I Had A Dream

I traveled back in time to New York in the seventies...or maybe it was the late sixties. I was in some hole of a walk-up apartment where these art critics and dealers were hanging out with artists and poets, feeling all pumped up and alive because they were slumming it and vicariously engaging in squalor without having to get their suits or their veins or blood dirty. You know how those people are. I kept trying to warn the critics and artists about things in the future like AIDS and the Bush family, telling them they could stop these things if they listened to me, but they thought I was just another junkie poet and that I was just part of the tripping "local color." This pissed me off. I explained all these things in great detail but they just said things like "Wild!" or "You should write that down!" I was talking to assholes like Clement Greenberg even though that's the totally wrong generation for the time I had landed in. A nightmare room in the back of the apartment was occupied by wild cats who shit wherever they wanted. The floors were just totally gross with cat shit, and in the corners of that room sick cats were licking themselves. These guys were sure everyone would realize how wonderful this new loose lifestyle really was.I remember being worried about Joe Brainard and thought he was there somewhere and I may have seen him in the apartment being very quiet, but I'm not sure. I thought I could stop him from getting AIDS. I tried to think of things I could predict that would prove to these people I was telling the truth or explain things or describe technology which hadn't manifested yet, but after repeatedly derailed attempts I realized I might as well try to explain Emily Dickinson to a housefly. They were just the fly in her poem. These people were doomed because they thought they were the future. That's often the first sign of doom: when a culture or a subculture begins to believe it is the future. Look at Nazi Germany. I think cultures that feel doomed probably have a much better chance in the long run. A culture should be worried about its ecological footprint, its ethical footprint, in a nearly crippling way. Or so I neurotically think. When I woke up, I felt physically sick from this 12 Monkeys sort of dream and I went and ate a piece of chocolate cake so my hypoglycemic blood would spike up into a false sense of euphoria. Then I got in a hot bathtub and realized I'm not the messiah. All those people are dead anyway. The chocolate cake had peanut butter icing, which I think is the best kind.