Pulverization Factories

Once several years ago I had this dream, as is recorded in my Book of Dreams:

Last night I had a dream... The gigantic, massive, rooklike towers on the hilltops... The pulverization factories... Devoted to the manufacture of powders. It was revealed to me, as if in a word of knowledge, that back in the early part of the last century, these pulverization factories had been the frequent target of angry mob attacks, often led by that sort of angry middle-aged woman, prohibitionist suffragette feminist vegetarian do-gooder, who deals with the emptiness of her middle-aged Angst by becoming a moral busybody who traffics in the angers of unease.

And so the crowds stormed the pulverization factories, massive crenelated brick cylinders like mediæval rook-castles atop the tall hills... Most people today, it was revealed to me, do not even know about this page in early twentieth-century American history...

And now, this time, I was to be working in one of the pulverization factories. And my job was to stand on a platform, right above a conveyor belt, holding a vacuum hose with nozzle. And powders that were brought in would be crushed to even finer powders, and these poured out onto the moving conveyor, and as they came toward me I would vacuum the powders up off the conveyor belt and into storage.

And then it was a question of whether I would accompany Steven and some other guys, on a weekend trip to the Holy Land, to see some of the pulverization factory towers over there, many of them dating back to the Crusades. But I put it off, as it seemed that their itinerary was rather elastic, and here I had to get to work.