Dream Journal: Weird body-image thought

[mbranesf]

I had a dream early this morning that clearly emanated from a recent rereading of the scene early in Samuel Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders in which the protagonist Eric contrives to get his dad to make a pit-stop at the Turpens gas station/convenience store so that he can investigate a lead on a strange and amazing secret fag-sex restroom venue in the back of the place. In the eighteen minutes or so he is the store, he manages to hook up sexually with a bunch of men who later become his friends and lovers later on. In my dream I found myself in a place kind of like this, a public restroom that was particularly scabrous (this actually recurs in my dream a lot for some reason) with dudes going about various business. I saw a Latino dude seated on a toilet getting head from a fat older naked white man; I saw several dudes pissing at urinals and talking to each other; I saw a boy of maybe sixteen or eighteen years old squatting over a toilet, hovering over it without letting the skin of his ass touch the seat, trying to take a dump. He wore a Turpens baseball cap like the one I had bought in order to have a reason to be in the place, blades of blond hair falling over his oily forehead. I had the thought that I just needed to take a piss and leave because I wasn't going to be interesting to any of the guys for sex. Because, I realized, as I approach my 46th birthday, I have become really unattractive and schlubby. The reality is that I am consistently about 20 to 30 pounds overweight with wild swings one way and the other. Because I am on my feet most of the day for long days and usually seven days a week during high seasons at work, I have a lot muscle stamina (and awesome calves!), but it is undermined by my abusive drinking and erratic diet. I am starting to feel older and out of shape and kind of like shit. This is how I felt in the dream in the Turpens rest/sexroom and how I really feel. This is a pic of me from today in a real restroom. I enhanced it to emphasize my flaws. That weird blackness on my chest is the scruffy result of not doing anything to remove my patchy gross chest hair for the last year. I am only talking about this to myself because I think I might be getting more okay with all this.