Terminal Dice

I woke up with the title of this post. While awake, I’d been trying to figure out what to call it—“Consistently Weird 2” (no), “With Dice 2”? In the dream, I was in the back of a venue while some lone figure was soundchecking on stage. I was standing by the entrance, half in shadow—standing like Nicolas Cage was (in a dream, then reenacted in real life) in Dream Scenario, which I saw last night in Hadley, Massachusetts. (In the final scene of the movie you see a Massachusetts license plate, realize that’s where you’ve been the whole time. (Except when Cage goes to New York City. The hotel he’s being put up in is named: the Ace. I’m relieved, looking this up now, that there’s an Ace in Manhattan—the last time I was down there I was being put up in the Ace Hotel, for a show with Blake Mills, but it was the one in Brooklyn.))

I was half in shadow by the entrance, writing this post on my phone. Periodically, someone would open the door from the street, slashing harsh daylight into the part of the windowless, mostly-unlit room I was apparently skulking in. I realized the post should be called “Terminal Dice,” named after a song of mine from 2015. Then I woke up.

Shortly after, reaching for the one guitar I keep in our tiny apartment, I saw that the B string had snapped. If you read my last post, you can see how that rings cherries for me in a vaguely threatening way, keeping with the unpleasant alignments with “Paul.”