We all went a little wackadoo in Russian River
Read Tom River above in the PDF for atmosphere, or below here on Substack for convenience.
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Have you been dreaming of the New Age? Of the Occult? Of the Hero Archetype or of Hitler? Would you like to know what it means to dream of the Feast of Fools? Of Alien Abduction? Of China? What does The Dream Encyclopedia have to say about Reality as a Dream? I’d love to know, but I didn’t get that far. The Dream Encyclopedia is 400 pages thick and we’re intrigued by all the topics. Morocco. The Bible and Dreams. Nakedness, Dreams of. Lyndon B. Johnson. This is the kind of coffee table book provided for guests of Dawn Ranch, a small spa resort off the mountain highway that runs along Russian River, California. Falling dreams. St. Thomas Aquinas. Communication with Gods. Penile erections. The list of topics included in The Dream Encyclopedia is long and wacky. Wacky is how one must describe Dawn Ranch.
It’s not just the vintage dream encyclopedia. It’s the location, for one. Russian River is about an hour and a half north of San Francisco, but it has the back road texture of somewhere like Western Mass, of gravel and sweatshirts, and needles on playgrounds. Everything is recreational. The beautiful woods. The sometimes bad vibes of dispersed camping. One time a guy from Massachusetts told me a joke, saying haven’t you ever noticed what’s outside every bar? A parking lot! And his point was that everyone in his hometown is driving drunk. He told the joke like he’d told it a million times before, because this was how to perfectly capture the spirit of outside-of-Boston. In these towns of America there are charming tourist attractions and Airbnbs and the opioid crisis. Guerneville, where Dawn Ranch is, is one of those towns. I’ve only been to Russian River twice for weekend trips, because I am a tourist. This was the second time. It was the week of Tom’s 30th birthday. This is why we’re here in the hotel restaurant, flipping through bizarre reading materials in the lamplit lounge before lamplit dinner and really having a great time.
The wine is excellent. They tell us to order small plates, which is how you remember this is not Western Mass but California, where real estate is very valuable, which then affects everything else. Chicken thighs and mushrooms, caviar on small potatoes, monkfish and broccolini. Pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin. This is the description of a dish called “pumpkin.” The wackiness comes in the jokes like that they make on the menu. In the joke the waiter tells us after he pours the second bottle.
“Do you want to hear a political joke?”
“As long as it’s in the right direction.”
“Okay how’s this,”
A politician dies and he has to choose between going to Heaven or Hell. He gets to spend a day in each before he decides. First, he goes up to Heaven. It’s great, the weather’s nice, he sees everyone sitting in a big circle with Jesus singing kum-ba-ya. He says, Okay, great, and spends the day lying in a field feeling really nice. The next day, he takes the Hellevator (the waiter specifically says Hellevator) he takes the Hellevator down to Hell, and the Devil is there waiting for him in a snakeskin suit. (The waiter mimes the Devil with his lapels.) He says, “Welcome to Hell!” and they give him an ice-cold martini and take him to play a round of golf with the boys. They’re yakking it up, they’re smoking cigars, they’re hitting golf balls into car windshields and he’s feeling like the king of the world, right? Okay. The next day the politician goes up to God and says, “Honestly, God, I gotta say, I think I had better time in Hell,” and God says, “Okay,” and sends him back down to Hell. The doors open, and he feels the scorching hellfire and hears the screaming souls and he says, “Oh my god, what happened?!” And the Devil says, “Yesterday we were campaigning. Today we won the election!”
The waiter approves of the bottle of wine we ordered and tells us more stories. About the man who got guerilla married trespassing somewhere near Half Dome. About Texas. He asks us, Have you ever been to Houston? In Houston, he tells us, there are a lot of things wrong with Houston, but what he loved there were the big lightning storms, when he would to go out on to the golf courses and take a bottle of good wine and watch the lightning strike the grass on the sprawling private horizon.
Here's the thing about jokes like that. They’re so polite. They require consent. You have to ask, Do you want to hear a joke? You have to announce yourself. Knock knock. Who’s there? Regards. Regards, who? Hello. Oh, you won’t get that one yet. Okay, another. An easy one. Knock knock. Who’s there? Lemmy. Lemmy, who? Lemme tell you a little more about Dawn Ranch, and the important objects they put in the rooms. How they create their own class system on the grounds. There’s the main campus on one side of the highway and the ancillary section called The Grove at Dawn Ranch on the other. How they treat only the mainland rooms to luxurious items like the PEMF mat. In Sawyer and Tom’s room we found what is called a PEMF Go Mat from the brand HigherDOSE, an $800 nylon mat stuffed with little crushed rocks. It’s about four feet long. You plug it in and it heats up like a car seat warmer. But that’s not all—I won’t assume you know what PEMF is, PEMF stands for pulsed electromagnetic fields, and this $1,000 mat steeps you in these PEMF rays, and many doctors who have podcasts are quoted on the HigherDOSE site saying this is the best purchase of $1,200 you could ever make. Also for sale on the HigherDOSE website there is a red light baseball cap for hair growth ($449 plus tax), and a red light neck enhancer ($349 plus tax), which is for enhancing the neck.
There are four levels of PEMF. The first level is for sleeping, the second for grounding energy, the third for meditating, and the fourth and highest dose, I’m not even kidding, is for sending emails. Go look at the website. That’s where all this is headed. That’s what all this ladders up to.
It was the winter of Tom’s 30th birthday and Trump’s second inauguration. It was the winter Dawn Ranch put a book called Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit in the lobby and in all the PEMF rooms. Genesis, a book by Henry A. Kissinger, published in November 2024. The back cover and the inside flap and the first several pages are all about how Henry Kissinger was a thoughtful and human-loving man, who actually was always interested in AI and we are lucky to hear him speak on it from the great beyond. And this is the political slant of Dawn Ranch: PEMF and Henry Kissinger, AI superstar and god-tier emails. Want to hear a joke? OpenAI has a competitor called Anthropic. Anthropic is gonna make all this right again. Their AI philosophy is one that is “human-centric.” Their AI is called Claude, which is adorable, and obviously they are funded by Amazon.
This would have been a political joke in the wrong direction: Want to hear a joke? Gay rights. Or something like that.
It was the winter of Tom’s 30th birthday and the first time I ever got a real promotion and we had been drinking champagne all week. We were feeling rich. We were feeling lucky. All week it was thing after thing to celebrate, and we’d been balling out on shellfish indulgence platters and small plates and medical bills and coffee makers. We were the richest we’d ever been. Johny, I said to him when the shellfish indulgence platter was set down before us, Johny we’re rich! At Dawn Ranch we got the kind of wine waiter himself would have taken out to get struck by lightning on a golf course on the southeastern coast of Texas. A minerally white. A steely wine. Because who knows what will happen next? We’re here, now, right now in Sonoma County we’re together. Sawyer points out the novel Tom Lake in the bookstore. We’re running around with our arms out like airplanes, running around a muddy open field, picking her up by the arms and legs, pretending to toss her into Tom River. We are washed in the river of Tom, that bildungsroman feeling, we are dancing to Pink Floyd in the PEMF room and how nice is it to be a family? To hug and kiss and dance around! Bohemian Grove is in Russian River, a ten-minute drive down the road and that’s where the Illuminati eats their shellfish indulgence platters except it's like human hearts and livers or something but never mind that, this right here is the most exclusive club in the world. Smoking on the patio. BYOB in a plastic bucket of ice. We’re singing AND HOLD ON TO THE DREEEEAM! The PEMF levels are off the charts. We’re dying to send some emails. This is how we’ll send them:
Regards,
See attached file.
Hello
—CH
Because that’s how you send a god-tier email—so efficient the hello comes last.
It was the winter of Tom’s 30th birthday and Trump’s second inauguration and in unrelated news we were feeling lucky, we were feeling rich, we were the richest we’d ever been in our lives, and in the beautiful lounge before beautiful dinner Sawyer and I flipped through the Encyclopedia of Dreams. TikTok died and was resurrected in the span of the Dawn Ranch days. TikTok was brought back to life and was feeling super lucky grateful for President Trump’s wonderful amazing support! But before that all happened, TikTok died while we were reading the Encyclopedia of Dreams. We were on sex dreams and Tom said, “Well TikTok is gone now!” and then we had the bit of conversation about Claude and then moved on to other topics because by now we couldn’t be fucked to care that much about all that is depressing and abstract. There is already too much losing the of mind. The other day I got a news notification that said, “The Doomsday clock reveals how close humanity really is to total annihilation.” What am I supposed to do with that? For $400 you could enhance the neck. For $1,200 you could send an email that will make you immortal. On the company dime I once sat behind ___ ______ at a basketball game. He has ice-blue eyes like a White Walker. He turns around and you don’t know if he’s looking at you or the section behind you so you start looking around like, “Who, me? Huh?” and he just keeps staring straight ahead, does not acknowledge you just inches from his face, it’s a power thing, naturally, he is feeling so fucking rich and lucky, human hearts and liver rich and lucky, and the only thing that gets his dead-eyed attention is any given pig-faced man sitting some ways down the court that lumbers over saying, “___! ___! Good you see you, man! Have you met Jim? You gotta meet Jim! I’ll put you in touch,” and Jim wiggles his little fingies from somewhere else down the courtside. That is all I can say about AI that is not abstract and that I haven’t already published in a newspaper. Human-centric. Give me a break.
Nothing makes sense except a long mountain road that runs along the river.
At the end of Russian River there is a place called Goat Rock Beach, where there are coastal cliffs and you can climb a big hill of shrubbery and look out upon the round planet and see the stone archways out in the water. You get slowly frozen on the inside at the top of that blustery hill. At the horizon there is a pinhole in the clouds and the light shines on one lucky spot on the surface of the ocean. A purple flash of lightning strikes a golf course in Texas. There is no greater awesomeness than something like that. I never want to go home. In the city there’s about one tree.
In a family you see their faces in the walls. Hear them in way someone breathes. Someone inhales the wrong way and it’s the funniest joke ever made. Sawyer gets up from her chair and we say, “Hey, doesn’t that chair look like Sawyer kind of?” and then comes the giggle giggle discussion about if they ever made a couch out of human hide.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
It’s me! The couchmaker’s boy!
The couchmaker’s boy, who?
[You open your door to find a freshly upholstered couch.]
There must be something to say about Russia in all this. In Russian River I found so much America. Here are some Russian things that happened here. Johny reads about the Bolshevik revolution on the way to Goat Rock Beach. Some remnant in Sawyer’s and my faces, probably. A memory of how she used to love Tetris. How all the contemporary fiction I read is begging me to believe the characters are real, but the Russian classics deal in archetypes and that feels more real than a “complex” “modern” character. Here is something Russian about all this: Johny shivering in his boots while I face into the wind in a long black coat. How I love the cold in a way he’ll never understand. Nothing makes sense except the way one takes the cold. A serious family is the most exclusive club you’ll ever hope to belong to. The stakes are so high. There are blood pacts involved. At dinner we told stories. Tom told us a story of his grandfather Tom and grandfather Tom’s grandfather and an act of bravery and all the noble violence down Tom River. These are the drunken notes from the weekend in Guerneville. This is the encyclopedia of dreams. We all went a little wackadoo at Dawn Ranch, because it is encouraged there, and who knows what will happen next?
Wow wow
Love it