Doc Pock's Harmonious Rocks

Here's a story, still in work but in need of iminent distribution.

A DREAM< REFLECTED: Lived, dreamed, experienced, and narrated by Robb Pocklington

Last night I found myself double cast. Simultaneously, I became both actor and audience member in a film about assassination.

My character plans to bomb a coterie of criminals, to end their reign of terror. Other actors with professional credentials play gang leaders. A few look familiar from Mafia films of the 1970s.

Our film, set in a massive movie palace and museum, features magnificent ballrooms, dark alleys, titanic marble staircases, and crystal-hung galleries.

As an audience member, I revel in the grandeur, and as an actor, I delight in the suspense. Men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns, my targets, drift in and out for assignations. Fedora- shaded characters in expensive suits and gleaming shoes creep in dark places. I saw them once, moving in and out of a well-known Southern Mafia den in Georgia. I saw them 'round a Texas lakefront cabin, but and on blonde-clay streets in the Philippines.

I, as their hunter, arm myself with cylindrical grenades that I might toss or roll at my make-believe enemies, my "targets." Whenever, in this film-to-be, I spot congregating of gangsters, I simply click my lighter, touch it to a white fuse, and roll it into the gathering bloodbath.

My success overwhelms me. I kill and I kill evil people by the dozens.

From my seat in the theatre, I rejoice at each success, though my own death by bombing takes me by surprise. I thought my role to be larger and longer. Perhaps I have fallen to the cutting-room floor.

Imagine my delight in recalling that we we are but actors (Jacques) in a high-dollar thriller film. All the world ...

Upon mutual demise, we return in a different setting, still gunning for one another, but now in a rain forest of unknown consequence. Trees protect us from shrapnel, and depressions in the earth served as fox holes. Grenades rain down, and we die once again.

Such little deaths drop us on city streets where Prohibition era mobsters ruled once upon a time. Even long ago, our little cylinder bombs worked well. We die in pieces, only to wake on cliffs high above foaming seas.

"Geez," I think as I pick popcorn from my teeth. "Does this film ever end?" Already, it pushes the two-hour limit of audience attention.

But again and again, we appear in ever more exotic locations, living and dying violently, and in great pain. Then, in a twist none of us expect, we become friends.

We continue, of course, to kill one another to for no reason other than an acting side provides

We speak to one another, wondering how long the next episode might run and where we might be: in an office building? On a research campus? In someone's tropical illusion of heaven? In hell?

How long must we watch this repetitive film? When can we go home? What about our families? Life ends for us again and again, only to propel us further into tedious torture. We never forget who we are or the lives we believe we lead outside of this beautiful, hideous, film.

We talk. Some actors consider su***de. "Wouldn't actual death be better than endless expiration in dramatic dreams?"

"Drama." In Greek, the word means, "the thing done."

Done? Hah! I wish. We wish.

Finally, the urge to end possesses me: as an actor, as a character, as a watcher, as an eternal cadaver looking for peace.

I choose a high place, a cliff above a rugged valley from an ancient time. My goal: "to die, to sleep, perchance to dream. Ay there' s the rub . . . "

No dreams may come between returns from murder. The trick will be to leap before Mafia grenades destroy my scenery and my sanity and thrust me once forever into a future so full of death that never ends.

Hiding behind the blaze of a signal fire, I note my enemies' approach, rolling-bombs in hand, blinded by firelight, they neither see nor sense my backward motion to cliff's edge.

I step into space whole, not riddled by shrapnel. Out of site of my scripted enemies, I drift through space, wondering what will happen when I hit the ground.

In my seat, relief rushes over me. Over. Me. Over. I tuck a popcorn box beneath my seat, where the ushers may later pick it up. I rise.

I fall. But before the valley of the shadow claims me, I feel my solidity dissolve into stringy eyeball floaters. Diaphanous wings sprout from my back, and again . . . I rise.

Somewhere on the soundstage yawns a tunnel paved with grey concrete. Shadows armed with rolling thunder creep deep, deep, and my eyes open.

Wet sheets surround me, and I smile, almost chuckling at my dreams' reflections on my waking life.

Health and sickness alternate in eighth decade.

Cut here. Heal there.

Send in the cardiac team . . .

And, oh what a relief it is . . . to call it all a dream.

This morning, Facebook noted that a DocPock page I created had been rehabilitated. I asked to see it, and now, I cannot find how to get back to my regular page. Any ideas?

IMPORTANT DESIGN POINT:

Q. Why do the tops of my pendants look so much alike?
A. My name is Doc Pock.
Q. I know that. So what?
A. Artists sign their work. The bale (where the chain goes) makes my initials, DP.
Q. It doesn't look right.
A. That's OK. I'm dyslexic.
Q. Oh.

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream haunts this mysterious pendant. I see the little faeries sparkling in a misty wood. Titania ignites the ether as Peasblossom and Mustard Seed light a path to her sacred Bower. On one side of the stone lurks the master of magic. Some call him Robin; others clep him Hobgoblin. Most of his fans, though, hail him by his real name, Puck from Puckling Town. Other admirers address him as gentle Doc Puck, the lover of rocks, rills, and all beings in nature.