Spray-painted Books
From Telkoth.net
Just last night I had a bizarre dream. Fairly short, but more... surreal, I guess, than most that I have.
It started with me working at Barnes & Noble, but the store was larger than usual, and there were lots of new people, and things were just generally... I guess the furnishings (such as shelves) were more spacious, but there were always people around, and usually other co-workers, though no one I recognized from real life.
Anyway, one of my managers, Roy I think (okay, so he is from real life, but no one else...), gave me a plain-looking book and said I needed to fix it. Besides having a blank cover other than the title, the pages inside, he explained, were no good. The book was divided into chapters, but within each chapter there were occasionally centered headings - sections within the chapter. According to Roy, customers expected that while most of the book would be printed on normal book paper, pages with chapter and section headings would, of course, be printed on pure white paper. This book, for whatever reason, failed to do that, so I was expected to fix it... with a can of blue spray-paint.
I got to work immediately, starting with the cover. I knew that if I sprayed too much, the blue would cover up the words, making them illegible, so I sprayed as lightly as I could and then took a small piece of soft, square paper, and attempted to rub the dots of spray paint over the cover, to even it out, and make a lighter blue. I was doing this in the back-left corner of the store (the History/Biography section in real-life; not sure about in the dream), on one of the little tables. Anyway, I kept at it, occasionally noticing areas that were lighter than others and spraying those specifically, etc. When I was finally done, however, I ended with a very odd pattern. It's hard to describe, but I can reproduce it fairly accurately on the computer:
It's more or less accurate. The pattern was a bit better done, so that some of the overlapped areas produced areas where there was more white than blue... it kind of blurred between "is it white dots of varrying radius on a blue background, or blue dots of varrying radius on a white background?" except that it was definitely blue dots on a white background if you really loked at it.
Oh, and even though I was kinda' randomly spraying, and blurring with that soft square piece of paper, yes, the book title got a nice white rectangle around it, preventing the text from being hidden by the spray-paint.
After doing the cover, I checked back with Roy to make sure that something like this is what he had in mind. He dismissed it as being perfect, so I started to apply the same technique to the first chapter page. Before I got long in to it, however, I realized it was break time.
For break I decided to head to a 7-11-type store across the street. Somehow Katie was there with me, and we looked around for something to eat during my break.
I'll describe this store as best I can. It was definitely one of those cheap, old, run-down type 7-11-knock-offs... the ceiling was made of those pourous-looking tiles that fit into the thin metal framing... you know, the kind that gets easily water-damaged and falls in to the place. This had clearly happened here in the past, as the ceiling tiles were different shades of oldness, and some patched up, etc. The floor was cement.
The floorplan... oh, I'll just make another graphic:
Okay, so, the entrance is at the bottom there, where the black line breaks. The "refrigerated beverages" are... you know, those refrigerators with the sliding glass doors and all the drinks in them, and you take one out and the rest slide down... one of those. The "shelves" contained standard snack stuffs and/or canned foods. I didn't notice them specifically, but yeah.
Okay, so the area which I promised to explain below I'll explain now :) From the ground up to about the height of the shelves just behind me (as Katie and I stood facing this area), the wall was cut in to - not, like, with a pick-axe by the owner of the store... it was designed that way - and another shelf was there, again shelved with standard junk food. Above that shelving were shelves which were actually built into the wall, just two rows of them, and higher up than Katie could reach, and barely within my own reach. On these two rows of shelving were large, octagonal jars filled with bulk candies, and of course those tear-off-the-spindle grocery bags were abilable nearby. Katie picked out some kind of candy, and then I picked out a couple. I can't remember what one of the two candies I picked was, but the other were these sizeable gummy balls, almost an inch in diameter I suppose, pinkish-red on the bottom two-thirds and green on the top third, but kind of blurred together in that way that gummy colors tend to blur, and they were lightly coated in that sour sugar stuff.
Between my two bags of candy and the beverage, I was afraid I was going to go over the $7 or $8 I had on me in cash, and I didn't want to have to use my debit card, which this old place might not take anyway. I explained my shortage of money to the store owner, and asked him to weight one of the bags of candy first, so that I could decide which of my three things I would actually get. After weighing one of the bags of candy at about $7, I decided against getting the other bag of candy. Some communication failure lead to a couple minutes of discussing which of the two bags of candy I was actually going to buy, and if I was buying the beverage, and as he went back and forth between which bag he thought I was buying, he would write or scratch out something in black permanent marker on one of the bags of candy or the other. Finally we figured it out, and he gave me the total of, I believe, $7.76, though considering the beverage, it would make more sense if it was $8.76, but, you know... dreams... they don't have to make sense.
Anyway, it was $something.76, because I gave him a quarter, two dimes, a nickle, and a penny, and was about to leave, and then realized "wait, I still need to give him another 25ยข," and he'd failed to notice too, but I rummaged up another quarter and handed it to him, and was on my merry way.
Oh yeah, and sometime while the guy was ringing me up, Katie noticed one of those patched-up ceiling tiles, and asked the guy if that's where they had previously put the elevator to get to the second floor. I didn't think that there was a second floor, but I'm not always as observant. I did observe, however, that the patched-up hole was way too small for an elevator shaft, and remarked as such. The store owner never replied.
Anyway, Jordan, as usual, purred in my face to wake me up, so I never got back to spray-painting that book, but there you have it: A thoroughly unusual dream :P
