southward, soonish

Here's an entry in my desktop file titled "memorable dreams/things that matter" from last summer:

"Night of June 29th. More Zanzibar dreams – in fact all of my dreams last night occurred in a “tropical” type of setting. In my dream I was, along with many other people, trying to summit a relatively small rock formation jutting out of the ocean (maybe it was 40 feet high?). The rocks were jet black. I ran down a sandy beach to join in the apparent “competition” to reach the top, but I was still wearing only a towel from my shower. Once I'd swam out, the towel kept getting snagged on the rocks and falling off and I was embarrassed, to an extent, but was more focused on getting to the top (not winning, per se, but really just getting up high). Once I reached the top I was very proud of myself and I could see the clear blue water for miles…but I was intimidated by the slope on the way down. I ended up sliding down and scraping my back rather than inching down slowly, but I was glad to get down back into the water.

After I got down from the rocks I couldn’t find my friends (or whoever I was there with) and so I followed another group of people to a place that everyone seemed to be talking about, an island nearby. We swam there and when we arrived, i wandered around with these anonymous dream-people. the island was home to a village made up of mostly hotels and hostels and restaurants, but as we wandered from place to place (all locations seemed to be connected to one another, so we were inside a labyrinth-like building the whole time) and all the buildings had dirt floors and were overrun with tropical foliage. The interior of this huge complex seemed somehow abandoned, but had beautiful Spanish-colonial style details – creamy pastels, intricate wood carved doorframes, brass furniture, muted yellow embossed tile ceilings, vines creeping through the windows and just occupying the space ever so casually etc. etc. etc.

We arrived at one hotel that was nicer than the others and there I used the phone to call the mainland and try to get someone to come and pick me up…and that was the end, or all I can remember for now."



Memories of Zanzibar, it would seem, as well as some good old fashioned "stranded" thematics?

A tribute to my theory that having been raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, smack in the middle of the high desert, was some sort of cosmic mistake -- that my pasty-white ass was meant for regions say, on the Equator...?

I'm an exhibitionist? I'm an exhibitionist with great style?

Or maybe this entry popped out at me because it reminds me that it takes very little for me to know what I want, most of the time. Like now, sitting at the Hotel St. Francis and having just consumed a surprisingly earthy house salad and a glass of cabernet -- I guess it takes a setting like this to get me daydreaming about being brown from head-to-toe and getting completely lost in cities inside cities, about being as anonymous and brave as the faceless others in my dream...

So I bought a ticket to Mexico City tonight, and I leave on October 15th.