DREAM – i was in bellingham, but it was weird bellingham, that was older and/or newer than real bellingham. at first, i was on my bike, travelling from the north side to the south side, but i was going down high street/indian street from the university, and i had to go by fred meyers on lakeway before heading to the south side, but the further down indian street i got the less like actual bellingham it was. i noticed this and went 1 block north to high street, and i found houses i recognised, so i went back one block south, and found myself in the middle of an office complex that hadl, from the look of the architecture and the age of the trees, been there for at least 50 years. indian street was gone, and it was as though the university had expanded to take over part of sehome hill to jersey street and east all the way to chestnut or holly street. there was also a weird part that was sort of like a dream that i had a while ago (i’m not sure whether or not i actually wrote about it), where i was on my bike in bellingham and going from the madhouse by my friend eric’s house on mason street, but there was a railroad track, a much bigger freeway and this strange lighting effect that made everything look as though it had been filtered through something that removed all the colour and made it look like antique photos. also the store at potter and humboldt was in a different place, right next to the railroad track and closer to lakeway.

anyway, travelling along the back of one of the long buildings along where indian street used to be, i discovered this strange thing that was kind of like an aqueduct, but was now more like a sewer, sunk into the ground and covered with brickwork that was broken in parts, so part of it was open to the air, and the further toward chestnut i travelled, the more broken the brickwork became, until it was more like a brick-lined ditch with broken bricks, a little water, and a bunch of grass and weeds growing in it. there were also large brick buildings that looked like they had been there for at least 50 years, surrounding a big, open space with massive trees and pathways criscrossing the neatly manicured grass. eventually i left my bike somewhere, for some unknown reason, and headed back up the hill towards the university. i actually went through some of the buildings, because i could. inside they were more like hospitals: a lot of people wandering around with drip sets and posts with drip bags on wheels, butts sticking out from ill-fitting hospital gowns and such-like. it must have been an older hospital, though, because there were no automatic doors or ramps, it was all stairways, manual doorways between levels, and hallways going off at bizarre angles. at one point i realised that i had forgotten my bike, and went back, ostensibly to get it, but i didn’t get far because a huge crowd of people were getting in my way, almost as if the classes were changing or something: one minute there were just the people that looked like they should have been in a hospital, and the next minute there were all these people that were all going different places all at once. they didn’t realise they were getting in my way, but there were more of them than i could deal with, and i realised that i had forgotten where my bike was anyway, so i proceded back the way i had been going to begin with. there was a part where i went up a stairway to a door that came out the back of the hospital-like building, with a bike rack along the back of the building. the hill continued up, but i noticed that this was the highest point you could get to on the paved pathways, and if it hadn’t been for the huge trees below, there would have been a great view.

eventually i got to what had been the end of jersey street, where it goes into sehome hill, and i remember thinking that, at one time, i had gone up to sehome hill by the same route when i did the blessing before my son was born, and i thought about how different it was now, with all of the buildings and neatly trimmed grass.