty but not lively/sexy enough. "Get more experience." So she visits a brothel for women. In bed, male prostitute learns who she is, he's a fan, asks about art and heaven and hell and forgets about sex... and falls asleep.

Sheesh. No wonder she's so world-weary. Guys let her down pretty consistently. From Dad on down.

Fascinating episodes, but incoherent in the end. May be translation problems, or compression (I suspect whole volumes in the manga become minutes in the film), or that fact it's not subtitled but dubbed in American slang with a rock soundtrack. Jarring.

Still, the core portrait is clear. A bright but perpetually disappointed girl. Because, perhaps, she expects it. Do I do this?

THAT NIGHT

I'm with three friends dressed like Miss Hokusai, in a corner store with kanji and a good-luck Japanese swastika on the sign. Yet the architecture looks British. We're in a small theater on the ground floor, watching a strange film. A fairytale?

We get bored and decide to explore the building. Sneak out front. I know from the swastika there's a general navigational trick--always curve to follow the swastika's arms. Circle the building widdershins, try non-theater entrances. First two are locked, but the last, at the top of Prentiss Street, is ajar. In, a lobby--hotel or bank? Narrow stair to the right. Yep, no door, gate or even sign forbidding it. Follow the spiral! Find a maze of little halls and rooms. Funny, I can sense them before I see them.

Up to a strange space cupping the theater. Around it, above it. One-way mirrors so guests don't see us but we can peer in.

Behind us, someone starts up the stair. Slow tread. I can sense it's a woman who'll kick us out--staff only up here. Gotta hide! The girls with me wriggle backward--feet first--into pigeonhole-nooks a foot wide and yards deep, storing rolled rugs and fabrics--mostly fake fur. They burrow into the center of loose rolls... successfully, to my surprise. Like tuna inside furry sushi rolls. Fur-maki!

Furry masks form, hiding their exposed faces. Quite effectively--they can smile with their creatures' mouths and swivel their glass eyes, even look through them. Gradually their masks, their furry disguises, become living. We're upstairs--in the spirit plane--so I can ghostily see the rolls of fake fur right through the wood shelving, and through the rolls, I faintly see their bodies transform into catgirls, kitsune, deer-girls...

They're adorable--but then they were as humans too. Why won't I date them? Never ask a single one out.

Damn. I am a Miss Hok. Expecting letdowns. I never even tried.

NOTES ON WAKING

• Furry nooks associated with sex: Freud would insist these are symbolic vaginas. Really? Square ones? I think they're literal. I'm sculpting a set of lifesize plushies based on dreams, the Foam Furs, so I often shop for fake fur; and the only two local fabric warehouses with decent selections display their fake fur as end-on rolls in rack-nooks just like this. Maybe be sexual too, of course.
• Upstairs space cupping the theater, one-way mirrors:
  1. Elfhome--Oilcan's town is a borderzone where magic and technology both work--fitfully. In borderlands, it's natural to fumble around a lot seeking love and right work.
  2. Dreamspace! The space upstairs. The ground-floor theater is the waking world, pretty much blind to the bigger, stranger multiverse we really live in. Where magic works--if fitfully.
  3. The story-space around Miss Hokusai! Its manga source, and the real people the manga fictionalized. Hokusai may not have been a jerk; his daughter may not have been unhappy. Even if they were, WE need not be. Don't get trapped in the movie!

My housemate Alder tells me "I had the weirdest dream last night. I was exploring a strange building with lots of little spaces. My friends hid in big fabric-storage nooks, and turned into these cute creatures!"

Don't be a Miss Hok. Dump your dreary expectations. Physics is wrong. Magic is fitful--but real.

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