You turn me right round baby

Dreamt about tornadoes last night. I was in Edmonton, or a place I thought was Edmonton because it was mostly skyscrapers and a few old houses that were being foreclosed on due to variable rate mortgages, and it was really flat. I don't think houses are actually being foreclosed on there due to variable rate mortgages but in my lizard-brain Edmonton and Cleveland are more or less flatter/hotter versions of each other with disenfranchised natives and disenfranchised black people standing in for each other - haven't been to either so I don't know why. In my dream I was in my lizard-brain version of Edmonton, sitting around on the verandah of one of the old houses with my mum and dad and someone else, I think Elvis but I'm not sure. Dad was giving me a haircut because I'm not happy with the one I got here before the Benjamin Biolay concert, and he was a bit nervous because he hadn't cut a bird's hair since he cut mine when I was eight and he hadn't yet banished me to the world of femme-y hairdressers.

We went to a run down old shopping centre and were poking around a chinoiserie shop ran by a middle-aged Asian couple around my parents' age, when I glanced out the door and saw eleven or twelve tornadoes on the horizon that looked big to my untrained eyes. 'There's a bunch of tornadoes,' I said, 'I reckon we'd better go to the basement.' The Asian couple had a look and decided indeed we should, so we did. It was quite a nice basement. I think they were running a childcare/school down there but the kids weren't around, just the desks and bright colours and whatnot. Dad wrapped up my haircut and then I got a little restless, so I told them I'd be back in a mo and went to explore the rest of the basement.

Turns out it was another little commercial complex down there with restaurants and bars and stores full of crap, which was tedious, but then I walked up a half-flight of stairs to where a small crowd of people were watching the progress of the tornadoes. It was pretty neat looking. They were wandering around the skyscrapers, occasionally pushing one to the side and blowing shit around. But suddenly one was RIGHT THERE. I had a little scream, as did everyone else, and then I ran back into the basement looking for my family and unable to remember in my panic which part of the basement they were in. I maintained a degree of calm by reminding myself they, and I, weren't getting any safer than we were in that collective basement, but I was desperate to be with them, and tearing around like a madwoman, backtracking, peering, trying to remember where I came from.

If my subconscious was a television show, it'd have a painfully intrusive laugh track.