A Dream in on the Orient Express.... between Grand Central and the Community Bookstore, Chase Bank and Judson Memorial #powerdream #earthriot

revbillytalen says:

 "We want to dream with you. Non violent direct dreaming in an undisclosed chase location. DM for meeting place- Saturday at 12 in nyc." 

Surrealist impressions. 

Waking out of the dream in.  Chase Bank kills the Paris climate agreement.

The cops just love Savitri!

Daydreaming about the earth at Grand Central

revbillytalen:

Nonviolent Direct Dreaming today at high noon. Get down on the floor of a big midtown JP Morgan Chase Bank and have a Dream-In ! Dream of evolving all the way through the toxicity of the big banks’ investments. Earthalujah?!

Do something strange.

 In the  meantime, Michael Petrelis was recalling a friend who was elsewhere.

“This was in May 1992 when we protested outside Ross Perot's NYC campaign headquarters after he told Barbara Walters he wouldn't have any gays in his cabinet.”

Lately, the kids and I have been talking  a lot about dreams.

The 17 year-year-old has wondrous thoughts, rumbling through the unconscious night.

We talk about them every day, mostly over breakfast.

Compare notes and drafts from dream notebooks.

I have my anxiety dreams, walking on a tightrope, leaping through the sky.

Falling through time.
She wonders what would happen if she became  a whale, saying goodbye to all this.

She’s been watching Cabaret and dreaming about Sally Bowles.

Thinking about California and Paris and Berlin, where Isherwood

lived, taking in as much as he could.

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

After leaving Berlin, he moved to California, where the trees run deep into the ground, extending into the sky, out into the ocean, touching  all of us. 

Those vistas changed me.

They changed Isherwood.  

“The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person,” he wrote.  “I really don't exist…: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound…. My  conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes...”

Out of the horror of the First war, movements took on dreams. 

Dada looked for something else outside our order.

The Surrealists looked inside.

Freud helped us think about what these dreams meant.

“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”

Friday morning Savitri d suggested we daydream about our changing world:

“…in case you missed it, or we missed you,  radical lunch is on saturday this week, we will meet at 120 park ave, the philip morris atrium, please bring a sleeping bag or a convincing bed roll,

Non Violent Direct Dreaming to stop the climate nightmare,

this will take place in an undisclosed CHASE.

please come promptly to the meeting place at 12.

POWER DREAMS!...”

Reading about the action, my mind trailed off to Freud and the Surrealist dreamers,

the disruption of Dada,

the Situationists,

helping reimagine our every day.

Dancing between, here now and  our unconscious worlds.

The inside taking  on all that is outside,

Through our “psychic” conflicts,

Freud understood:

“[I]ts inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.”

I’d join their Savitri D and company Saturday.

But Friday was still rumbling.

Psychic pain still unresolved, lingering,

Michael Petrelis recalling a friend elsewhere.  

 “You don't need to have suicidal thoughts to call a suicide prevention hotline …” he wrote on  facebook, under  the picture of his friend. “Carl Goodman, my BFF, jumped a bridge and died and he's been on my mind lately. Carl ended his life in January 2014 and I had to get a few things off my chest, so I called a professional listener at a hotline. Just the phone chat therapy I gifted myself. We had a productive conversation… and realized again how much I love my buddy.  It has been six years since Carl left us. I grieve over his death. I celebrate our time together, cherishing the activism and laughter we shared. When the need arises again, I'll call that hotline. Carl, you are missed!

What a story I wrote Michael

“... i hope at some point you can share a little of what you were going through...and he was going through. so sorry....”

“When I crossed the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in January, I was reminded of Carl diving off a bridge,” explained Michael. “Briefly experienced my usual anger at him. "How could you die by suicide after the years we fought for AIDS treatments and all?!" That would pass and I then got all goofy remembering an outrageously funny episode during our ACT UP/PDX time. Any time we talked about the episode, our moods elevated and our brothers in activism bonds were renewed. I was, still do at times, grieve and celebrate. All part of the process.”

All day, I thought of it.

The changing states of our mind and our world,

The  roller coaster of our consciousness.

People leaping from this life to the next.

Our planet ever evolving. 

Solid and melting.

Bodies moving from this life to that.

From solid ground into the water.  

Off the bridge into another world.

Greg and I rode bikes to the big reading up the street from us at the Community Bookstore.

Friends reading excerpts from Brooklyn Writer’s Space.

Julia began  

“Estella laid her head down.

I’m about to be  sick.”

I looked around the crowded bookstore where my little one and I used to go every Friday after school, for years and years of Fridays, 

New stories  every Friday.

Gene and  Kristen sitting to my right.

Rob to my left.

Greg and Mary M behind me to the left.

By Allison who teaches at  City Tech.

Rachel and Norm in front.

Dodi and Will planning their Bowie Party at on Hoyt Street.

The teenager and her buddy walking the streets.

Home from Janels party.

Dodi and Caroline spent the day touring colleges,

To Sarah Lawrence where Caroline went all those years ago.

Hadn’t been back since 1991 when she graduated.

Past, present,  and uncertain futures everywhere.

“Could a person  have sex without knowing  it?” wonders Julia,  reading for the crowd.

My mind trials back to the crown, thinking about those sitting in attendance,

their day jobs, the tragedies they’ve endured, premature departures,

the parents they don’t talk to, the sex they might have had earlier in the day.

“How do we know the rendezvous has not taken place?”

Anna, who used to live in Austin, reads from

A Feast in the Time of the Plague, her novel set on the way to Moscow,

A magic train ride through time, the burning trails through the night,

Juxtaposed with nature and poetry,

Master  and  Margarita on the Orient Express.

“The suicide was motivated by the malevolence of this critics,” Anna reads,

pulling us onto her ride.

“No discussions of poetry on the train,” roars the conductor enforcing the doctrine of the era.

Leslie is the last to read, telling us a story about rejecting an offer from a buyout firm.

Her mother couldn’t speak or move, losing more and more of herself.

At the end of the day, it has to be about more than buying or selling people.

“You must stop buying your head,” she quotes from Rilke.

I think.

Or was it:

“You must change your life. From Ahead of All Parting…”

Up late, we chat into the night.

And then  more  dreams.

Falling, unable to move, to wake, the eternal repeating dream.

Can’t move or wake.

Watching myself

Jumping between this world,

clounds through the sky,

Hurling between them.

I had the weirdest dream last night, says the teenager.

Walking to the lighthouse.

Dreaming in with Savitri D and Billy and the choir in the lobby at chase bank.

Stop taking selfies Ben, Savitri implores over and over.

Militant ethnography requires it participant observations.

What are you doing here?

screams the security.

You have to leave.

Daydreams end.

We make take our sleeping bags across the street, looking at the starry night on the ceiling.

Do something odd, preaches Billy as we lay on the ground in Grand Central.

Do something strange.

Dream. 

Adapt.

Be with the earth.

Feel her inside you.

Be strange.

At Judson, we sing.

Spirituals as liberation.

As code.

As disguise.

Guiding and freeing.

Valeries preaching.

The sun’s shining through the stained glass.

Deep River

Wade in the Water,

Surrounded by water from the River Jordan.

The words instructed.

Moving to set  my people free.

Coded messages

Riding from this life to the next.

The folks singing knew what was up, says Valerie, referring to those running on the Underground Railroad.

A safe way of communicating.

Each spiritual offered some fuel.

Speaking to the unmistakable trauma.

African Americans carried it along the road.

The horrors and the trust that they were loved.

Its good to sing. 

I am happy because I sing says William James.

The choir sings at Grand Central.

Outside Chase bank.

Focus on the joy not the sadness.

Peace in the storm.

Dream of a better world.

Of a better way.

What can we believe?

When hurting, connecting helps us understand, to stand, to hold  on, says Valerie.

Connect to your song.

Let her get you through.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.

Navigate through the illusion.

Revolting Lesbians kicked Rebekah off the board.

Red hot embers cooking  up something new.

Paella for everyone.

Daydreams  for everyone. 

 Paella after a crazy weekend. 

IT'S EARLY & TOO LATE! Join us at 7 AM to rock Chase's world & stop climate disaster. #ClimateBANKS #ClimateCRIMES

Revolting LesbiansFebruary 22 at 2:23 PM · WE DID IT!

After our sustained direct action campaign over the past few years, 𝗥𝗲𝗯𝗲𝗸𝗮𝗵 𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗱 from the American Museum of Natural History's board of trustees.This is a big deal because we are in a climate emergency, and a scientific institution has no place accepting money from and giving power and legitimacy to a mega-funder of climate science denial.Thank you to everyone who has joined us in our efforts to get Mercer off the board. DIRECT ACTION WORKS!To keep up with what we're doing next, join our email list at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/revoltinglesbians

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