Alligator Pear / The Apple of the Winter

I had a dream. It came on the couch after the ingestion of an inhuman quantity of a late summer salad I made out of a 1.5 LB yellow heirloom tomato, a hefty and rotund Bacon avocado (the alligator pear, the apple of winter), a not petite mango, and my aunt’s basil… as well as two skewers of marinated grilled vegetables, two grilled ears of corn on the cob, half a loaf of garlic ciabatta, and I hesitate to publicly admit… a piece of cheesecake and a gigantic bowl of strawberry shortcake. It was a fever dream. In this dream I was in Chicago, on a skateboard (the one from my childhood, with the T-Rex graphic), by the lake, skateboarding around a concrete park that had been mentioned on This American Life. My friends Eliot and Christina were there, and Etta too, following my skateboarding on bikes. We were all wearing helmets and had plans for dinner later. Resting in the concrete park, I told them all my tentative plan to move back to Chicago in March, and that we had to make this movie happen now. I had the movie camera with me, and we filmed the conversation. Then we paid a Mexican six dollars to drive us around the city in a white cargo van at high speed with the camera mounted on the side of the vehicle. I woke up with a headache, more determined than ever.