3.14.2025 - Weekly Digest

Some of you may have concluded that I don't know how to adjust the size settings on the images I include with my posts. All of you would be right.

This is something I plan to learn more about and fix in coming days - especially because we'll be featuring Without a Gun's first guest artist next week, and I want their paintings to receive proper treatment.

Anyway, posts this week are a bunch of dreamscapes. I'm fascinated by the intersection of randomness and dreams with art - a principle of the way-too-serious Surrealist Manifesto, but one that also feels useful and natural to me.

In its way, this sort of chaotic storytelling is somehow more organic than the artificial means writers employ in our pursuit of craft. Not to say we should forgo edits. That would be monstrous.

-JA

3.10.2025

Hostile aliens have trapped us in their shooting range. There’s a group of us but our numbers are dwindling. We make a break for an exit across a wide open space, like a gym floor, and they take out some of our best people. Me and whoever I’m with reach the far wall and there’s a black curtain hanging down like a stage scrim. I wrap us in these for camouflage but I don’t expect it to work. A few of them pass us by on patrol and I’m starting to suspect they're leaving me alone on purpose. What's left of our squad regroups and we agree we have to keep going, the only way out of this is to follow the path and hope there’s a reward in it or that we'll get lucky and kill the jerks killing us. We reach a neutral position. Look and feel of a mid-sized office floor. Cubicles with transparent walls in the upper halves. Up a short set of stairs is a locked door and we can see through a panel attached with alien screws (weird Xs, almost swastika shaped). A mundane scene, sickening. Table with place settings. Rack with human magazines. Like they’re inviting us over for tea.

3.11.2025

‘For twenty years there was this log back there.’ It’s a pond behind a house in the mountains, an Appalachian or Estonian setting, maybe. It’s the guy from LOTR and Lost, Dominic Monaghan. I’ve been watching Lost before bed with French subtitles so I’m gettin’ learnt. Anyway so he’s telling me all this and there are six or eight dogs running around, kinda like at Dad’s place. Then he says one night a couple of them wouldn’t come back. ‘I had to use the nail gun as a deterrent’. He went out to see what they were doing and this log was thrashing around and turns out it’s a 300 year old gator. Goes on a feeding frenzy every night at approximately 8:30. 'Courteous of him to keep a schedule.' So now we’re shooing all the dogs inside cuz the gator is coming after us. Unclear if we’re leaving it alone out of respect or supposed to kill it. ‘We have to make decisions out here about whether to fix something or ban it. Like it’s really close to impossible to repair a broken window so the rule is don’t break them.’

3.12.2025

V is putting on a play in the courtyard of the Hancock Tower. The show is going on but the Cheesecake Factory is still open so servers and patrons just wander through the production. Chris Farley makes a surprise appearance. Not a guy who looks like him but the actual Chris Farley, who died upstairs in 1997. Everyone gasps and the rest of the play doesn’t matter.

There’s a small aircraft to be piloted. Debate ensues. Guess I’ll do it but navigating the Loop in an aerial vehicle I have no training on doesn’t feel like the best of options. Either way we have to escape, of course. It's a short flight and now we are sneaking through back yards, making friends with guard dogs. A house with a pool in back. We know these people but they’re not home. They don’t live there anymore. We can probably hide out here. V's son is with us now. ‘You don’t change.’ She means when I talk to children. I always liked grownups who spoke to me like I was a normal person, I tell her. Without pretense of wisdom.

3.13.2025

And in this one I’m trying to get everything out of every building in this complex and there are familiar people around but I can’t name any of them I just know that they expect me to get this done so we’re going through layers and layers of trash in all of these outbuildings we never even used and it feels endless and there’s a shitload of spiders and mouse droppings and at some point it goes dark and it’s my job to purge the evil so I have to become wraithlike myself and enter into each black room shrieking horribly at a sustained pitch and looking at myself in the mirror almost clownlike, almost like the Joker, an evil and technicolor demonic apparition but I’m still in control and it works and now we can let the kids come in and play.