The Dream Factory: Nosferatu Aces History 101

... and John I Tzimiskes defeated Boris I or II ?

It was one of those dreams where you have not studied for the test; time has passed and you have frittered it away, and now it is time to pay the piper.

I used to waste a lot of time in the library and art galleries. Knowledge and Art were an aphrodisiac to me when I was at University, but then, come to think of it, what was not? Did not even the morning alarm have erotic overtones at that age? My superstitions all dealt with lovers and friends; stepping on a crack in the sidewalk never once made me think of my dear mother's aching back, but rather an omen of a dark eyed beauty soon to turn the corner and walk by me.

Well, so time was gone and the test was here. It was History, and the prof wore a pale pink sweater. He came wandering through the rows of desks, and looked at me and smirked, taking my precious time to remark that it must be awfully difficult to do the final when one has skipped most of the classes.
(Actually, I started skipping class in my dreams 50 years ago, and am still doing so!)

He had a nasty sense of retribution, and after the initial shame had come and gone, I decided that I have finally had enough of these educated boors, who are so tedious that they drive us from their lectures, then have the gall to crow over our discomfiture.

I rose up.
I was a bit taller than I am. I was thin... sort of unhydrated, you know: my fingers were thin and wrinkled and I crooked a finger at him and demanded he approached.

He tried to resist, but I drew the facts and dates of the wars of Byzantium and Bulgaria from his frightened face; the data coiled like serpents of smoke, straightened and feathered like mare's tails, and I drew it from his open mouth: full knowledge of antiquity!!

I finished, threw down my No.2 pencil and left his body collapsed upon the floor. The other students gaped in awe.

--

The Dream Factory: More Floods

 Toledo, Ohio: I-280 Bridge Over The Maumee River

Last night, I finally had the first good sleep in three nights, so of course, I dreamt about floods, high water, and watery locales. Not Hawaii or Tahiti, but just good old US of A type quasi-rural, quasi-urban, semi-industrial waters and their riparian scenery.

I was on Harsens Island, Michigan, and we were driving or walking down by the golf course. I think we were driving, and that turned into walking, like the director had done the shot both ways, and the continuity person and the editor were on drugs.

Again, it was one of those interminably sunny days we had this year, filled with a coolish breeze, a sun gleaming like a polished aviator's button, few clouds, and more blue in the sky than all the Dutchmen's pantaloons in Holland itself.

The water was encroaching onto the east side of the road. It was on our left as we were headed south. It sometimes reached over the road and covered the neighboring flanks of the golf course, leaving small pools behind as it withdrew.
Of course, we wondered how this was all possible in low water time. It was more like 1984, when waters did cover many of the roads. What was happening?

At the end of the road was a point where some houses were. It was at this location that the golf course ended and the road took a slow turn to the west, and created an isolated triangle point where these houses had been built. As we arrived there, we saw a new house building in the upper end of the wooded triangle, and immediately south there was what seemed to be an abandoned house whose yard showed some signs of erosion distress.
Yet the new house seemed to be high and dry.

We thought that more trees would be helpful to hold the land against the water, and looked at a some tall trees that were very dark, and we said that it was too bad they had died from black cherry disease.
I thought prairie cordgrass should be planted to resist erosion.

Quick-like we were swimming in the St. Clair River beside a very odd freighter that was docked at the island, a freighter that seemed articulated and had large extensions that dug into the river like a back hoe. The freighter had a black hull, and the extensions were grey. We were aware that we best stay our distance from that freighter, in case it began digging down into the river.
Then I think we were swimming and the freighter was digging.
I thought it might be a sand boat. Some freighters used to dig sand from Lake St. Clair and transport it to Detroit back in the old, old days. I believe Construction Aggregates in Chicago used to do this in Lake Michigan, and Erie Sand and Gravel did it in Lake Erie.

Soon the freighter left its dock, and it looked very much to be articulated. We had talked about this strange appearance, because we had, of course, never seen such a freighter in the Great Lakes; never a boat that bent in the middle or aft section.
The extension were not visible, and must have been pulled in and collapsed into a berth below the deck which we could see... or maybe we just left them out of this variation of the dream sequence. The freighter was very black, and we clearly saw the hinged portion in the aft, and we realized that it was indeed articulated.
Then we saw that this aft section was actually a barge being pulled by cables, and there was no real joint within the hull...

And at this point we pretty much lost interest in the whole matter.

However, let me point out that within the past 2 weeks I had driven to Washington, D.C., and as we went through Toledo, Ohio on the I-280, I saw an Erie Sand And Gravel freighter tied up to the eastern side of the river.
We were on the new bridge, the Fantail bridge, as I call it, because it resembles a bird's fantail, but not the aft section of a  battleship.

The freighter was very clean looking... ship-shape and Bristol fashion, and I wondered if it were some permanent exhibit, because working vessels do not usually look quite so made-up bravo zulu, not to say magna cum snazzy, at this time of year nearing the end of the summer shipping season.

There have been many floods this year, many mortal deluges. I have not studied them, but I think the severity of many has been due to man made constructions and modifications to the natural flood area of rivers and creeks. Certainly a washed out road or bridge falls into that category, not having been designed for that once in a hundred year flood... or maybe it was designed for that hundred year flood back in 1906... or was designed in 1942 using engineering from 1906...

I do not know why I dream so much of water... other than rivers are the portals of wonders

--

The Dream Factory: Floods

 

Sans Souci Bar, Sans Souci, Michigan

This past Thursday night I had a dream of flooding. I was jarred into memory of it by watching some early morning documentary on Hurricane Sandy.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and the sky was rich, deep blue. I and a friend were walking in some town on the water, maybe Sans Souci, but it resembled Sans Souci not a bit. It looked more like a combination of Venice and nice summer places on boardwalks and the standard movie-set-of-my-mind of Port Huron and a Dark City in the bright sunlight.

Large swells and waves came in and flooded through the streets. The water was warm and it did not seem to seriously impede us. If we were knocked down, we got right back up, wet but not injured. I looked at how high the water level was on the buildings, thinking of the water damage.
I cannot describe how refreshing yet intimidating was the water! It rolled in the sun under the vibrant blue, breaking white crests, then carpeting the shores with roiled conches of light, light green and white-clear sheets of water, curved like liquid flakes from a flint from the world's genesis...
We were inconvenienced, yet felt good.
If, we thought, we could only live in harmony with the waters and the waves, all the floods and aquifers of the world.

There was another dream about this riverside or seaside place. It had to do with my father's passing. Fortunately, this time we, the people of the dream, were not anticipating our own imminent demises, such as we did in that other one from the beginning of 2013.

I just remembered that other dream right now, just as I was starting the previous paragraph.

I have a whole dream history of water side villages, in high water and low, dry roads and flooded, reeds and marshes through which high water flows and floods the game room, causing the Monopoly games to float from the cabinets and go into the parlor.......

I remember the old rotary telephone upon a doily on a phone stand before the summer sun spilling in like buttermilk fire, and reeds and winds... there are reeds blowing in the wind where actually I know - I know for sure! - there is nothing but lake scum and trash...

How wonderful are dreams!

--

The 99.95 Years War 2

Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla

So many guns are being sold, there is not enough ammo for a proper Hundred Years War anymore.

Last night, I dreamt about it. I saw in a dream our history as an opera. It seemed Wagnerian. It was taking place in a Bayreuth theater imagined by Leni Reifenstahl. "2008" - strangely and eerily similar to the name "2001" , which itself was an iconic bit of music - was merely the overture to a Gotterdammerung, or Twilight of the Gods, where the end of time has come and even the gods in Valhalla go down to destruction.
A good deal of sound and fury and wonderful music. I sing quite well in my dreams. I don't recall at what point I had left the audience and joined the cast onstage, but there it was.

Last night was the first opera: Gaia or Ge, the mother Earth, rejected us at last for the slings we lashed her with. The peaceful God lamented our hoard of weapons of destruction, saying not even Alberich nor Mime ( the dwarf ) with all his gelt ( his gold ) had such a destructive pile of goodies. ( I think one of Alberich's gold pieces was the ring of the Nibelungs. Exactly how it wrought destruction may be imagined from "The Lord of the Rings")

Disgusted by mankind's murderous greed, the gods abandon the Earth for Valhalla. At the end, there were a wretched few humans remaining alive. They raised their assault guns into a spire like a crucifix. The spirits of their ancestors - milling about the wings like a Greek chorus the entire opera - wept and abandoned them to the world they had created, thereby removing the last spiritual vestige which had connected man to the rest on the universe. It was all rather sad.

As I was exiting, I heard a large matron say to her companion, "Well, I can see why the living will envy the dead! All very Biblical." Her companion, an elderly gent, smiled a smile of the elderly - a benign symbol obscuring the fact that he had not heard what she had said at all. We bumped into each other and excused ourselves, allowing for each other to take precedence in exiting, and smiles all round.

We remembered the words of Winston Churchill:

"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."

--
reprint

I Do Not Want To Say This...

The Sun Room of Dreams

I had a dream last night. I was in a large group of people in a large building. It seems that we had been taken hostage by a group of terrorists.
I suppose it was somewhat like the Vice Presidential palace in the novel Bel Canto. I could wander about a bit. I found a large group of women wearing white abayas in a spacious sun-room paved with stone. They were crying. I discovered my wife and daughter among them. They were to be executed along with all the other women and children... unless I could find weapons and a group to rescue them.

It was a very immediate pain. I woke up.

I will talk more about this later; there are dreams and dreams....
In 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, I meditated on the Holy and the World. I thought that my view of the Holy and the World would be decided by the issue that was tormenting us: Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, which weapons were the reason given for the impending invasion.

I fell asleep. When I woke up I immediately thought that there were absolutely no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq. If this were indeed to be true, then I would accept that the Holy is present in and intertwines within the waking lives and dreams of mankind.

If it were false - and indeed it should have been false! Surely at least one paperclip from a document from a design from a weapon of mass destruction MUST exist somewhere in Saddam Hussein's country! Surely some small evidence must be there!......
If it were false, then God and Mankind were just like we like to think they are: separate; God is in heaven and mankind is on Earth....
If it were false, and we could manage to find one small detonator or centrifuge, then Karma is a concept, not a reality, and sins of the fathers are never visited upon the heads of sons, and visions are but hallucinations. Surely no one can talk to God!

But it was true.
And now I feel like Jonah avoiding the city lights and night clubs of Nineveh.

This dream of last night is a continuation... nothing has changed in our lives, has it? Afghanistan is yet aflame, Iraq is rife with violence and death, and our own lives are asteroids that rotate around a dead star.......
And we seek a new fire in Syria.....

This whole business makes me very uncomfortable, but I guess I can't ignore it anymore.
--

The Dream Factory: The Tidal Wave

It was the early morning of January 26, 2013. I was at home, having come from the hospice where my father slept the afternoon of Friday, the 25th, and I was within the comfortable ambit of my own bed on a cold and wintery morning. I had risen very early and had gone back to bed after having lit the colored lights of the small Christmas tree still standing on the dresser in the bedroom. The lights wrapped in front of the statue of the Virgin, the one with the Christ child with a broken ceramic arm, the one I call La Madre del Brazo Roto, and she stood upon the gleam of a blue candle.

Sleeping again, my family was in a city on the water. It was a park area, fairly new; there were no signs of older structures. It seemed like a combination of a park on the water, bright cottages on canals, a modern Venice built in a sunny spot in Florida, maybe. Perhaps something like Johns Island north of Vero Beach - smaller houses, however - with numerous canals through the properties and some small commercial properties near the park and amusement areas.
We were on the edge of a large body of water, like Johns Island borders the Atlantic, or a town like Empire, Michigan borders Lake Michigan.

We seemed to be doing what folks do in such places, walking, talking, looking: nothing too interesting. It was a sunny day; everything was very bright.

At some point I saw an enormous amount of water in the air, held up as if by an invisible enormous tablespoon. It was at a distance, but close enough to instill a sense of wonder and fear.

The invisibly gigantic tablespoon dumped its load of water into the large body of water nearby. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, apparently since the massive amount of water in the sky was not to be dumped on top of us.
However, I felt certainty that there would be a tidal wave or tsunami as a result of the displacement of water in the ocean or lake equal to the massive amount of the sky-borne water. I was sure that it would overwhelm us.
There was a long moment of anticipation, like waiting for immense change, like staring at Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, and making a painful effort to hold one's breath on the edge of chaos and change.

The tidal wave did come, and I saw water pouring from openings in various architectural objects, thinking it was, perhaps, but a small bore, and would prove to be an inconvenience and nothing more, but then I looked up and saw the crest of the approaching wave far over my head, and I knew we were all to be killed.

The wave hit; we tumbled in it. My mind seemed to be straining at this point to continue the story, to follow the churning wave and see what happens to us; it seemed as if there were scripts available and shots edited from films of people being pulled choking from the water, and these could be used or edited in.....

However, we died.
I do not think I have ever died in a dream before.
Afterwards, we inhabited together a cottage with a warm wooden interior with plantation blinds on the windows and doors. We were in a life between normal life and death, an in-between state. I think we briefly discussed it, some saying we survived, and some saying we had not, but now were in another state of being.
There was a front door, a small foyer area, and about four steps leading down into the living area of this mahogany cottage of another life; I remember watching a family member - maybe myself - sweep those steps and ponder the future.........

It was like a limbo. We seemed to go on as before, but knew we could not be perceived by anyone alive... maybe. It is not quite clear.
There was a kitchen of the antiquity of my dreams; it had been used a thousand times by my personal Morpheus, and must stand in the back lot of Montag Universal Dream Films. It was a shadow kitchen to which someone walked from a brightly lit hall, and there was an old time telephone on an old time hall stand... but not visible. I knew it was there just beyond the dark shape of the person entering the dark kitchen, but it was out of the picture, for my view was from inside the darkened kitchen and I saw out into the light, and the stand and telephone were off to the side.......

--
notes

I had come from the hospice; death is all around us. I suppose it is clear enough. I did mention Richard Dadd to my nephew on January 24, a Thursday.

--
--
Addendum

Dreams are very interesting, and here is a germane one:
http://joe-ouellette.blogspot.com/2012/08/dream-about-massive-tsunami-tital-wave.html

Mr. Ouellette forces meaning based on old stories onto his dreams, but we all do.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

DREAM ABOUT A MASSIVE TSUNAMI TIDAL WAVE

Dream August 1, 2012 by EJ Ouellette

Dreamt a bunch of us were running for our lives up north somewhere. I knew Nibiru was coming and was going to cause a massive flood around the world. I was panicking and running as fast as I could pulling my daughter behind. I saw an apartment building and we ran inside to get as high as we could. As we got to the top I could see a giant wave coming quickly in the distance and before I could even think about it, it was upon us. I took a couple of huge breaths of air and held my daughter really tight. The wave pounded against us but then I realized we were alive and not washed away. I was out of breath since we were under water so long. I realized we were would be fine after that. I started to cry, as I knew many people in the Arctic were washed away and that the arctic was seriously destroyed and thought maybe all the snow had melted.

NOTE: I just read somewhere that Nibiru’s debut in our solar system would be on August 17^th and would leave around the Sept 17th. Also Nibiru supposedly takes 3600 years to return to earth. 7200 years ago was the FLOOD. Also interesting to note is that every culture from around the world talks of a flood 7200 years ago. 3600 years ago was when Manna fell from heaven.

EJ Ouellette

The Dream Factory: Protean Waters Of Mars

Ancient Martian Sea

I was on Mars where water took on many forms and faces: it was protean, sometimes ferocious, sometimes as playful as a puppy. We went underground into some of the last remaining aquifers, and there was a sweet, crystalline, and acute smell of fresh lime stalactites; water dripped from fissures into a cavernous clepsydra which kept the time in this dark realm.
The water was unlike terran cave water, quiet and inscrutable, but more vociferous in its demands. It shook the vaults as it paced through endless filters of sand and lime, roiling around island formations, plotting its eventual reconquest of the surface.

It formed a pact with Frost, the god of snows and ice, who seemed a much more somber and sober figure than Martian Water. I imagined him as a funeral home director wearing a worn and slightly askew black top hat. His mouth formed singular words: Sympathy!... Patience!... Endure!
The water did not seem to pay a whole lot of attention to him.
--

The Dream Factory: Tires

I dream of tires, front steering tires, to be precise; they are turned at a slight angle, I can smell them, I can see their tread and pat my pocket, looking for the tread measure. There are no abrasions on the sidewalls: they look factory new, and there is a spot of red paint yet which marks them as such.

The painter, C.A. Jeffrey, has a great love of coffee (see right under Links). I did a picture of her in a coffee house once in my series of painters with flat tires: sort of the Mahlerei of Flats.  I did Giorgio de Chirico, too. De Chirico drove a PT Cruiser with Donald Duck style exterior sun visors, so big that they supplied a good deal of lift.

In dreams, tires seem iconic, enigmatic, and powerful. Dream time is the time of life we all do the back stroke as we rest ourselves floating on the rip-tide of the world.
--

Romance of the Past

Dressed in butter-nut jeans, and swinging idly on a gate, many a youth of the time might have been pointed out as a likely senator, poet, general, ambassador, or even president. Never was there more romance in a new country. A great change was coming over the people of the West. They retained all the best characteristics of the Puritans and the settlers of Maryland and Virginia, with something strangely original and characteristic of the time and place, something biblical applied to the circumstances of the hour.

 The words of Francis Grierson, a writer whom I had lost for a spell, and who now has returned like the prodigal son. The period of which he writes is just before the Civil War. Of course, I think of the present age and wonder if there is any such romance as Grierson wrote about. There are protests, but the romance of discontent is a milk curdled far differently that the sweet butter of the romance of dreams and aspirations which do not face insurmountable odds.

The Dream Factory: Brian Dennehy Remembers Bill

September has many dates of importance in the first two weeks, and I forgot to remember my brother-in-law's , Billy's, passing. Bill used to work for a company owned by people in the UK, and whenever that airplane carrying the bosses would touch down, there would be an exodus of upper class Brit types who would come into the terminal, sniff, look around, and say "Where's Bill?"

It was sort of let the good times roll!

So last night Brian Dennehy drops by, and he is a bit tired, since he just left the night performance of "Twelth Night" in Stratford, makes the drive, and collapses on the couch in the front room. I tell him how much we liked the play, yadda-yadda, and it would have been great if Billy had been there.
He looks at me, wondering. My wife explains that he had met Billy a few years ago when he, Brian Dennehy, had been the center of attraction at some event hosted by Bill's company down in Florida.

Mr. Dennehy thought for a moment, then had an enormous smile explode across his face. He remembered Bill! No one forgets him.
--

The Dream Factory: The Gifts of God

The gifts of God are small, yet they are in a steady supply, like beads of crystal falling from a torn rosary, and endless streaming throughout our lives. Miracles, on the other hand,  are in-your-face and somewhat rare.

I woke up and today was September 9, not the 13th, and looking out my window I saw globes of glittering lights, some whole, some broken into dawn-fire-reflecting shards, and wondered "What are these things?"
I said it over and over, louder and louder.
Were they those beads of crystal? What is it that I see on the tree branches?

As I got out of bed - I assume I was still dreaming at this point - I realized it was an ice storm, and ice covered the tree branches like a crystalline glove wrapped around their mystic fingers. An ice storm! On September 9th!
On the river, there were floes of ice, and a few polar bears and penguins enjoying the climate change. It was warming as the morning drew on. The neighbors were pointing at the animals. One guy got a Bobcat loader and began building a stone and sand bridge towards the ice. It would change the dynamics of the waves breaking along our shore, and I yelled so at him, but he ignored it, drawn on with curiosity or maybe a feeling of religion to reach the ice which was decreasing in size rapidly now.

All the lands were the usual river lands of my dreams: the Canadian shore across from me, the hidden kingdoms of the East where the sun came from. There were reeds and cattails and grasses. There were no boats, but if there were, they would have skipped rather than sailed... I knew that.

I have been concerned about beach erosion - real life - and that explains some of it. The yesterday-winds down by the Clinton River were up in the tops of the trees, which gave the leaves a tenor quality, and the first leaves tinged with yellow fell here and there.
I am still waiting for "ice" or diamonds to festoon the trees outside my domicile.
--

The Dream Factory: A New Version of Flint, Michigan

 Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory, Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan

We seemed to be in Flint, Michigan. I have a feeling we were near the sight of the old "Chevy in the Hole" factory, which was not all that far from where Millard Saxton used to live in his house designed by Alden Ball Dow (you may look it up!). We had lost our car, or rather it had progressively diminished in stature, getting smaller and smaller, until it reached a point when it split into two motor bikes, like a cell replicating. We left the parking lot of the old Middle School - where we had attended some frivolous and forgettable function - through the far end of the parking lot which led through a service station, where various freight trucks parked in a irregular fashion, like hobo trucks behinds Wal-Mart in one of the less affluent neighborhoods. We followed a small white service truck.

The exit street dead ended within fifty feet and the truck turned. We continued straight over a grassy section where a street had once been, bisecting these residential blocks, but had been removed in the past, and now this grassy swath ran straight through, even though no one had removed the stop signs from the streets that perpendiculared into the one-time street: there were still four-way stops, even though the cross street was now a lawn covered walk.

We ended at a circular court amidst small hills, about 5 meters elevation, where the remains of an educational institution occupied half of the circular prominences. It had been a High School until recently, and now its windows were boarded up, blind as Oedipus at Kolonos of the Horses awaiting some blessing from the Eumenides, or the Fates...

On the other side of the circle street was a still flourishing conservatory with tropical flowers dimly visible through the windows. I told her to look at it, She did not seem to distinguish it at first. Then she, too, saw it. She had been looking at the higher level, but the conservatory was at street level and backed up to the hillock surrounding. It had a strange angularity to it, but we assumed that was a necessary of design to fit it into the area constricted by street and hill.

--
That is all of that dream.
This morning I discover Firefox has not only updated its miserable self, but has apparently played "52 pick up" with my bookmarks. I found the "Detroit Zoo" and the "Detroit Friends of Belle Isle" and the "Belle Isle Conservatory" sites in a second "Medicare" folder.
I opened them all up inadvertently and on the "Belle Isle Conservatory" site saw a picture of the ceiling of the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory on Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan.

I have wondered whether to call such dreams "prescient", but that is probably a bit too much for many people to swallow, so I think I may call them dreams of "prior-imaging". (Note that most dreams of "Warning", or "Monitory" dreams would come under this heading of prior-imaging. The usual run of dreams made up from images of one's experiences are "anterior-imaging". I use the hyphen to indicate that we are talking Imaging equivalents to things such as "Present Tense" in Language.)

To reiterate - and I know I overemphasize things until I drive people crazy! - when we regard things like Prophecy - outside the privileged and peculiar realm of Religion - we are merely talking about Images and Languages and Times: Past, Present, and Future.

To wit, the main difference between my Prophecy about the fruits of Politics and my statement about my indisposition following my dinner of too many hot peppers is a distinction between the Future Tense in the one versus the Present Tense in the latter. Similarly, if Images are involved, prior-imaging versus anterior-imaging.
The "real" differences are sought elsewhere.

--

ps.
As I write this, I am being notified that yet another Firefox update is available!

The Dream Factory: Stories from Port Desespoir, Michigan

Within the strip of wetlands between the landscape and builders' supply and our plant property were two dead trees: one a young elm we called Gracey, the other an older Red Maple we named George. The other motley group of trees seemed to thrive in their fractal way, but these majestic ones seemed to fall victim to the noise and hub-bub around them. The wetlands were struggling, too. It was a small area caged by a fence on the old railroad property.

I looked around for old photos and films. The technology exists to rebuild the site, to photo-shop the reality and to refurbish George and Gracey, if only we could retrieve enough detail: then we would have not the infinite detail of reality, but we could emulate it, we could make it Mobius on itself, build a Klein Bottle topological film out of it and make pretend that what we had was endless!

So I went over to the yard next door and talked to the manager, who had an office next to the truck scales where they weighed the trucks in empty and weighed them out loaded with mulch, top soil, and what ever else they sold there... see if they had any digital records and images of the trees. He had a beard and was husky... affable and busy. He said he look into it. I never heard back. People just don't care about rescuing the past from itself.

Last time I saw him, he was one of the poor slobs rushing to get out of the old Pantages Theater/Shopping Mall which had been apparently scheduled for demolition, but nobody had posted the notices... nobody had told anyone, so the old Victorian structure was coming down around their ears as they rushed down the staircase!
I saw a portly banker jump out a side window and grab onto the portico of the building next door. He swung himself up with surprising ease for a big guy with a gut. His morning coat was open and I could see his gold vest with $ signs.
--