sleep in samples.

Had a dream. I think I know what it means already.

You see everything moves so fast these days. One second I’m in the studio with my hands on the Akai, beats loosed over odd-time signatures and snares syncopated off beat, and then I’m in some other place at some other age. My hands are smaller. I am four years old again and clutching a long twig that’s hooked at the end like four-years-old’s do. No reason. Just there minding my own bee’s wax, as the kids say. The air is dense with rain. I feel the drops suspended in air, like paper stars cut and glued on a grammar school wall. Clouds cover the sky in a quiet shroud, objects and people appearing as silhouettes cast in a collision of gray and blue, slightly beveled. I’m in those holy moments that precede dawn, the washed-out blue light falling before all other light, time stained with the ocean and all things faster than they really are. Looks like a movie theater, reality projected at a higher speed and overexposed only for the moment, until pimply-faced God sets down the popcorn and notices her mistake. She doesn’t see yet, no not yet, and I exist in a part-time theater employee’s gaffe. My right hand covers my eyes and there’s that hooked stick in my left and I’m kicking around pebbles, rocks spilling out of the black plastic boundary and scattering on the cement like blood from a busted artery. Icarus Park is just a monster heart splayed out lengthwise. Even with my eyes covered and all, at the forgettable age of four, I can see this. A couple older kids race my way on bicycles. They scream backwards. We found him! We found him! They did it. They found me. They pedal at me faster yet and I’m the hell outta there, see y’all later, police sirens blaring in the distance. I glance back. The kids, the police, the ex’s faded gold sedan creaking along like an old wine cork tossed to the floor and rolling along a line of pines and street lamps all symmetrical. Turn around. Don’t look back anymore. Just run. This is the sound of one foot in front of the other, spinning the earth below like a top, round and round.

Everything moves fast and so am I, running now, pebbles spilling out from behind my heel and past the boundary again but on the other side this time, dooming the sideways heart to bleed empty, it ain’t got a chance in hell. I climb the playground and slide down the other side and run past the chip up bars. Hah. They’ll never catch me. I look over my shoulder despite swearing not to. There’s the kids on bikes again, the ex running and yelling with a bottle in her hand, the police cars swerving into parking spaces on the other side of Icarus, doors flung open and chubby men in blue displacing all their mass, spilling out in the open. The red and blue spills out too. It creeps up and grabs at my heels. Yeah but I’m long gone by now, moving fast like all things beside me, “catch me if you can, fuckers” like a mantra condensing in my head and throat. Still drops of rain hit my face as I speed onward. This is the sound of leaving them behind, leaving her behind, fuck the bullshit, escape.

I’m long gone. Everything slows for a few moments. My fingers wrap around the twig, shifting and tensing and I don’t know why I’m holding it in the first place but damnit if I let go. I hold it like I’d hold my own heart if I ever had to and I note the bridge ahead and how it stretches and arches its back over that long drop, tall grass and swampy creek water waiting below. Running, still running, not getting there quite yet. God, maybe they will get me after all. At last I reach the bridge, my heels pounding on the damp wood, the noise soft and muddy as I make the gradual ascent and then descent. I register the sound and modify it in my imagination: pull back the mids a bit, let’s bring up the highs. I blast to the other side and by a gazebo to my right, but with time slowed and whatnot I have a moment to make out faces and emotions. A smiling girl with balloon in hand, the yellow sphere stretching up and reaching for the clouds, a jump rope slumping downwards in her other hand. Parents clapping and smiling. A boy with video camera in hand, pointing it not at the girl or the parents but instead up at the gray sky with blue wounds. An adult yells at him to get this on tape by god or he’ll get a beating so hard he won’t sit for a week. He doesn’t hear. Just points and shoots the heavens. This is the sound of creating, creating and that’s it, brush strokes on the Sistine ceiling, fuck the bullshit anew.

I’m past the gazebo and again everything seems so fast! Stretches of tall grass blurring green past me, the wind cutting into my eardrums, whispering to me my own velocity, demanding I run faster. Faster. Somewhere in the static I hear something else from behind. I just don’t love you anymore! You hear me? Err, I, goddamnit. The ex is drunk again, following me around like she does. Fuck it. I not gonna stop this time. The creek curves around and intercepts my tangent at another point, another bridge coming. Pat pat pat. My feet push the green below, pulling the second all the damp wood of the second bridge closer as if all the world’s tied on a string. Pat pat pat. A part of me goes cold because I know this sound. I’ve heard it before. This is the sound of a heel hitting the ground, rebellion, one man frozen before a Type 59 tank like a fucking mountain.

I reach the bridge and things stop midway across when my bare foot catches on a board uprooted just an inch from the others. The gaps between railing crossbeams allow just enough room for my small body. Left hand still clutching the twig, my free hand grabs hold of a crossbeam, allowing enough time to feel the pain in my foot and arm and my side and realize that, oh God, this is happening. The wood cracks and cracks and I fall down, twig still in hand. Clinging. Like it’s all ok as long as I don’t let go.

Ok so I hit the ground and all in one instant pass through the grass and swampy water and emerge on the other side, in my house kitchen. What? No time. Everything moving too fast for questions. My mother stands there, arms akimbo, scolding me. I cry because I said “hell” or “damn” or some other swear word, at least that’s what mother tells me, I can’t recall. Rest assured it was terrible, awful, only dirty little boys who shoot other boys with bee-bee guns say that word. She asks me if I am a bee-bee gun kid. No mother. To be honest I don’t know what sort of kid I am. She takes me by the ear, pulls me to the bathroom. It smells overwhelming like soap. Stacks upon stacks of soap bars line the walls like drugs neatly wrapped and stashed away in seat cushions. Everything is white. She coats the brush with soap and tells me to have at it. Gotta clean that mouth, lest I become a bee-bee gun kid. No. Brush away. No I won’t. Have it your way you fucking bee-bee gun kid, she says, leaving the room and flicking the light switch behind her. The door slams like a pop, a piccolo snare or a gun, gunpowder going off and bee-bees ricocheting inside my skull and reverberating through the bone. The black is everywhere. I can’t see a thing, reaching out like a blind man for the light switch, meeting nothing but cold air. The room is larger than before. I panic, run, feel for something or anything. A singularity in the black of space, too far from any other star or galaxy for light to survive the trip to this point, some corner God forgot about. I’m in the blind spot of existence. My legs tire and it’s harder to pull them up. They become wet. The cold reaches up to my ass, then my back, and then water and some anyonymous smell like guilt attaches to my skin. I find myself sideways, gasping for air, feeling fluid in my lungs and bruises on the inside. I cough up blood and it runs on my cheeks and neck, dark crimson against the pale white, my voice wheezing and purling. This is the sound of growing up, ties and Eau De Cologne, doing that nine to five, Kafka.

I open my eyes and everything goes fast again and there’s gold and orange breaking around the bridge up above. Morning. I lay in the creek, water and grass clinging to me as if my body heat gives them a temporary consciousness that they just can’t concede. The police and kids are gone yet mother stands overhead, cradling my head, crying. Wait. Not mother. I squint my eyes, trying to make sense of the silhouette hovering overhead like a doctor over a patient. My pupils constrict and I see. It’s her. The one who calls herself “ex”. She’s crying. My leg feels forced in a way it shouldn’t be and I cry too. She tells me she’s sorry, she’s not herself right now. Identity crisis seems to be the theme of the day. Then she says it will be ok, we will start over. She’s so sorry. And I love her, even with the alcohol coming off her breath.

I wake back at the studio and everything still feels fast, time bent past its original form. A dull beat drones quietly from the monitors. Kick snare kick. There’s the beat: finches gliding a little further, clouds parting and colliding and parting an extra time, the world twirling into dusk fifteen minutes early, needle humming break beats over vinyl fault lines. My face splayed across my arms and I’m staring across the length of the soundboard, recovering from a reality syncopated and modulated to an odd-time signature like jazz. I notice the picture of us back home in the park, ex and I, its frame tipped over and face down on a keyboard. This is the sound of two people becoming one, not merging, but one leaving the other,

I still have that beat. Yeah at least I have that beat. Leaking from those bookshelf speakers posted like towers to a glitch-hop God. Pulsing in the copper wires that span from my head to my heart to my ears to my hands. It feels loud, it sounds warm, senses melding into kicks and snares and synth. In digital I see and breathe and dream. She is the one and I am the zero and I am waiting.