Box full of sand

House.
I was in a brownstone on South Portland last night, meeting a friend who’s a contractor. He showed me around. Living in a bland box, I forget sometimes how wonderful these row houses can be. The pocket doors between the parlor and the dinning room are still operational. Enormous mirrors in both parlor floor rooms, one of them cracked years back in a fire. Both outer and inner front doors were very large with a Gothic curve at the top. The fine old wood of the staircase had been revealed from its years of defilement.

Dinner.
We had dinner at Smoke Joint. There was some excitement: three “yuths” came in, evidently a return engagement, “after an earlier incident,” as they say on the subway. The owner or manager, his ear blinking with one of those Lt. Uhurus, had evidently told them to scram after they had threatened to shoot the place up. Now they were back, adding some heat and spice to the BBQ. One of the guys was a virtual parody of the type, homo homie, skinny as a 2x4, his jeans hanging well below his hips and his shoes untied, capped by the absurdly oversized baseball cap, a style which has the misfortunate of making its wearer look microencephalic.

Dream.
I dreamed I was in a new wine store in an unfamiliar neighborhood. There were some suspicious goings on, and I left out the back door (the place was a former CVS). There was a little park outside, and a weasel/possum-like thing came up to me and started to crawl up my leg, like a baby squirrel once did in Prospect Park. I wanted to take a picture of it, but it kept moving and was too close to the camera. Someone had a children’s field guide and said it was a “soto,” which I’d never heard of. I contested the identification even though the picture looked just like the animal. I woke up to the sound of Stompy, upstairs, practicing his tap-dancing/pacing his Satanic pentagram/voguing in heels, whatever-the-hell he does at night, besides sleeping in his boots, in case, one presumes, the world is about to end and he wants to be ready.