July 20th, 2007.

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I don’t want to really do anything today. I feel like I’ve been driving too much, on the phone too much, scattered too much, but I had to come up stairs and make sure the world hadn’t changed.

I hate dreams that leave you unsettled – dreams that wake you up and rattle you and leave you feeling like you haven’t slept, and then you’re so tired that you go back to sleep – re-entering that world half because you’re exhausted and half because you’re looking for a happy ending, but this was just nightmare after nightmare.

I woke buried in sand outside the hotel we’d all been sheltering in. The dream had shifted from some third person Transformers drama (I’d just seen something horrible bite the head off of Scorponok – the old Headmaster version) into a first-person experience of sand and grit. I pulled myself and Heather up out of where we’d been hiding, and knowing that it meant there wouldn’t be much time, we ran back to the hotel.

Rooms and rooms and rooms of sheltered humanity, smelling bad. We had electricity, sort of, running water, sometimes. The interior stairwells were thinned down because we used them to store food and the interior elevators no longer worked. Heather and I rushed back to our shared room and looked out the windows to see a long, long trail of cars snaking their way out into the desert. we screamed and hollered and stopped the line – one side effect of having played so hard BEFORE the holocaust – we had some small level of fame, and people were willing to wait for us.

And so we were scurrying, filling an old Tupperware tub with what we could carry. It was confusing, for some reason my head would NOT let go of Tour vs escape and I kept having to stop myself and stop Heather and say “we DON’T need merch, we DON’T need CDs” – jeans were no longer about what looked good, and I stopped packing anything with holes and only grabbed things that looked as if they’d last.

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We don’t have to bother with strings or food, the stores and all their wares are mostly all there, it’s just the people that have died.

And so we load ourselves and our guitars into a man’s hybrid. I’m surprised he thinks he has space for his, because his grizzled father is in the passenger seat, obviously ailing, stretched out – but our benefactor explains that his father is dying and has elected to stay here.

We load him into one of the swinging exterior elevators of the hotel, ready to haul him upstairs: the elevators are on swinging arms and fashioned out of the interiors of old cars. Because we know it’ll make him smile, we pop out the cassette in the elevator’s tape deck and pop in Lynyrd Skynyrd instead. The old man doesn’t speak English but he Loves his Skynyrd. I’m crying at his departure because I’d lost my father only weeks before.

And so we return to the caravan, but I’m still demanding to wait – Heather wants to know why – I want to wait for our brothers, George and Justin. I don’t know why she knows and I didn’t, but Heather breaks it to me that they’d both joined the army and had been wiped out a couple of days ago. They were both dead.

Numb, we climb into the tiny car and start moving.

People are reconverging at an old airport in another city, and everyone’s holding up signs with their names on them, hoping to find friends and family. Heather and I are just wandering, knowing we don’t really have anyone, and just to see, end up going over to an observation gallery elevator. We climb in with an elderly woman and hit the button, brass and brushed steel in surprisingly good shape.

I remark that it’s surprising we still trust the old thing and the woman glares at me as the whole structure judders and the doors buckle a bit inwards.

That’s all I remember.

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Other snippets of images – trying to make a phone work, so grateful for communication from England but the phone kept dying out. Playing with a dog, a grumpy overgrown pug that couldn’t decide if I was fun or a threat.

I’m up and wishing Heather were up because I need some assurance that I’m not all alone in this world, I think.

I always wonder where such bizarre dreams come from. Apocolyptic, post-world-blown-up yet non-radioactive dreams are relatively common for me. I’m not sure why – whether it’s because I’ve read so many sci-fi books or seen too many movies, but none of them are ever so graphic. Last night’s, though emotionally charged, was relatively benign – I’ve had severed fingers rolling beneath my heels and humans stacked like wood burning and dying while burning and the stench of most of these end-of-the-world worlds has been unbelievable. Last night was mostly just dust and desert and some unwashed humans.

Perhaps there’s a little bit of a short story in there that I read recently: “Last Contact” by Stephen Baxter ends our world quite calmly and with huddled, resigned families. It made me cry. Perhaps it’s rewatching the movie “Wargames”, which is a LOT more terrifying than I remember. I think I’m glad I was only 8 when I first saw it and perhaps didn’t completely understand it. And perhaps it’s a little inspired by being a child of the Cold War and the overall belief for a kid my age was that we’d never get to grow up ALL the way since there was no way Reagan WOULDN’T blow us all up.

I wonder what lasting effect that’s had on me. and others. It all seemed so hopeless for a long time, and I was steeped in bands that affirmed it – Megadeth and Bolt Thrower and Anthrax really didn’t have much hopeful to say, and it’s funny that I found hope in the resignation and nihilistic passion of grunge.

I just finished a new song about being caught between generations. maybe everything’s just culminating into imagery in my head.

I shouldn’t be so cynical nowadays, of course. Most of our end-scenarios at the moment are environmental or coincidental, and my brain really isn’t big enough to hold those sorts of things most of the time.

Things are going well – this past weekend, Solarfest really WAS an amazing event – people actually “eating their own dog food” as my old boss Jerry used to say. I was very impressed that Solarfest really DID create more energy than they used, and our stage, which had better sound and lights than anything we’d ever played on before had been entirely powered by the solar array neighbouring it.

I’d been cynical about it at first, sort of assuming that this would be like any number of Earth Day events I’d gone to – a sprawling event that left trash and cigarette butts and ripped earth in its wake. Microphones that were used to make knowing jokes about Bush and America and to tout emigration to Canada. but no – this was a group of people with practical solutions, and who practiced what they preached.

It was an amazing event.

Now if any of those practical solutions were within my price range – I’d like nothing more than a solar-powered vegetable oil burning bus of a tour beast.