inhahesdreams

So i was looking through my old neighborhood on Google Street View, it started out of curiosity but it turned into nostalgia.. even though everything is so different that it took me literally maybe 20 minutes to figure out which house was actually mine.
Nothing at all is the same.  i mean, everything that could be different, is different.  i only recognized my friends' houses by knowing what their garage structures looked like. 

this is a slums neighborhood.. it was more obvious back then when i lived there, because you'd be likely to find houses painting purple, pink, orange, cyan, etc.   it was a mixture of hispanic and black people.  well, it was originally fewer hispanics, but they gradually moved in. 

this journal was meant to be a dream journal, but this might as well have been a dream.   There's this one building that has almost mythical status in my mind because it's been in my dreams so many times.  not the building itself, but more dream-like versions of it. i could have sworn the building existed somewhere off to the south of one of the houses i lived in, but i wasn't sure.  so i searched and couldn't find anything like it, and i was amazed to think it must have existed only in my dreams.  then i found it, sort of..

--

This is my old house.  It looks nothing like it once did.   different colors, no wooden fence around the yard, totally different trees (including a giant paper tree near the road in the corner, which got knocked down during Hurricane Andrew, and trees completely lining back side of the yard), and picture 1980's-style cars..
[link]

this is the house across next to mine.  some of the roof came off during Hurricane Andrew and they all hid in the bathroom.
[link]

this is another house across the street.  once I stood on some kind of large wooden wire spool (there were a lot of those around for some reason) and peeked into the second window from the right someday when nobody was living there.  inside I saw all the doors opening and closing by themselves, with no windows open for a draft.  of course, i was pretty young. my memory could have been altered somehow..
[ghost house]

this was my friend Jamie's house (i think..).
there was no white fence there. in fact, once i pushed him down the sloped driveway inside a wagon or something like that and it ran out into the street and a car was coming and it had to stop for him. :P
his sister (Amber Gamble) was really hot.
[house]

this is where i visited once and one of the kids got pee on me from about 20 feet away (at least as i remember it).  I had thought that was a physical impossibility.  after that event I must have thought some black kids were something like magical beings.   i was about right where you can see in the picture. 

I probably wasn't as angry as I should have been.  i was so afraid of people already that that was just the sort of thing I would expect, in a sense. 

The street there is one of the ones I didn't normally cross, because it was one of the bigger ones, and they  were all intimidating to me.  all of the ones with dotted lines were intimidating to me.

this is the house next door to ours, where a state senator lived.  he only owned the house so it could look like he lived in that kind of area, though.  the only times he we ever saw him were when he was mowing his lawn and doing leafblowing.  I fell on my mini-bike and landed in that corner, once.

this is where my friend Derek lived.  he was a lot older than I.  he told me lots of stories, like that he had a gang with a thousand people in it.  i pretty much believed him at the time.. though I might have been suspicious.  he told me once he wanted to be a computer programmer when he grows up, and I had no idea why anybody would be interested in that.   

his mom had a mitsubishi with liitle tiny wheels. 

His brother once shot a BB that bounced off the sidewalk and hit my sister in the back.  he was older and a kind of bully, and he once drove his R/C car right in front of my bike and I had to pull up the front wheel to avoid running over it, and he laughed.

[this] is the corner where some old guy told me as I was walking by that if I keep talking to myself I'll go crazy. 

The street to the left is another one I wouldn't normally cross, but sometimes I couldn't resist riding on for brief periods of time for some reason that I can't remember.   either there was a ramp formed by a driveway leading to it, or I could go faster on it than the other streets because there were no stop signs, or something like that.

On the [opposite side] is another corner i slipped off my mini-bike on.  that yard and corner was Packed with trees and bushes.  it was rainy.   my cousin was driving it, and my younger sister was riding it too.  she laughed. 

Here is the park that was two blocks down from me.  back then I only knew the terrain relatively.  i knew that if i traveled this far this way, i would come to this road, and so forth and so on, and there were some areas i just never, or almost never, ventured in. i didn't really have that good a picture of what the overall layout was.  looking at it all again now through google maps was really odd.   and also this park is on 184th street, which is a street I pass frequently here the neighborhood I'm in now.  it's weird.

What you see that's now a parking lot was once a big sand pit with some stuff for kids to climb on.. i'd been there many times.  apparently they tore it all down for a parking lot.  all in the name of progress, i'm sure..  
it was also a lot more bushy and shady and stuff, and full of interesting creatures. i don't remember what they were now, but i think they included love bugs, roly polies, and lizards.  perhaps even caterpillars -- not sure though.  (most of those were things you could find all over the place in that neighborhood.)

there was an old, run-down water fountain over near the building, and it never worked in all the years i'd been there.   those kinds of things make impressions on me.  not bad impressions, just impressions.  i remember another such water fountain in the backyard at Johnny and David's (sons of Susan and Larry's) house that I used to go to.

--

about just after i stopped living there,  i lived [here] for about 9 months, with my aunt and grandma.  as i was "driving" down the road on google (and listening to trance), i realized that the Christian energy had still be on me at some point in time while I was living at that house.  I had gone to Christian schools from kindergarten to 9th grade, and the school I went to there was the first public school I went to.  (i later renounced Christianity totally.) 

The ocean was literally two blocks away.

[the driveway on the other side of the street]
btw, my cousin once shot a rock (or was it a penny?) with a slingshot in the general direction of that house while I was with him, and it just happened to hit their glass door and shatter it.  i'm sure he got into big trouble for that..

[this] is the building (you can see it peeking up just behind some houses) that I was hunting down that I told you about.  ...I think.  either that or my childhood exists partially in the dreamworld..
[You can see it better from further away.]  If you rotate to the left a little, the house is right there in the panorama.
You can see it even better from here.

FIN