For reasons lost to the dream I'm having dinner at the White House. It's not really the White House of course, and the part of George W. Bush is (natch) played by my father, but for the purposes of the dream it is the White House and he is the President.

I'm sitting in the dining room alone at a bare eight-person table, shortly joined by a kind of schlubby companion, known to be an obsequious courtier and who I also somehow know is named Josh. Annoyingly, he takes the seat next to mine out of all the other seven . This will be awkward because I won't know if people are speaking to him or to me at dinner.

The Bush daughters arrive, played by somewhat more vampy versions of themselves. Dumb-blond Jenna briefly flashes us two Joshes in the style of girls gone wild followed by Barbara (the more intelligent and ergo more attractive), who crawls across the wooden table to the far corner seat with the exaggerated, cat-in-heat style hips of a stripper working the rail.

The table is set, and various "grown ups" filter in. Laura Bush is Laura Bush. For some reason there isn't enough wine or wine glasses to go around, and Dubya/My Father rations out tiny quarter-glasses into various mugs and short cups from the dregs of a magnum bottle. For reasons lost to the dream I know we will still all become drunk, although I also find it improbable in the moment that there isn't more wine, a functionally unlimited supply, to be had in the White House, and that what we do have to drink is rotgut.

Conversation is indistinct. There is discussion of a legal brief -- schlubby courtier Josh is some sort of lawyer -- which will have to be approved by Cheney. He is never seen but rather felt as a presence, perhaps just in the other room. George makes a comment about how "we don't like being disturbed in the mornings around here," and -- scene missing? -- the next thing I know I'm waking up on a couch with a hangover.

The digital readout on a clock reads 10:43 and there are frat guys crashed out on the floor. It's some kind of den or TV room. A bunch of my stuff is laying around in boxes; feels very "college." I begin quietly rifling through my things, planning to pick up a few key items as I somehow know I might not be back for a while.

There are lots of books, poorly looked after. Their pages are bent and some have been left closed around smaller books, a pet (broken spine) peeve of mine. I begin straightening out a copy of Jim McManus's Positively Fifth Street, thinking that Bush will like this and that it would be a nice gesture to clean it up and leave it out for him, when I realize it's been jammed open with a folded-over packet of notes, an act that reeks of a drunken scholarship.

Although the narrative of the dream suggests I would read the notes and the underlined passage on the page they kept marked in the book to intuit the nature of the research, the experience is one of voice-over, and so I hear Jim McManus say (roughly):

You have to accept it when it comes, or you have to accept responsibility for what happens when you don't. I was in the airport bar waiting on the red-eye to Los Angeles trying to drink my balls away, drink down this hard-on, and it wasn't working. Boarding the plane with my carry-on bag I was stuck: too excited to sleep, to drunk to go to the bathroom and finish myself off, too timid to cum in my pants right there.

I put the book down in the pile after removing the notes and smoothing out the pages, and I spend another minute making sure I've got everything in my bag that I want before leaving. Somehow I know George and Laura are sleeping it off behind one of the doors near the table on/under which my stuff is piled, and I am trying, as per dinner, not to wake them up. It occurs to me in the moment that other world leaders must find it inconvenient that the President of the United states is inaccessible before 11am.

In the next room on my way out, daughter Barbara reappears and repeats her cat-crawl, this time diagonally and ergo more dramatically across the carpet. I stand and watch, considering. She stops a few feet in front of me and roles over onto her back, her body perpendicular to mine. Her top (unlike at dinner) is sheer. She hikes her black skirt-dress with lace hem slowly up over the tops of her thighs. Naturally, she has no underwear or tan-lines, and very little pubic hair. I bring myself down to her level, lowering my mouth to gently tease at her clitoris.

She says something along the lines of "If you want to lick Barbara's pussy you have to accept the sixty-nine." It doesn't sound too sexy in the dream either, more contractual, but the moment is charged with erotic energy anyway.

There's a flash, a drawn-out dream second defined by the tip of my tongue pressing against this most divinely specific taut wetness, the foreknowledge that I'm about to get it...

And I'm awake and right on the edge of cumming, awake on an air mattress in New York City in Franz's apartment. Two or three literal seconds after I open my eyes my cell phone's alarm clock goes off. I silence it immediately, clamping down on the situation and simultaneously marveling at the serendipity. To come to consciousness right at the moment of losing control and have that also be the moment at which workaday drudge responsibility comes crashing down upon me.

That's fucking timing, man.

And now I've got to get to work. I offer the above without too much comment. The Freudian overtones are so laughably obvious as to be post-modern. I will say though that the dream image of Barbara was intensley sexual in a highly pleasant way. It captured the kind of thrilling abandon that lust can embody and reminds me of great moments in cunnilingus, so I'll take that as a gift from my sub-conscious and let the rest of what it all might mean churn under for mental compost.

Substance aside, the style of the dream reminded me strongly of the film Factotum, which is taken from the writing of Charles Bukowski. I watched that with Jill -- a woman who I came back here in part to see and stayed with for a few days running around New Years -- and found it to be slowly paced but enjoyable. I recommend it for the specific small touches and the great flashes of language.

The film (and this post) ends with a magnificent piece of poetry:

Roll The Dice
if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.
if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.
go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.
if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.
do it, do it, do it.
do it.
all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, its
the only good fight
there is