A third night of hell. And as is fitting with the trend, once again I returned to Five Points… but this time as the Chinese arrive, which is the end of Anbinder’s book.
A Chinese woman moves into 6 Mott. A black woman moves next door. The black woman later hears a lot of noise and screaming and finds that the Chinese woman living next door has her entire family living in a space the size of a walk-in closet.
I am a man named Titus. I am sponsoring the training for theater of a Japanese woman named Uehara Jyo. The woman feels obligated to marry me, but I refuse if she does not love me. She does not, and I never see her again, but continue to sponsor her training.
These weren’t too bad, I must admit, but the final dream had me drenched in sweat, beads of it dripping off my pajama top as I got up and felt my back and head ache.
I dreamt that the blankets covering me were made of the ships manifests containing the names of hundreds of thousands of children who were sold, stolen, or tricked into cruel indentured servitude in New York. The names just crushed me with their weight, and I woke up moaning and found myself soaking.
This flu really, really sucks.

The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the Worlds Most Notorious Slum
by Tyler Anbinder

I finally finish this sucker.

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And it continues. Last night it was a band of bootblacks (boy shoe shiners) going against Big Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall, done up in new WB-style animation, complete with Saturday morning cartoon bumpers.

Whether a good thing or bad thing, there were other sickness-induced dreams last night that had nothing to do with Five Points New York (thank god). One was me playing Legend of Zelda on the Gamecube, which apparently was compatible with the Wooge Olfactory Woofer System (ya got me), but that the game was published with typos. If you saw in your inventory “”y’all gots the real doppleganger”" it really meant “”Wooge 2400×1200x256″”. But if it said “”the real doppleganger”" it really was the real doppleganger.

So I caught the viral infection that’s being going around. Probably caught it when I was out with Kim, Bobbie, and Sue on Friday, when we had dinner at Doughboys (mmmm, S.O.S.) then went to the Hollywood Improv. I woke up in the middle of the night feverish.

In the morning I felt okay enough to go to work, but that was probably poor judgement, as I felt much, much worse by the end of the day and had to crawl home at five o’clock. I climbed into bed and promptly got severely ill.

Here’s how it goes down. I’ve recently been reading the social history of Five Points New York written by Anbinder, as I got interested when I saw Gangs of New York. It’s a slow book, since it is extremely dense, but it is because of this density that in the throes of my fever it permeated every delusion I had that night.

While many of the images were of being in a riot (not the kind the movie, but as described in the book, not once did I run into a one-glass-eyed Butcher), being at a polling place, or walking in the slums of New York. But what really stuck were the living conditions of the people at the time, and the political climate.

So here I am, delusion in my fever thinking that it’s not just me who is sick, but an entire neighborhood. I am lying on the floor of a hovel and others are sick with influenza around me.

This is not a pretty picture.

Oddly enough, as I woke myself up in the throes of an especially feverish moment, I thought I was a man named Place who was running in an election under the Tweed vote but was losing due to my illness. Great. Now I’m a corrupt elected official dying of influenza.

It was, to be sure, a very, very shitty night.

I think I’ve only had two other nights that rank so high on my list of bad flu nights. One was when I was very young and I hit 104 degrees and was sent to the emergenct room. The other was in 1996 in Canton, when I got sick on the train over and lay in a room at the friendship hotel sweating and rasping while prostitutes kept calling on the phone, disturbing what little rest I could get.

Well, at least that’s over with. Now I can just look forward to an uncomfortable night of sniffles and a mild temperature.

Whee.

Go in with zero expectations, come out surprised. How many times have I said this about the crappy movies I see?
Here’s one thing, the story was pretty damn faithful to the comic book storyline, like the way Elektra gets taken down by Bullseye. And I have to say the things they did alter were fairly understandable, even if it did severely weaken the powers of the hero.

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CELEBRATE ME!

Did yoga last night.

Wow, that hurt.

Not a bad way to spend an evening. Not a great way, but not bad. Shanghai Noon was much better — but probably because the whole western-kung fu schtick was so well done. Here you’ve got Jackie and Owen in London… eh. Sure, it’s got a lot of bits that are interesting, but you don’t feel it. They kinda rehash the same jokes from the first movie, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. Most fell into “doesn’t”.

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This is the year of Linus.

I’m trying.

I really am.

Last night I revisited a house I dreamt of quite some time ago. I remember the previous dream more clearly now because I dreamt of it again last night. The previous dream featured this ridiculously fun house that belonged to Katri’s family. It featured the largest family room in existence, and had a cozy secret apartment with two bedrooms, its own kitchenette, a living area, and two baths.

In that dream, things were happy until in the distant future (where I remain inexplicably ageless), it has gone to ruin and an evil cat is torching the place using the fiery depths of hell to emanate from the main house’s kitchen stove. I remember escaping via a dimension portal.

But let’s forget all that and concentrate on last night’s events.

The house had been transplanted from Finland (where Katri apparently grew up till high school instead of arriving in Cupertino when she was no higher than a standing prairie dog) to somewhere in California, and there was a crazy arthouse party going on.

This is probably an influence on my going to the art exhibition for senior students down at the Kinross South gallery last night, where I noticed a preponderance for pastel colored hair. That wasn’t the reason for the visit, though, as I was actually there to view Jenny’s work. I liked the on on the upper right.

Anyhow, in the dream a similar crowd of crazily colored, multiple trajectoried hair people were drinking and laughing and chatting, and there I was sporting my spiffy C-2500L digital SLR taking pics when I realized, “”Hey! This is Katri’s house!”"

Katri, with Kris and Kim in tow, arrive soon after (I must have contacted them using my amazing mental powers), and we’re touring around, noting what was changed to the house.

“”Oh, here’s the den my grandfather haunted,”" Katri noted, pointing to a door that’s been barred shut with planks and big iron nails.

“”I guess he’s still haunting it even when the house is here,”" I surmised, based on the frantic appearance of the planks. Then I exclaimed, “”Wasn’t there a secret apartment upstairs? Where you had to swing on a beam to get to the hidden hatch?”"

“”You’re right!”" Katri said. “”Where is it?”"

We then tromp outside, over to another section of the house, and up a flight of stairs. And in the room that should have a small hallway that leads to a tiny attic space where the hidden hatch lies, we find a plastered up wall.

Denied, we sulk for a bit before looking around some more. And the dream ends.

Note: Katri’s grandmother’s house in Muijala, Finland looks nothing like the mansion in my dreams. And there are no haunted rooms or hidden spaces. I think.