So the weekend was strangely uneventful. I ended up not going out due to falling asleep during the prime time hours (10 p.m to 5 a.m thurs, fri sat and sunday night.) Also, for the entire weekend the movie “Apolcalypse Now Redux” played on repeat in my room. That’s not meant to be a metaphor for some abstract, surreal and creepy shit that was going on. I really was watching Apocalypse Now Redux. It must have played nearly 30 or 40 times(and still counting.) That of course, led to some really bizarre and terrifying dreams. The worst type of nightmare I have is a frequently recurring one. It’s one of those where in the dream, you’ve killed someone justifiably yet covered it up or buried them(like a metropolitan version of Deliverance but without the uncomfortable male rape scene.) Anyway you spend the entire dream, nervous about getting caught by the authorities who are slowly picking up clues(Match Point?) Well in this particular version, I had killed someone after they had come back from the dead, because they requested it. I may have actually only reburied them in some sort of weird shrine in the backyard. IDFK. For some reason I had to keep them in the freezer for a bit first. And then I went to the bank teller… who was in my house for some reason, and took out $50 to gamble in Vegas(high stakes I know.) The teller gave the money to me all in 1 dollar bills, and in an excessive amount of bundles and money bags which made it look like a hell of a lot more than $50. I was concerned it might be stolen.
Anyway, the big twist in the dream, was that when I got back home, my mom was in the process of killing someone. It was some sort of real jerky guy who resembled that asshole ex-husband/ex-boyfriend guy in Superman (was Brad his name?) So, yeah, basically I walk in, catch the end of the ordeal as she’s busy wiping away fingerprints from ashtrays and scrubbing the place of dna evidence(my mom always was a neat freak.)
So, later the cops show up, only vaguely suspicious,to ask her questions and search the place. I’m of course nervous about my own “crime” (which she does not seem to know about.) After they leave she tells me they found nothing except she can’t understand why they managed to spot some blood in the freezer. So the jig is up, but then I rationalize that since the cops are working on a completely different case, the blood in the freezer won’t match with that of the victim they are investigating, so they may not look into it further. The dream ends with us somewhat fast forwarded ahead in time, trying to get on with our lives. Meanwhile I’m still concerned about the police, but she reassures me that they have no evidence, and they’re not going to do anything.
One thing about these kinds of nightmares that always gets me, is that they are so real. I often find myself saying “if only this were a dream, but it’s real this time! I wish I could take it back, but it actually happened, and I will have have to look over my shoulder forever. This is real!” Well it wasn’t real. I woke up and there was Martin Sheen to tell me, “Saigon. Shit, I’m still only in Saigon.”
I just woke up from a long nap with some strange dream sequences, which may or may not have been induced by the strawberry frozen yogurt I consumed a few hours before. I don’t recall the exact narrative of my dream, if there was one. Some highlights:
Some guy had planted fruit trees in the middle of the street, so now there were full grown trees blocking huge portions of the road. I couldn’t believe this didn’t seem to bother anyone and that no one was doing anything about it.
I woke up within the dream…you know one of those perplexing moments when you wake from sleeping in a dream and somehow think you’re not dreaming anymore since you woke up. Suddenly I realized I was covered in tattoos. They were good tattoos from what I could judge, and apparently were placed there by some female friends. I tried to figure out how they could have done it while I was asleep. Had I been drugged or something. tried to wash them off only to discover that they were permanent. I then however, woke up again within the dream and the tattoos were gone. Ah thank goodness it was only a dream, yet I didn’t realize I was still dreaming even then.
I was sitting in some unknown mall-like airport, in heavily trafficked area near one of the exits. A somewhat dirty, white german shepherd dog wandered up to my chair and wanted to be petted. I was nervous, because you never know if strange dogs will just decide to bite the shit out of you. It’s owner seemed to be nowhere to be found, but finally a white trash looking lady came by and claimed it….As I’m sitting there, I’m watching an anime series on a portable little gadget I apparently own. The Anime series is a fictitious older one which is titled “The Last Lois Lane.” As the theme song is playing, there’s an older Asian man several seats away from me singing along with the words as if it’s something he’s nostalgic for from his childhood. However, he seems too old to be nostalgic for an anime series that’s maybe at the most a couple of decades old. He would have been a full grown adult at the time when it aired….so I figured he must have watched it with his his children and maybe he’s reminiscing about the time he used to spend with them. I wish that I could remember the words to the song, but I’m afraid it was all just gibberish, though maybe it was just in Japanese an I just didn’t recognize it since I don’t speak the language. I don’t want to offend anyone.
I had a dream that I saw a movie, and it was one of those movies where at the end….it’s so moving that you’re just like “Oh my god I just saw such and such movie and it was soooo good,” only I had just said that about some other movie so I was trying to find another way to say it without people responding “Oh you just like every movie.” Because clearly I don’t! Anyway, the point is that the ending was so great….and then I woke up and realized the whole thing was a dream. And in that instant I realized that since it wasn’t a real movie, that I could just copy the entire plot from my dream, make a script out of it and sell it….only problem is that I can’t remember what it was about! All I can recall from my dream is that it was an art film and the title was “72 hours” (no relation to the 48 Hours Eddie Murphy movies.) The end was sad and desolate and there was some quoting of spanish…but beyond that I recall nothing. It was amazing though. My subconscious told me so. My subconscious posted a message on a generic equivalent of facebook that “72 hours is soooo fucking good.”
All I can remember are these scenes…which may not even be part of it. They could just be other random shit that occurred in my dream.
A guy is buying a coffin for himself to be used in a couple years. A bunch of stuff is wrong with the order. They keep talking about how the credit card may be expire or become invalid before it’s time to collect the money for the coffin(when the guy dies.) They get on a loudspeaker and suddenly lots of people are involved.
There is a lot of road construction in late afternoons and evenings in an urban city neighborhood. For entertainment, people watch in lawn chairs. This isn’t in hicksville either. Drama erupts at the clothing store where locals work, over a girl. The guy is pissed about rumors spread…other guy responds that he’s sorry for spreading the rumors but that they are true. The other guy threatens to throw him into a giant rock/boulder that is nearby yet indoor.
Girl pounds wall while having sex with rival guy so the guy who likes her/hates that guy and is standing in a hallway outside will hear it. She’s supposed to be on his side…so why she would torment him like this is anybody’s guess.
Something in spanish toward the end, while driving in a car.
Did you ever know someone that you thought was a huge bitch and then you had a dream about them…and they turned out to be so horribly evil a person in the dream that when you woke up it made you think the real life version wasn’t so bad after all.
So lately my sleeping periods are all out of sorts. Instead of getting a proper night’s sleep, I have been going out every single evening. So to make up for only sleeping three or four hours a night, I have divided my zzz’s into two shifts, a few hours in the afternoon, and a few at night. This combined with my elevated antihistamine usage due to allergy season…has led to some pretty goddamn bizarre dream sequences.
The other night (or day?) I dreamt that I robbed a bank in L.A. with an ethnic looking girl as my partner in crime. It was successful but somehow instead of just money we also obtained a large satchel full of oversized rubies, emeralds and misc gemstones….which appeared to be made of plastic so we might as well have robbed Juicy Couture for all I know. Anyhow, the LAPD was after us in full force, and we were hiding out on the roof of a this parking garage, and basically you could tell the police knew we were there and had their binoculars sighted on us.
So we had to decide what to do. At that point I proposed that we should just go back to the bank and return everything, and hope that they’d just forget about the whole thing. She was totally opposed to this of course, and was like “Are you crazy? I’m not giving up all this money!” And we all know diamonds are a girl’s best friend or whatever. So we decided to both split up and try to escape separately. I knew the cops would be waiting for me if I took the elevator down to the 1dt floor. So instead I took it to the second floor, climbed down to the street and walked away casually. The police were everywhere though, and eventually one came up and asked me some questions. At this point things in the dream get fuzzy as to how or if I get caught, but I do know that they actually took me to the bank…but the bank was all Korean employees(which isn’t a big stretch of the imagination for an Los Angeles bank,) and they spoke Korean so it was hard to understand but they maintained that the bank had not been robbed, possibly because they didn’t want to admit someone had successfully carried off a heist in their bank. So the cops let me go. The following monday though…I was in an office presumably at a workplace and the cops were waiting for me at the end of the day when it was time to leave. I knew it was for real this time…but they were so busy interrogating my employers that I was able to nonchalantly walked out without them seeing me and vanish into another dream.
Just woke up from an antihistamine induced coma. Fell asleep watching “Earthquake”(1974) starring Charlton Heston..a classic with a tear jerker ending. Apparently there actually was an earthquake today(yesterday,) but I certainly didn’t notice it. I went to my grandma’s to eat rack of lamb, and then to American Apparel where I purchased an overpriced white denim jacket, which is officially the most trump tight piece of clothing that I own. I wonder how long I can go without spilling wine on it and ruining it.
Saturday night was “Cheap Thrills” which was jam packed and with all the best people. It was about the most fun I could hope for without the presence of any romance or overt sexual activity. Some band played there that I have never heard of but must have been semi-popular.
Nothing too eventful happened except that Danielle Stanley was there but then she saw someone get beat up so she got disgusted and left. Also, they kind of have those oversized wine glasses there so I was drinking wine and got a little out of control on the dance floor. When I got home it was pushing 3:30 am so I had a bowl of chocolate cheerios and passed out with all my clothes on.
My allergies are kind of going buck wild on me. I’ve been having some mondo-bizarro dreams lately, which I think are the result of antihistamines. Like I had a dream that I was in some gigantic studios and I was going to be in a makeup commercial(!?) and I had to report to the set. It was just like a maze of stucco building corridors sort of similar to the Venetian…
and when I got to the set I was late. I was also really nervous and self conscious, and I knew I was going to have to take my hat off for the shoot, but I hadn’t had a chance to fix my hair or comb it or anything. It’s one of those things where I wear a hat so often that I almost feel naked without it. It’s like taking off your pants. In fact, I once showered with a girl still wearing my hat and socks(but not my pants) Granted it was like 6 in the morning so I was half asleep..so that had something to do with it…but probably not everything. My advice to people would be to always wear the same thing all the time. Whenever I change things up, I get self conscious that people suddenly will change their mind about me. It’s the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it mentality.” I have seen too many girls that were totally raving beauties, decide to cut all their hair off or make some drastic style change, and they were just never the same after that sort of like in that song “Caroline, No” by the Beach Boys. It’s why I end up wearing the same “lucky” jackets all the time…agonize over whether or not to grow a beard(or whether to shave it) because I always worry that I might disappoint someone. To that you might say “Who gives a shit? Do whatever you want.” But that’s just not my personality and never will be. I’m a diabolical, meticulous, scheming planner and doing something that “comes natural” or “just feels right”… just doesn’t come naturally to me. If it were forced maybe it would feel more natural though!
Anyhow, back to the makeup commercial in my dream. For some reason director Mike Mills was filming something right next door, so I thought about going over to him telling him “Hey you won’t remember me, but I was in some commercials you did about 10 years ago. I’m here to film a makeup commercial right now. Well just wanted to say hi.” But he wasn’t there, when I went over there…there was just a stack of his business cards. So they finally call me up to sit in the chair where we’re going to shoot the makeup commercial…and they don’t make me take off my hat. They don’t even put makeup on me. They just film me for like a second and are like “That’s it we’re done.” It was like one of those sexual experiences when you just get too excited and can’t last no matter how many algebraic equations or skateboard tricks you do in your head to get your mind off the possibility of impregnating the undeniably sexy girl in your bed. And so I was like what? I flew all this way just for this? But I was glad to get out of the situation without having to remove my clothing or subject myself to anything that I would consider too degrading.
I also never got around to learning what a guy like me who doesn’t wear makeup and hopefully doesn’t need makeup was actually doing appearing in a women’s makeup commercial? On some level though, dreams always make sense. Like what’s hiding behind what’s made up? And perhaps I’m the star of a makeup commercial, because of my long career of concealing things behind images and characters I have created as well as poses which successfully shield me from my insecurities. And it’s not going to stop any time soon! This entry is though, as it’s getting about as gay as it could possibly get. It’s been skirting the line of “Some Like it Hot” territory.
P.S. The true origin of this dream is that I was reading Raquel Welch’s autobiography when I fell asleep. In it she talks a lot about her techniques for applying makeup to help her look younger! And she’s 69 and still every bit the babe that was looking for the firedragon in Fathom circa 1967! So yeah that’s why I had that dream, but it’s fun to think about all that other stuff.
While taking a nap today, I had a bizarre dream that there was this small plastic rocket that aliens or someone left here to be launched or something. Only one person seemed to know the secret of how it worked, because he was standing in some special place that made you smarter for as long as you stood there. I personally thought that launching the rocket was the aliens sneaky way of getting us to blow up the world or whatever. Finally, “when the time was right,” we put the small pellet like component into the plastic rocket and nervously launched it. After it was airborne, I wanted to run for it, thinking it would come down and destroy the immediate area. The handheld control it came with, only had a button which began to flash “confirm when you’re ready” which I assumed meant was time to push it while it was in midair and you were far enough away from the surface area. So I went ahead and pushed it(even though I had not left or taken cover) but it turned out all it did was activate a camera which allowed you to view the breathtaking scenery from the rocket as it fell harmlessly back toward the Earth.
Last night I had a series of action packed dreams. The first one was sort of an unpleasant mix drink combination consisting of an informal high school reunion populated with people I barely knew in the setting of a post apocalyptic wasteland.
I don’t remember anything of the second dream, so perhaps my mind is trying to protect me from some traumatic thing that happened to me in it but I doubt it as my mind tends to fail me in that regard. Most likely just forgot.
The third dream was the most exciting, but also the most terrifyingly realistic. I was in a crowded convenience store during first fridays, only first fridays was in Tempe instead of Phoenix…but it wasn’t really Tempe. It looked like a completely different city that was merely being called Tempe.
…So I’m in this mom and pop convenience store which may or may not be run by Asians and this menacing looking woman and a short, stubble faced guy are sort of harassing me, trying to get me to hand over my wallet, but I refused. Then suddenly there is a cop, and he’s telling people to be on the lookout for a woman who’s name is Laura something or Lauren something…but whatever it was I glance over at the menacing girl as she takes her ID out of her purse to give to the attendant, and I notice it’s the same name as the person the cops are looking for and turns out she’s wanted for two separate murders! I duck out of the place wondering if she noticed that I saw her ID and whether she “knows that I know.” The streets are filled with people and it’s a festive atmosphere. I weave through narrow alleyways and packed corridors trying to get far enough away to safely call the police from my cellphone. Every place I seem to go though, the girl and her friend(who seems to shapeshift from male to female and back regularly) are always nearby. I have the feeling they are following me and planning to get me alone and kill me. When I finally get a chance to call the cops, I don’t know the number. For some reason instead of dialing 911…I’m trying to call the non-emergency number so I end up calling 411 and talking to a pleasant, automated sounding lady who gives me that number. I then proceed to call the police department, and a lieutenant “cop voice” man essentially gives me the runaround and doesn’t seem too interested. No wonder this broad and her cohorts are on the loose.
This dangerous cat and mouse game continues on for awhile with these howlers trying to kill me as I enter various stages of my usual paranoia. The dream eventually comes to an ambiguously abrupt ending without any sort of climax(no not even that kind) or resolution to speak of.
Yesterday we were playing the new John Madden’s football 2010(Madden ’93 for the Sega Genesis is the best of all the versions in my opinion.) I lost a couple of close games against Rudd 49-45 and 35-32. They both came down to the laset couple plays of the game. Then after a night of nothingness at Casey Moore’s and a few minutes at Cheap Thrills I went home, and ended up having bizarre football dreams. I dreamt that the New York Jets along with a host of other teams wanted me to be their starting quarterback. The fact that my prior football experience was as a mediocre player at the Catholic grade school recess level, and am a scrawny malnourished snotling did not seem to discourage them. However, I hate New York, New York accents and New Yorkisms(take a walk, etc) and all that so I really didn’t want to play for them. Then I realized I did not know how take proper snaps and run plays and formations so I would not get very far. I came up with a plan to study all that stuff and essentially cram for it in one night.
Needless to say, the dream never materialized. In fact it didn’t even materialize within the dream. There was never any imaginary football played, and there was a really annoying guy who kept bothering me because he wanted to be starting quarterback…and he was so obnoxious it was like someone trying to talk to you on the bus. Anyway I said I wanted to play for a different team just so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. I don’t remember what happened after that. It was a dream after all, and these things often end unresolved.
So i feel as though I have a lot of creative and imaginative ideas for sites.
Some of them may not be so imaginative and creative, but are by nature “good bets” for success. I could be all wet of course, but let’s just say I have clear visions of these ideas. How does one go about finding someone who can turn those ideas into how I view them as successes in my head. I don’t have thousands of dollars to hire a programmer, and hosting and bandwidth are always an issue. I’m just looking for advice and opinions on how and where to go about it.
I have created and maintained a lot of websites in my day, some of which were utter failures, some of which were fairly successful but none which quite hit the big time. The reason for this is that my actual web development skills are quite dated. Being that the bulk of my knowledge with hand coding html and such was self taught, everything I do still has that 1998-2002 feel(which I like! but is not enough to make a popular site in this day and age.)
I never made it to the php world.
Several years ago i ran a url redirection service at 4w4.net. My plan was to get as many members as I could…hopefully to the size of tsx.org or cjb.net and then sell it for big bucks. I got it up to about 1000 members…and bam! out of nowhere my host cancelled me because someone was spamming their url. So it went right down to nothing in a matter of days( i could not find a new host who would be understading about the uncontrollable spam issue). At that point I said the hell with database driven stuff…as soon as it gets popular it gets too expensive to maintain. So then I started an internet news site which was onlinedailynews.com. It got fairly popular but I found it was impossible to make any money off of it(this was after the banner ad bust in 2001-2002 when site based ppc was mostly dead, and pre google adsense). Around that time I also had a site midifind.com, which was a midi file search engine. This strangely was a good money making site, as it actually made a lot of money selling ringtones from just a single tower banner ad. I regret that I did not keep this site going, but I was much more interested in catching expired domains at the time.
One thing I have always thought is that the web is all about people! Almost every huge site and “next big thing” on the web became big because of the people who joined the site and/or somehow contributed to it….dnforum wikipedia friendster myspace facebook twitter google mp3.com(the old version) drudgereport blogger wordpress livejournal the list goes on and on… the one thing they all have in common was the information and knowledge of a lot of people flooding into or permeating from the site.
However, going for “next big thing” type crazes may itself be chasing the last big thing rather than seeing the future. Perhaps the proverbial next big thing in business is tried and true proven business models. Having a simple product, service or store that is targeted to a niche, either geographically or specific product wise… and then marketing it step by step. You don’t need the biggest newest idea ever to be successful. Grocery stores have been around for forever and ever, and yet someone can still just open up a corner grocery store and start making big money. I guess what I’m saying is that the “next big thing” is not necessarily anything like what is popular today or even revolutionary in nature.
So getting back to the point…what do you think the best way to approach “partnering” up with someone if you have the idea but not the practical means to make your vision of a site come to life?
