The Pure Life of Dreams

March 2, 2023July 26, 2025

No Longer Fit for the Party

I am in Paris in the banlieues and I am going to a party. Or at least I think I was invited. And I am parking my car on a deserted dusty brown and ill-lit side street. There are no other cars at first but when I park I find myself trying to squeeze in between a white van and a blue car. I have to shift my car back and forth to maneuver it into the space.

Once I am satisfied I get out, but my car is bumpered up against the blue car behind me.

The definition of curb and road is poorly defined as if it is a construction site and the dust of the concrete has blurred the partition.

It will do, I think, as I walk away, even though I see that I am a good two feet from the curb.

So I walk to the party, somebody’s house, and there are students there, a younger crowd, different nationalities, and they are having a good time. In one room, a few are lying on the floor under a beige duvet, laughing as they throw pillows on top of each other.

I go to another room, I think the kitchen, and a woman in a black dress, loose-fitting, says something to me about her phone but I am not paying attention. I see her breasts pop out from her dress, they are small and pert, with dark brown nipples. Her breasts are too small for her dress, and she looks annoyed or uncomfortable that I saw that. She pulls up the strap of her dress and walks away.

I lean out the window, look out at the houses opposite. Each balcony is brightly colored with sheets and shirts hung up on clotheslines. It looks homely, but happy, with an ease, the same ease as the people at the party.

Then it dawns on me, I don’t love my life. ~~Wife.~~

I return to the room where they are throwing the pillows, but I don’t fit in, I need to leave and I pull out my phone to see the way. Only it is not my phone, it is square with a blue screen and it has a different provider so I take it back to the woman with the black dress.

Black dress thinks that I took it from her, I can tell. She has an Irish accent. As she steps away I see she has a black wart on her back, just above her left shoulder blade.

These people are having fun, they love each other, or are comfortable, and I know I don’t belong. I sour the party. So I pull out my own phone this time and pull up the map. And the map’s locations are in French with some Arabic but the phone has only 1% battery and I need to hurry.

Back outside I am looking for my car and the streets are filled with life, new stalls brightly lit, people heading somewhere, or browsing, or with dinner plans, or rendezvous, or other parties to go to. I walk past them to my car only it is not where I thought it would be. There is a different line of cars, even on the dark street where I thought I’d parked.

I return to the main street, then back again to double check, but my car is not to be found. And I go up to a stall decorated with purple and white awnings advertising medical options or a pharmacy, I cannot tell. A white mortar and pestle are painted on the awning.

The owner is closing up but I duck under the awning to get some light on my phone. As I pull up the map I realize that I cannot get home without it. I’ve never been to this part of Paris before and I won’t be able to intuit my way back.

And the phone now indicates 0%.

I don’t want to, but my only choice is to return to the party to charge it even a little.

Photo by Viktor Solomonik on Pexels

February 1, 2023July 26, 2025

Bookstore Encounter

We are browsing a bookstore in Cleveland Park. Liam and I, and Lizzie and Siobhan, wandering the crowded store. And we are on the second floor on a balcony surround that overlooks the level below, when one of the assistants comes up to Liam and I. The two of us are sitting at a barstool table and she takes the third stool and sits with us.

She has straight black greying hair fashioned into a bob and a pale chinless face, and she is young, maybe twenty-five. She wears an oversized jumper, green with white flecks, and she looks like a big bear in the jumper. And she is explaining to us how the shop gets us to buy more books.

Then suddenly, “You have the same pullover as me!”

And it is true because I have a similar jumper, dark green with little white bits. She pulls one of the white flecks on her jumper to illustrate the point.

“You want to take me out?” she asks, directing her question at me.

I am taken aback. I’ve never had an affair and I don’t know what to say or where to start. And I can’t think of where we would go. Somewhere where Siobhan wouldn’t bump into us, but something nice, like a walk. Like in Dupont Circle, for the restaurants? Or Cleveland Park itself? A place where there are more interesting shops.

I am trying to think of something to say when she walks away to help a customer.

Then Siobhan walks by. She takes the ladder down to the first floor.. And I peer over the edge to look where she went but the ladder she took drops straight down. I would follow her but it looks dangerous. The rungs are painted an orangey brown and it does not look like something for the shop visitors to use.

“You’re not supposed to go down there,” I hear someone complain.

I peer again over the edge of the balcony, and sure enough, the lower floor looks like a backroom warehouse. A tall thin man who could be the manager is down there, and is handing someone a book. Then he adjusts the ladder at an angle, and bounds up the rungs, his spider legs wheeling, taking the rungs two or three at a time, before he jumps over the gate at the top, onto our level.

I have to find the shop assistant. There is an argument upstairs, and perhaps she is there to deal with it, but when I get there, I see that she is the source of the commotion. She is surrounded by visitors to the shop. It looks like they are trying to calm her down, but she bursts through them and takes the stairs up to the next floor. And I follow her, pushing past the crowd and up the stairs, and once I arrive there I find myself outside, on the roof. The assistant is even higher, sitting on her knees on a dark grey awning that partially covers the rooftop area.

She is wailing. “What about Daniel, what about him?” she cries, as she flops back against the awning.

I think Daniel must be an ex, or a fired store assistant and I think it best to leave her alone and return downstairs to meet up with the others. Besides, I cannot think of places we would go or things we would do. Even though I really want to do something with her.

Back on the ground floor, the four of us exit the bookstore together. We walk up the road a few steps until I pause.

“Hang on,” I say to Lizzie, Liam, and Siobhan, “I will just be a minute.”

I pop back into the store to find the assistant. I am holding a flyer advertising books, but it has too much writing on it for a space to write my number, and tear off for her. And if I give her my number, maybe she won’t even call.

Instead, she can tell me her number and I will remember it, or will write it down on the back of my hand.

Photo provided by Pixnio

December 15, 2022July 26, 2025

How to Make Chi Flow in the Room

I am at the Tai Chi beginners class because I know that some of the advanced students will be there and I have forgotten the sequence to the sixth. I sit to the side as the class concludes.

Then as I leave, a man walks with me into an adjacent Victorian style room. The room is empty but sun filled. It has brilliant white walls, with white crown mouldings, tall open stash windows and pine wood flooring.

The man throws his hand back in a sweeping motion, over his head but I don’t recall that move.

I try to mimic him. “I don’t remember that anywhere.”

“Try it again,” he says, and again he throws his hands up carelessly and bends backwards, pushing forward his pelvis.

The class is fully wrapping up now and people are flooding into the room. I stand over to the side.

Some men, young and lithe in black bicycle pants and bronzed naked chests are being flirted with by the women.

I see a different woman through the crowd, her back to me. Her skin is pale on a silk ivory dress with thin shoulder straps. Her legs are thick and also the color of ivory. I prefer her coloring, though I confess I am a little jealous of the ripped bodies of the younger men and women.

Then another woman in a simple white dress and wavy blonde hair enters through the doorway. She is being toasted for her presentation. She has been somewhere exotic and has just gotten back.

“I had to do that because they wouldn’t let me go on to Guatemala,” she says to the crowd.

The projector shines her slides up on to a white screen at the front of the room. It shows an architectural drawing with lines and points mapping the intersections of buildings of what may be an archaeological dig. I want to call out to her that I’ve been to Guatemala but it was so long ago and it would sound pompous.

Instead she comes towards me. She stands to my left against the window while the others in front admire her presentation.

I am aware of her presence, the whiteness of her plain cotton dress lit by the sun, her white skin. The blonde waves of her hair frames and partially hides her face as she tilts her head forward.

She holds up her right hand directly in front of her, as if to reach out to something. I reach out too, brushing the palm of my own right hand across the back of her hand. Suddenly I am overcome with a fear that my palm might be clammy, but she turns to me at a slight angle, her face still in shadow from her hair.

In the shade, I can feel her breath on mine as our lips part slightly to meet.

Leaves and Insects series by Qi Baishi, via WikiMedia Commons.
The name of the Yang Style 108 movement is Retreat to Ride the Tiger.

July 14, 2022July 26, 2025

Bad Hot Dogs and a New Route to a Lost Car

We were just coming back from a football match in Manchester and I was trying to find the car.

To get to the match we had to walk a lot. Liam had brought a friend but even so, we were going to arrive very early. Nobody else was even making their way. And we were lost cutting through a suburban estate.

Middle class, wide roads curved left and right, sided by red brick houses and manicured lawns. It wasn’t very exciting.

I told the boys to hang back, ”We don’t want to get there so early”, but they went on ahead.

And when eventually we did get close to the stadium, only a few stalls were opening up for food.

I wanted hot dogs but the woman gave me a palm-sized Saran wrapped banana leaf that contained the dog inside. I wanted the greasy kind. Still she told me, ”There are seven layers of leaf so you peel them to get to each bite”.

I ate it in one go and went looking for another.

The next stall I found also had bad hot dogs; this time the greasy kind and that’s what I wanted.

“Give me the sandwich bread,” I said pointing at a line of cut pieces of baguette. And the man landed the dog onto a baguette slice like I asked.

Returning from the match, Liam and his friend walked off to do their own thing, and Siobhan and Lizzie joined me to go look for the car.

I’d had to move it because a traffic warden told me that, though legally parked, they were towing the area anyway. I had moved it but I couldn’t remember where.

We tried an area in front of an abandoned field that was surrounded by a wire fence. Overgrown uncut grass. Siobhan and Lizzie tried the red brick lane adjacent and together we tried the place where I had originally parked, but there were no cars left.

We even wandered the streets where no cars could drive, where there were only narrow walkways with cute white Greek houses decorated with bougainvillea.

Some one told me Shawn from work lives there, pointing down a side street lined with olive trees and flower boxes. That’s certainly nice, I thought. I was surprised he could afford it.

Then we stepped back out onto the roads and kept walking, until we were further from the city center. Until, finally, I recognized a street, Queen’s Parade, which curved to the right, townhouses on one side, the park on the other. Just before the road curved leftwards once more, I recognized our car so we hurried past the other silver SUVs. Until we were close enough to see the decals on the back of our own Highlander.

When we got there I saw the tyres curbside had been punctured, as if someone had stabbed each tyre, the rubber crunched between road and hub cap. Sitting in the car with the convertible top down were three Chinese girls. One sat on the drivers headrest, her toes up on the steering wheel; she was reading a magazine. The other two were in the back.

“What are you doing? I’m going to calls the cops.” I said. And we had a little argument, clipped teenager tones between them, before they agreed to mend the tyres. Their mechanic came by, his feet bare and swollen like balloons, but he unscrewed the tyres and rolled them away and the girl in charge said he’ll be back at seven.

As they were leaving a parking attendant reassured us it would be OK, and we walked back the way we had come while the girl went off with the mechanic. Then it struck me that I had not got a cell phone number so I caught up with the attendant to ask her. She knelt on the pavement and started writing.

“I‘ll give the number of both the mechanic and of the girl. Though I suspect the number I have is for a burner phone and she’ll have changed it by now,” she laughed.

Photo of hot dog stand by cjuneau and of Naxos village by Marko Verch both via Flickr

May 4, 2022July 26, 2025

Jamal Ahmad was Shot Dead in the Age of Gentrification

I dream that I am crossing the road using the pedestrian bridge. It climbs high to clear the noisy traffic below and is all grey steel and yellow girders, clanging with my steps.

It was where Jamal Ahmad was shot dead. I have the magazine article about the unjust killing of a black man in my jacket pocket, rolled up .

There is menace in the air and a number of parades are scheduled for commemoration and protest.

As I exit the other end of the pedestrian bridge several black youths are coming the other way along the footpath. They climb the steps, and scatter; they push their way past me, and start to holler. I don’t know how to express sympathy without seeming churlish.

But I need to get back home, and so I take a short cut through the shopping mall. The back way cuts through a pub that is thick with smoke and the smell of day old booze. Wooden panels and TV screens; it looks like Celtic are playing, maybe with Rangers, but I can’t see the score.

I could have a drink. There is a full pint of lager on the counter in a tall glass, but I think better of it and exit the back way, through a corridor into the hotel. And the hotel is newly done up with bright yellow walls and black moldings. Sleek black furnishings, oversized leather couches and side tables are arranged across white tile.

As it is early in the morning only one half of the lobby is lit and the lights are still off on the far side. I remember when it used to be a department store; Marks and Sparks, 70s decor, long overdue for a refurbishment. Then I exit through the swing doors at the front and am back on the high street.

A parade is walking by in memory of the shooting. We gather by the side as the parade comes close. The parade occupies the width of the road and I want to take a photo but am not sure it is a good idea. Plus a very fat woman in grey track suit is in the front bearing down on us, and it won’t make for a good photo. Behind me I catch another bystander taking a photo so I turn back to the parade and snap one anyway.

The parade passes by me and at the end of the line is the coffin, white, close enough to touch, and held up by three men either side. I see only their hands grip the base and I feel my tears well up. But a black man comes up to me. I can’t tell whether he is about to threaten me.

“Yeah I know,” I say, but I don’t really know what to say and I start to cry. Another man dances past me, spiky Afro hair that springs as he moves.

“How’d he die? Did he get away before he fell?’ He asks to no one in particular.

And after the parade has gone by I cross the road; it marks the way home though I don’t recognize any of it. It has changed so much since I lived there.

I am lost but for an instant, when I see the Uxbridge Road. It is now a covered plaza, with sleek metal beams on the roof and on the road. It is a pedestrian only area, it looks nice, newly done; but it is still not clear where I am.

Looking in the other direction, there are more new buildings that I do not recognize. I turn the other way and around the north east corner, coming into view, is the old St. Peter’s church. That’s the way.

At least old buildings can’t be got rid of so easily. And can help you navigate the way.

Photo by Chad Davis via Flickr