September 24, 2005

  • There’s a party in Dreamland cemetery tonight.  But I wasn’t invited. 


     


    I ran my 6 miles this late afternoon around a ring of Dreamland, headed for the gates just before locking time (5:30 pm), yet found myself, to my surprise, locked in.  The regular guards would never do that and, indeed, they didn’t.  At the gate, instead was a very rotund woman with a two-way radio who re-opened the gates for me while admonishing me that “The cemetery closes at 5:30.” 


     


    “I know that,” I declared, ‘but it’s only 5:29.”  Which it was—both on my car clock and on my cellphone, which is synched to satellite time.  And, insistently,  I held up my phone to her face and showed her the ‘5:29.’


     


    “Well, my watch says 5:30,” she huffed.


     


    “Then your watch is wrong,” I matter-of-factly stated.  “The regular guards know me well and I always get here at this time and I seldom get locked in.  So I think your watch is wrong.”


     


    “Goodnight, sir,” she said with obvious displeasure, waiting for me to pull through the gates so that she could close me out forever.


     


    So I drove out of the gates, road down the street, parked, packed a few beers into my backpack, and hopped a fence back into the cemetery.  And here I am.


     


    I know there’s a party about to start.  Why?   1) That unfamiliar guard positioned at the gate—there obviously to keep everybody out except the exclusively invited.   2) Huge decorated tents erected all about the grounds with well-dressed attendants milling as-if in anticipation...of?  3) Cars driving aimlessly around and preppy-type people darting all about in here—even after the gates are locked  and thus at a time when only the dead, myself, and Rumi (am I being redundant?) are regularly to be found.


     


     Looks like they have about a quarter of Dreamland sectioned off for a gala nighttime affair.  I imagine soon there will be spirited drinking, music and dancing, and lots of graveyard strolling all about.  In fact, I just ran into a couple of guys planting torn, numbered pieces of an artsy-type puzzle on different graves and I asked them, like a cop, what they were doing. 


     


    “You guys on a scavenger hunt?” I guessed. 


     


    “Just the reverse: we’re planting the pieces in preparation for the hunters who will collect them later,” volunteered one of the two. 


     


    Sounds like fun, no?  But since Rumi and I were never invited, we’ve now taken ourselves to a section of the cemetery beyond what they cordoned off—beyond their bounds.  Of space.  Perhaps, time too.


     


    *thinking*   It’s been a long time since I crashed a cemetery party.


     


    —this is not the eighth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

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