Journal of Angel Acevedo

Hello everyone. Fresh off my first couple weeks of substitute teaching, I found myself with a short period of time to write. In a week or so, I will be working only one job and attempting to write every weekend, thus making this whole blog posting thing a regular occurrence.

I have decided to change the narrative structure of the project I am woking on, mainly by changing one characters POV from third person (close psychic distance) to journal entries (first person). As stated before, this whole thing will be written from multiple POV's.

As far as the journal entries go, there is no plot or agenda (at least not apparent and easily identifiable points), it is just one person's explanation of life to his self. I hope the mind of the person writing the journal is interesting enough to generate a form of emotional connection with the reader, and in making that connection, the fate and outcome of his situations become important as well.

Feel free to tell me if my spanish is grammatically wrong :)

Here is entry number one:

From the Journal of Angel Acevedo. 13 March 2013

            I had a terrible nightmare last night. The details are kind of fuzzy, but I remember the important parts, at least the parts that have kept me thinking. I really need to get a dream journal, or at least leave this one by the nightstand when I fall asleep.

            In my dream, I was walking up a large staircase made of stone. There were clouds everywhere; silver and dark grey bluffs obscuring everything but the steps. At the top was a man, but as soon as I saw him, he began to blur before me. Then the stairs began to blur too, and the clouds with them. Everything had tracers, moving, masking and rhythmically breathing in repetition. It echoed visually, a sensation I could only describe adequately the first time I smoked pot. Then, through the blur and smears a yellow orb ascended behind the man. It was bright like the sun, but shone dull through the clouds. The yellow became orange the further the beam shot from its center, and at the edges, orange turned to red and yet even more minutely, in a sliver at the end of the waving spectrum, before the clouds reclaimed the light, red turned to purple in a contour that held the light like a dark halo, its perimeter ephemeral and permeable.

‘I am God’ the man said.

            “No,” I responded. “You’re not.”

            As soon as the words left my mouth, he was gone. No vanishing act, no walking away. He was simply there one moment, and gone the next. I didn’t know if he had heard me. I didn’t know if he left because of what I’d said. It could have been because of what I hadn’t said. But, there wasn’t any time to let the event resonate in my mind.

I don’t exactly remember what happened next, I eventually found myself in a different place, in a park, somewhere in San Francisco, but somehow it was different. I can’t make sense of the fact that I am putting some level of importance on the lack of connection between the two places. The stone steps and the park were certainly separated by events, and time and certainly space. But I don’t remember. There was the man, then there was not. There were the steps, then there were not. Then, segue way…the park was lush and green and free of the usual occupants.  No hippies, hipsters, drum circles, bums, vagrants, druggies, avid Frisbee enthusiasts, dogs walkers, loud crazies, quiet crazies, hoola hoopers, assholes who play catch with hard baseballs in crowds of relaxing sun bathers, sun bathers, popsicle vendors, cookie vendors, pot cookie vendors, beer vendors, coffee vendors, undercover cops ignoring the green stuff and looking for the white stuff, the straight side, the gay side, the joggers, the runners, the yogis, bicyclists, rollerbladers, sk8ers, seniors doing geriatrics, seniors looking at birds, seniors perving on girls, people on benches reading, people on benches having existential crisis’s, people. Empty.

I always notice the voids. I want to remember.

It was also quiet, almost as if it was night but the sun forgot to go down. I was lying on a blanket, a multicolored rough picnic mat made of tweed and of a color set that looked as if it could have been made from one or more of Papa’s old ponchos. I could hear his voice in the back of my head, “Aye Dios, Angel!” I could hear him smile through the words the way he always did when he made a big deal about something he didn’t understand but didn’t necessarily disagree with.  “What did you do with Papa’s ponchos? Y Que estas haciendo ahora, mijito? Porque estas al parque en la noche? Y es la noche?” But then he, like the man at the top of the stone steps, was gone. Then, and I wish I could have asked for a bit of transition, even in a dream, everything around me was suddenly on fire. The ground blazed and the flames reached into the air rhythmically, like fingers dancing on the soft strings of an invisible harp. It was beautiful and destructive, but not hot. I don’t know if it was the nightmare’s intent or the just the limit of a dream’s ability to invoke the senses that made the fire cool to the touch, but the thought, which must have been forming in my subconscious, scared me and I tried to run, but of course I could not. I’ve never been able to run in dreams, and I suppose I knew at that point that I was in fact dreaming. And, if dreaming is a playground for the subconscious, then is the subconscious while I dream in fact the conscious? 
Well, nightmares have a way of trumping a person’s realizations, especially when they are introspective and as I began to contemplate the idea of joining my waking senses, a giant hand came from behind the hill? The horizon? Shit, the far end of the planet? And it grabbed the sun like a tennis ball and pulled it down with the force and ease of a granjero plucking an overripe orange from a low hanging branch. The sky went dark, and as if a vacuum came out of the darkness, the flames went out in an instant, leaving behind charred glowing embers in the grass. It appeared to make signs, or letters or something. I began to walk towards the closest hill to see if I could reach a vantage point from which I could read the words. Apparently there wasn’t time to do this before I woke, and my impatient dream gave me a helping hand in understanding its message as the ground erupted in violent bursts. Sheets of grass and char shot to the sky and swirled, covering the moon at first and eventually most of the San Francisco skyline. The embers continued to rearrange themselves until a message became clear. I read it and woke: God is the son. God is the sun.

            I should have written this all down right when I sat up in bed. I know I am forgetting some things and whether or not they are important, I guess I’ll never know. But I suppose my reason for journaling late is worth it in its own right: Mason was next to me when I awoke. This is the third time he’s slept over. I grabbed his warm body and put one leg over his hip, thinking about his smile until I fell back to sleep. If my dream was a nightmare, then upon waking, Mason became my dream.  My conscious desire. What could the nightmare mean to me anyway? I have lived happily without this ‘God’ and without the son and sun's symbolism for so long already. How can I explain it? I am a man of the moon? Maricon reyna?  I am my father's son, but I guess I’ve found my own light. I’ve learned to shine it my own way. “God,” he said his name was, as he stood obscured in silhouette on the steps.  Such theatrics. But then again, God was always a drama queen. 

         Why can’t I see you now, Mr. God? Pienso que esta solo suenos del Diablo. “Aye dios!” Papa says.

I wonder what Mason dreams about. Soon he will tell me. Soon we will share it all.