Tuscaloosa and some dreams

After a lovely dinner with Austin with Justin and Allison and their boys as well as Susan, we went to check into our Airbnb. Turns out the AC wasn't working, which made staying there a non-starter. I quickly booked a room at a hotel an hour away and we got on the road early, clipping an hour off yesterday's drive, which took us through Louisiana, Mississippi, and into Alabama. Despite all the people dying in these states, the pandemic would seem to be over here, because very few people are wearing masks.

After checking in to our hotel in Alabama, we took Justin's recommendation for dinner and went to a BBQ place called Dreamland and got some ribs and sides for takeout. It was said to be a small chain but there only seemed to be two of them. The one we went to may have been the flagship. It was a small old school bar, seemingly Black-owned, super homey and old school. I was sad we couldn't stay and eat inside. They didn't seem to be set up for outdoor dining. Natalie hung out in the parking lot with a little black stray kitty while I got the food.

Last night I had some dreams. In one of them, AZ and I were in Phoenix and we ended up in a cab on the beach where there were some cartoon characters swimming in the water alongside a couple of generic cartoon characters (i.e. not Bugs Bunny or Popeye but recognizable as cartoon characters). Adam's daughter Lily swam over and talked to us. Later I'm pretty somehow CAZ came up and then I ran into Debby at a restaurant kind of like the sort of LA restaurant you see in movies -- talking to a couple of snooty bitches -- so it was definitely a Zinn-heavy dream. 

At the end of the dream, or of the night of dreaming, Natalie, Graham and I were in the mountains, traveling. Mary wasn't there. It got insanely steep. We were going down a slope and Graham got going too fast and fell off the slope and went crashing down onto the slope below. It's hard not to read this as an extension of my conversation with Natalie yesterday about Graham's college search and the wisdom of having him apply early to Yale, just because of how intensive Natalie views the competitiveness, money-orientation and conformity of so much of Yale culture. I.e. even if he gets in (a stretch for most) it might not be the right place for him. In any case, thank God it was a dream. Oddly, I seemed conscious of the fact that it was a dream as I was dreaming it. Maybe that's normal.