As I walked through Wolseley it was the beauty and character at the front of the old, brick home that caught my eye first. Well, that and the “For Rent” sign, as it was in exactly the area my girlfriend and I were hoping to move to. Then on the side I saw what I thought was a car port, but soon realized was a sheltered, cobblestone patio. The entire place was perfect. There was also a two car garage with the door opened and I noticed a table full of nothing but ornate, wide desk lamps, perfect for the studio area I was hoping to set up. As I approached the garage a staticky Louis Armstrong became audible on an old radio in the corner. I noticed the lamps were dismantled and each of the pieces had a $15 price tag on it. I guessed it was some kind of odd garage sale and just as I wondered why there wasn’t anyone tending the tables a scrawny, gray haired man galloped into the garage and bellowed, “Ah! You! Glad you came back! Boy, do I have something to show you!” He was obviously mistaken, as we’d never met, but before I could stop him he was gone.
The old man soon returned with a thick pair of glasses on that had slid to the tip of his nose. His vitality and enthusiasm was charming, but I still found him uncomfortable to be around. He was holding a small, red envelope in one hand and a piece of coarse sandpaper in the other. He came close to my side where I could see the once heavy paper of the envelope was now worn and showing its age. He opened the tattered flap and behind it was mounted a shiny diamond roughly the size of a pumpkin seed. “I told you I bought this for buttons years ago from a fine jeweler and now I’m going to prove to you its authenticity!” With that, he vigorously rubbed the diamond with the sandpaper taking short breaks to show and tell me how the diamond remained unscathed. This tickled him so immensely that I didn’t have the heart to tell him his gem was becoming progressively more destroyed with each reveal and was likely just a chunk of ordinary glass. Instead, I distracted him by asking if he was the owner of the house which he said he was. He dropped what he was doing, went over its features and told me how it was just that morning that he’d put it up for rent. It had never been rented before now and he and his wife had lived there for decades. Anxious to inform my girlfriend and get an early application submitted, I excused myself and started down the driveway. “Wait!”, he yelled, “I’m headed that way, too! I’ll give you a ride!” I hadn’t said where I was going, but accepted the offer anyway.
He drove a 1950-something kind of truck with a push lawn mower in the back that slammed around from side to side as we careened through an overgrown field passing by a sprawling trailer park in a nearby clearing. The trailers were dilapidated and scattered randomly throughout the park which only seemed deserted, but wasn’t, and was in fact exactly where I wanted to go. The man was rambling a string of incoherent stories and laughing to himself the whole time. Rather than interject with a request to stop, I just opened the passenger door and shoulder rolled out of the truck and into the grass. I sprung to my feet and watched the truck disappear into the distance with its door swinging wildly, lawn mower bouncing in the back and driver cackling madly. Despite it all I was still excited to rent from the old codger and sprinted towards the park to find my girlfriend.
The terrain approaching the park was hilly and rough, covered in huge rocks that tripped me up here and there, yet oddly enough didn’t break my pace. Images of rattlesnakes flashed in my mind as well and I had a sense that I should be afraid of disturbing them in the rocks although I never saw any. Soon I was in the clear, dashing past trailers at breakneck speed until one in particular caused me to do a double-take that stopped me in my tracks. I swore I saw a tentacle slide past the bay window in the front.
The old home was mounted on railway ties with no skirting, its roof sagging in the center with rust and water damage running down the sides of it. I noticed its windows had been reinforced and were sealed to hold in the cloudy water that filled its breadth. Although it clearly hadn’t been tended to in ages, the entire trailer had been converted to a huge fish tank and, yes, it was a tentacle I’d seen! It was an octopus and upon further inspection I saw the trailer was home to a group of them; the most sickly octopi one could ever imagine… and one squid. They were barely moving, mostly limp, drained of any color and obviously wholly depressed. Then my sister arrived with a friend, both about nine years of age, and escorted me through the front door of the trailer that opened to a feeding area. There you could see the tank was actually split into two levels and an octopus on the lower level spilled a glob of tentacles over the edge, about fifteen of them, which made no sense for an octopus. They were all clumped together and they slowly wrapped around the friend’s arm. She wasn’t fazed and simply looked to my sister for support. “Don’t worry,” she said, “They only do that to get rid of the old ones.” Then the creature retracted into the tank, leaving a handful of its rotted tentacles clinging to the little girl’s forearm. I left the trailer and, concerned and saddened, fell to my knees in the yard where I noticed there were countless tentacles discarded by previous visitors that had rubberized as they dried in the sun. I don’t know what I was thinking, but my instinct was to just gather them up and make artwork from them in some sort of effort to help. This wasn’t an easy task, though. Most had dried to surrounding rocks or debris and tore as I peeled them from the earth.
Suddenly my mother appeared, frantic, announcing that my laptop had been compromised. She urged me to go and see for myself. I don’t know how I got there so quickly, but suddenly I was sitting in front at the desk in my new studio which was perfectly lit by an ornate, wide desk lamp. The computer in front of me was frozen up with the screen flashing a list of offensive and clearly falsified online infractions along with a notice that the authorities had been notified and were on their way. I laughed and my girlfriend’s alarm clock went off which – as you’ve no doubt guessed – awoke me from this bizarre dream.
Then I began to compose this journal entry on my laptop, which is working fine, by the way.
