this is a two part dream: the first part was out in a very rural area somewhere near place where a rural road split off and crossed a river. i lived somewhere relatively close, because i had walked there. the road ran parallel to the river and split off at right angles, where it crossed the river at right angles, over a bridge that was basically like a hill that went up, turned into a bridge and crossed the river, and then went down again, without any superstructure over the bridge, and the land around the river crossing was swampy, except for one place where there was a fairly modern building, with a parking lot. the building was some kind of spy organisation, and there were a lot of people there, both men and women, working busily. outside the building looked relatively small and normal, but inside it was a maze of corridors with offices and rooms on several floors, but i was only allowed to see the rooms on the ground floor. a lot of the people were speaking in code or using very specific technical jargon that i couldn’t always understand, and laughing about the fact that i couldn’t understand it. they said that if i told anybody about the fact that it was a spy organisation, i would be sorry, but at the same time, they gave me a very specific coded message that i was to give to somebody verbally. it was complex enough that i couldn’t remember all of it (and i can remember none of it now). i left on my “mission”, walking toward the river, and thinking how the only person that i could hope to tell all of this to was randy, who i knew to have been dead for at least 15 years, so it didn’t matter what they said about my being sorry, but at that exact same moment, i was attacked by three teenagers – or somebody on skateboards – dressed as ninjas, with machine guns, and i ran to the other side of the bridge and hid in the bushes.

when i emerged from the bushes, everything had changed. the one building on the other side of the river was now a sprawling industrial park, although the one building was still where it had been, now it was part of a lot of single-level buildings that were all connected together. randy was there, and we talked as though he had never died. we walked back across the river towards the industrial park, and i noticed my car, ganesha, parked in the parking lot next to the spy headquarters, so i decided to show him what i had been talking about. but the closer we got, the more suspicious i got that the people were really spies or something, and so when we got to the building, next to my car, we walked into the spy headquarters, and then turned the corner and walked out again, through a different door that lead to a kind of courtyard between the buildings. some of the people in the spy headquarters recognised me and commented that i shouldn’t have brought somebody else there, but they didn’t make a fuss about it when we immediately walked out again, although i did feel rather nervous about the whole thing, and i remember commenting to randy that they were all dangerous spies in this place.

we walked through the courtyard, which ran parallel to the river, behind the building complex, and eventually came to a place where there was a real agarbathiwallah – a guy who sold incense – at first he didn’t appear to be indian, but the more we talked to him, the more indian he appeared, although i was still convinced that he was somehow connected with the spy headquarters, and i was very suspicious about him for a long time. when i told him that i ran an incense business online, he told me that he wouldn’t sell incense to me because it was too “electrical and complex”. he did, however, sell incense to randy – really exotic, bulk incense for $4.50 a kilo – and i watched as randy wrote him a check, and he signed with his signature which i remember being exactly like the signature that randy signed when he was alive. more people came into the agarbathiwallah’s shop, who were apparently related in some way to the owner; an old man with a beard, and a young kid. the agarbathiwallah had a thing that looked like a shoe, only made out of wood, and he started doing something with some incense and a thing that looked like a pestle, also made out of wood, which he set on fire until it was smoldering and then ground the incense in the bottom of the shoe-like thing. i finally convinced him to sell me some incense: three large boxes and three small boxes of “pitha” incense. The Stars And Stripes Forever was playing on the piped in music thing in the store, and now i’ve got that march stuck in my head.

also another dream that i had yesterday, which was very short:

i dreamed that i was running an indian import business in the basement of a corner building in an old part of town – somewhere (possibly bellingham?). the basement was completely lined with wood, on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls, and there was a huge wooden beam that supported the roof in the middle of the room. there was also what used to be a stairway to the upper floor, that was at least 100 years old, and was no longer a stairway, but was a bin for holding firewood. somehow this all came out of a previous dream in which i was selling indian imports at something like the oregon country fair: i remember a huge booth with flashy, twinkly lighted toys and doodads at the close of the fair, after everyone had left, but i don’t remember the context. anyway, i was in the process of moving (back?) into the basement store, and going around the store making sure everything was as it should be. one of my suppliers had an aqua imac that was having some difficulties, and i said i could fix it for him, but it had an operating system with which i am not familiar on it, and a whole bunch of obsolete software and stuff that was interfering with the process of getting it back to “normal”, and i was getting more and more frustrated with it.