today is iris' ninth birthday. she's getting a new microscope.

dreamed i was in an old-growth forest, it was bitterly cold and damp, i was hacksawing the bark off a huge oak without much success. the hacksaw teeth were ineffectual on the hard, gray bark. rain was falling steadily in a grassy clearing nearby but it wasn't where i was, feet wedged amidst thick tumbled roots for leverage. i thought the bark was like elephant skin and i knew elephants would laugh at my futility and i could see in my mind a laughing elephant's eye. and i thought -- fucking elephants. my species is better than yours.

the tiny saw teeth made a sound like running your thumbnail along a comb's teeth but hardly left a mark. then i had an ice cream scoop, the kind with the spring-action tab that ejects the ball of ice cream from the bowl of the scoop. this i could get through the bark with the same kind of effort as with a slightly defrosted box of ice cream you let sit on the counter for five minutes before scooping. the tree inside under the skin scooped like cream but was a dry and solid mass like pulped, compressed photocopier paper or coconut. it was jet white. i scooped out scoopfuls and ejected them onto the roots below.

after a while i was having to reach well inside the scooped-out cavity i'd made in the tree and that hand and arm were frozen almost too stiff to use but still muscle twingey inside. then it changed and i was buried up to my shoulders amidst the root system and scooped pulp balls, in a dune of them against the tree's base. the back of my head leaned against the tree and my shoulders were protruding from the pulp dune but my arms were immobilized and the hands at the ends of them kind of disappeared into the soil beneath nearby trees. i was gigantic. my head was the size of a three-story house. people i knew were dressed in mountain climber jackets and goggles, ascending the pulp on ropes.

their climb was difficult. a crosswind stung them with frozen rain and they were in teams and shouted across encouragement to each other against the raw conditions, calling each other "blue team" and "red team." blue team got to my head first. they had pulled up a bundle of stiff metal cables like those used to secure a tall post or tower to points on the ground, the taut cable that goes down diagonally. blue team clambered inside my open mouth. then they drove two large metal spikes about six feet into my tongue. the spikes must have been alloy because the climbers could manipulate them easily, the heads of the spikes had a needle's eye and they threaded the cable ends through them. by this time red team had reached my mouth. they stood in there drinking broth out of thermoses, catching their breath, smoking. where the spikes went in hurt dully like through dental anesthetic.

the teams wriggled out of their packs and stacked them against the backs of the teeth. they took pictures and measurements and set up a rudimentary base, then some climbers started pulling the cables down into my throat. red team rappelled down into there with head lamps, echoing. blue team meanwhile took some cables and dug upwards through the soft tissue in back of the roof of my mouth. they worked their way up inside my head, there were tight corridors in there. i lost track of red team because blue team's noise was in my head.

the feeling of the dragging cables inside my skull was maddening. they were after the inner ears and behind the eyes, to fasten cable ends to them. where the optic nerve went into the back of the eyeball looked like how a sunflower stem goes into the head of the flower, with that node or knot capping the tendrils of the nerve. with tools they bent the cable around the node and wrapped it tight to itself like you do picture-hanging wire so it bit into the softness. then they started slathering some kind of hot caulky compound over the cable's loop with rubberized spreaders. they heated the compound in a stone crucible that one climber gingerly attended because it was white hot, it was precariously balanced in a tripod over a gas flame. the compound was going to help the optic nerve grow in a way to absorb the cable without it being a wound.

i guess the same thing was going on at my cochleae, and with red team down below somewhere. they were blasé about it all like this was their job. talking about what they would do later.

also i was salivating a lot because of the spikes oxidizing or something. like a 9volt battery.

that's all.