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mugabe won.

strange dream again last night.
a long story, involving cliffs and raging seas and storms, and hanggliders and underwater cities, old idols rising to the surface of the aforementioned raging seas...
by the end of the dream, though, I was a child with my parents. walking around the cliffs and rocks that overlook the sea at the end of the island, we sat down and I said something. my parents looked at each other and said 'hush, they can hear you. the rocks have ears'.
I didn't understand what they were talking about until they picked up a thick black electrical cable that ran under one of the bushes next to where we were sitting. we followed the cable, crawling through tunnels and cracks in the rock until we arrived in an underwater/undeground lab beneath the island, a dark place of corridors carved in the rock, with water on the floor and strange, whirring machinery along the walls.
we met some scientists that were fairly friendly, considering we had just blown their ill-disguised secret. they showed us a huge tank set in the rock with a glass face, where they kept their intelligent amphibian octopuses...
monstrous creatures. slow, intelligent, alien beasts with polychromatic hides that shifted in the glare from the light tubes overhead. utterly malevolent but indolent.
then I saw a little figure appear at the far end of the corridor. like a child. it saw us and darted off, around the back of the tank. my parents and the scientists were at the far end of the lab, on the other side of a huge pool of water.
suddenly I saw a little brown monkey appear in the tank among the octopuses. it had come in from an opening in the back.
the monkey was immediately followed by another one, a shining white-haired monkey that seemed to be talking and breathing under water. it spoke to the octopuses, and they stirred around it. I was sure it spoke of violence and revolution, because the octopuses were crawling up towards the opening, and I knew they able to move on land...
at that point I woke up.

I had a strange dream last night. as usual I remember only the end.

I was standing in a cafeteria with a lot of people I'd never seen, and some people from my old high school. a young black guy was teasing a baby in a huge multicoloured carriage.

what he did was poke his index finger towards the babe. when the baby reached for it, he pulled it back. he did this again and again, and the baby got more and more upset.

the baby had a horribly intense expression, dark liquid eyes that screamed fear and anger out of a dark orange face. it was on the verge of rupturing, as though its anger would make it burst like an overripe peach.

the situation really distressed me, so I started whacking the guy really hard over the head with a rolled-up newspaper, then I chastised him severely.

I walked away and out of the cafeteria, into a brightly lit plastic shopping-mall environment. as I walked out I turned around, and the guy was right up in my face.

he said he was going to kill my best friend, XXX XXXXX, a guy I knew in high school that works for microsoft now. not my friend. I bolted.

he caught up with me, tackled me and rammed his fist in my side. curiously, the fist stopped a few inches from my body. then he grabbed a bottle and smashed it into the floor, about three inches from my head. shattered glass sprayed my face.

I dropped to my knees and lifted my arms over my head, hands joined in a sort of weird quasi-religious supplicating posture. I "surrendered", but in the same way you "surrender" resentfully in an argument, claiming the moral high ground for yourself. "ok, you win". hypocritically, that is.

then the two walked away. I waited til they had left the bright plastic glare of the mall, then I ran up to them.

and beat the shit out of them.

curious thing is, when I woke up I lay half-asleep for about half an hour, paralysed with violent hatred for this imaginary person, while ultra-violent imagery flowed past my mind's eye.

I think the dream has some personal significance, about vulnerability and pretense and anger management or something, but it's too cryptic for my little mind...

I mean, besides the fact that my subconscious has internalised the imagery of violent black youth that serves as the cultural currency of MTV, B-class films and pop culture in general. how depressing

my harddisk is fucked. dead. dead, dead, dead for a ducat dead.

I'm feeling rather more than a tad depressed about this. a year and a half's worth of journals, pictures, essays, writings, worthy emails, even my stupid savegames... nearly everything I've written, made, photographed, manipulated, generated since, well, forever. 

the material substance of a whole chapter in my life, erased.

its like having your library catch fire. or your brain. I'm trying to hold on to that thrill of excitement you get when something old is destroyed that was keeping you tied to the past, however valuable it was to you. but it's a bit tough.

in fact I feel bleak and empty and robbed right now. and a fool, for feeling invulnerable in the face of the growing statistical tumour that was the increasing chance of a 'puter meltdown.

inevitable, I suppose. well, take heed and learn that we are not invulnerable. death and annihilation punces upon us in strange ways from unexpected directions. every day we die a little more.

a little digital piece of me just died. long live me