[geodeticman.5]

My dream with Gord in it. Note - this is one of my longer threads, for those who understandably find them tedious - just skip it, as I'm sure you do LOL, otherwise, settle in and have a spell. Caution, I caught myself elaborating so much detail that it is in two parts in order to be thoughtful of the reader's vital signs. "Thush begineth part one" as Sean Connery's 007 shaid....

OK - I will try to lay this one down in words. I dream that I am in a non-existant in real-life conference center in the airport (the Municipally-subsidized conference center is in reality not at all by or attached to the airport, but near the ocean , , a recurring dream...and as such please forgive me if I have described this one before to all good corfidites. Setting: in the airport in San Diego, more specifically, a multi-tiered problem to figure out; central theme being I am lost. Real common, that, in a dream. But what is odd as central themes again is that all the geometry is wrong. Like, spiral stairs leading nowhere, or spiraling, ramped floors like in a drive-up parking complex, where the transition from floor 2 to 3 is a vague thing, and I always get it wrong in real life when I come back to the car, which only, it seems, reinforces the dream. OK Gord will appear...

So I am first in the conference center, and my tongue and mouth go dry; tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and all I could make in the microphone for a sound was something like the sound of a fish when you squeeze it after gutting it (sorry ladies LOL) with in excess of 8,000 mappers & geodesists waiting for me to give my "preezentation"(this I have had actually happen in that very setting, minus the Escher-like sideways stairs..lol),soooo....I'm at the diaz, my mouth is dry, and I panic... then -poof ! - I am apparently down below it, in a second-city-ish mall under ground level.

And I don't like retail structures under ground level. Walk out garden-level - OK, but in Denver (suburban Lakewood,actually), there was a HUGE mall that locals surmised ,unsubstantiated, was the largest mall in the world in real life. It was called Cinderella City, and they must've figured they lost the men on that one by virtue of a girly-sounding name. Yeah, tell the guys fom Ice Road Truckers that you're a grown man "going to Cinderella City, for a few things, this and that, did they want to come shop with you? waap! thud ! muttered jeers and laughter in the background.

For this apparent reason, worthless word-of mouth had it that they built (under) the "City" a lower level of parking (in spirals with ambiguous floor numbers agggh), and rows of shops with actual cinder-strewn streets and old-fashioned (well, maybe late 1940's Bogart Sam Spade gumshoe movie-set-like appearance ) with fake street lanterns. and strore-fronts, and put "guy stuff "shops down there - pocket knife shops, sporting goods, travel accoutrements, and a now-defunct I think tasteless novely store called Spencer's gifts, pen store, a mini real by-gosh hardware store with self-consciously nostalgic wood floors, a electronic andother "gadget" store ( my mother and Merry used to call my affection for steel gadgets "bright and shiney's) eg Leatherman mini-tools,etc. - , like a raccon in what it steals, usually oreferredetc., and appropriately called it Cinder Alley.

Well, I had gone there a few times with friends as a teenager, driving down from our little "SouthPark" of Estes Park, where I went to High School. Wht ties this real-world part importantly to the dream was the fact that every time we went, we'd agree as a group of 5 or 6 to split up and meet back upstairs in one of the myriad wings, each with three above-ground levels, and one below, with theme names to the wings, and a central pavillion ala Jefferson Madisonian style, with the requisite big fountain.

We'd variably get lost ultimately in meeting our friends at designated time and place, and always seemed to wind up coming up out of Cinder Alley in the wong "hatch" - there were, brainlessly, mini-pavillions in addition to the central one. All presumably to create the maze theory in retail, and successfully at that, where the goal is to keep the customer in a puzzling non Euclidian environment where logical in/out uo/down don't seem to work, and you spend more money !

Thats the theory, still in use to get to the bread and meat and commodities in grocery, and have to navigate past high-mark-up candy, chips, and packaged food to get to the milk and bread. Inpractice however, it just pi**es eveyone off, Target is like this ,too, and Cinderella City was the Arch de Triumph of confusion and pi**ing off customers; with urban legends born in the mall alone of people having heart attacks trying to find their way back to their car.... being born and dying there, living on nachos and orange Julius (just kidding that part). Cindarella City not surprisingly wnt out of business, after turning into a gang haven, and even got to (per urban local legend) open fires in 5-gallon drums with (sad part) homeless people in it, too.

It got torn down, being a zoning albatross and a blight on the otherwise allready undistinguished light-industrial/commercial transitionary enclaves in Lakewood over time anyway. In some attempt to quash everyones' bad memories of the mall's demise, the city fathers soothed the collective conscience with some benevolent structure on the bentonite-ridden grounds there (that was the other problem, wings were sinking in it originally...) .

Back to the dream, having established sufficient cause in real life for such confusion in dreams. In the dream, I go from the conference center poof! down to the sub-mall, one end of the unwisely spiraling floors in the mall ending at a Marriot Hotel, the other end at the airport (mixed a little, but not unlike DIA airport - you know the one with the tent-roof.... OK I am wandering up/down/Escher-like sideways at times it seems in this old distressed mall , when poof! Iam taken down one more level/concept into a subterranean cavern, repleat with stalgmites and tites, and , of course, a confusing spiral route out of and upward throug the cave, presumably to the old mall, then up to the conference center- where of course I am scheduled to present again at an impossible to make time, on a map and white paper presentation I spent weeks on wth my tireless colleague.. Oh - white paper humour time - know what the difference is between a presentation and a PREEZentation ? about 3 parts ego, $2,000 more wasted on man-hours and overhead puting it together on work time, one part regional colloquialism in pronunciation, and one part pretentious airs ! OK shop humour, sorry...
Well I'd better break this up lest a reader die from boredom. In exciting part II, we meet Gordon, who has sage advice couched in metaphor and wilderness lore, I am inspired, and approach my escape a whole new way, at present, down in the cave (which BTW as you know, is the name of the dive Gord first had his paid GIG in the US, I believe the story goes, where i grew up in younger years in Cleveland, Ohio. Interessting.... Gord and the "cave" of a different hue in a dream...all that AND more, IN PART 2, "The case of the impossible Swiss Euler spiral from the cave, out and up to...revelation" in our next segment. Hope I did not lose two many here....