Dreaming: Ice-Cream

All I remember now is that people were pointing at me and saying I was a huge ice-cream cone.  I may have actually been a huge swirly soft-serve ice-cream, but I'm not sure anymore.

It's hot and dusty and often late at night in Ramadan I walked down to the baqalah and got an ice-cream. 

You can get a good one for ten to thirty qirsh, a vanilla bar coated in brown chocolate-like product or a tube of fruit sherbet.  They're not real ice-cream, they're milk and vegetable oil and fillers, but we're used to it.  Everything in this country is a cheap imitation, unless you're rich, but it's been so long since we've tasted the real thing that we wouldn't recognise it any more.  It's cold and it's sweet and it's affordable and that's all we wanted.

Ramadan's over now, and I think the midnight ice-cream runs are too. 

Dreaming: Pirates

I dreamed I was riding in an empty Greyhound-type bus around the logging roads of the town where I grew up, which were now paved, and empty of logging equipment and vehicles.  I had a little black cat clinging to my shirt.  The bus driver was a woman and speaking English.  People rarely speak English in my dreams anymore. 

I got off the bus and went through one cramped room after another in the little corner groceries on the outskirts of that town; they'd added on quite a few rooms since I'd last been there, with no obvious planning, and crammed them full of drygoods, mostly tins of fava beans and cellophane-wrapped yellow boxes of al-Ghazaleyn tea bags.

There were pirates, in the drygood stores, all of them male with multicoloured dandelion hair and sparkly teal eyeliner.  I wish I could pull off coloured eyeliner.  I only remember one pirate clearly, but he was a gentleman and a scholar and agreed with me that al-Ghazaleyn was way better than Lipton, even though it was cheaper.  Lipton is weak and insipid no matter how long you steep it, and it doesn't cover up the taste of the alkali in the water.  And to hell with supporting American brands anyhow.

I believe they were book pirates, rather than the maritime robbery sort of pirates.

I have no idea why I keep dreaming about riding in vehicles on the logging roads outside Bigotsville.  Those flamboyantly gender-presentation-ignoring pirates would definitely not have survived long there.  A shame.