Parking Lot Thievery and Cabbage Patch Genealogy

 

As usual, I don't know where this dream started, nor where it ends up, but I recall some salient details of the middle, so I am compelled to write them down. Here are the "facts" as I remember them:

I was walking across the K-Mart parking lot, and I dropped a ballpoint pen on the ground. As I reached down to pick it up, a group of street urchins surrounded me. One of them snatched the pen up before I could get it. They had a nice game of keep-away, passing the pen back and forth to one another as I grew more and more frustrated. 

They circled me, and the circle grew wider and wider until I was chasing them all around the parking lot. They laughed at the ease with which they were able to manipulate my sluggish senior brain with their tricks. I was such an easy mark. 

I soon noticed that my backpack was lying on the ground about 50 feet from me. I forgot about the pen and ran towards it, hoping to snatch it before the kids noticed. But of course, one of them beat me to it. He was a snarky little blond boy of about twelve, a real Dennis the Menace. 

I chased him out of the parking lot and through some apartment buildings. Something told me that I'd never catch him, but I really needed to get the backpack back. It had my wallet and credit cards and every other bit of important personal data. A perfect one-stop for an identity thief.

He climbed over a fence, and I followed, but I lost him before too long. They had practiced this routine many times, and I was clueless as to where he might have wound up. I gave up the chase and went back to the parking lot to search for clues. That's where I met the first of several young females who were associated with the little band of thieves.

 

I don't remember her name, but she looked like a young Rhea Pearlman, no older than 25, but still retaining the less than refined features of the 80's sitcom actress. I asked her about the group of kids who had stolen my wallet, but she wouldn't give them up. She did say that one of them was her brother, so I kept her as a person of interest in my investigation.

There was no tactic that was below my ethical standards, no ruse I was not willing to employ, in my quest to retrieve my wallet. I began by begging, but soon resorted to a more effective means: I came on to her like a teenager on a first date. That strategy seemed to work, and soon we were making out, right there in the parking lot. 

She told me all kinds of things that I found interesting, but still I was no closer to getting my wallet back. For one, she bragged that she was the owner of a rare Cabbage Patch doll of immeasurable monetary value. Something about its genealogy made it a highly prized possession. I stored this information for later use.

When it became apparent that I was going to get no additional wallet-related information from her, I extricated myself from her arms, leaving her there to protest my rather abrupt exit. I left the parking lot and went back to the apartment buildings where I'd last seen the young wallet snatcher.

Inside my apartment, I commenced a campaign to discredit the parentage of the girl's Cabbage Patch doll. After a few phone calls and viral internet posts, a controversy began brewing, then a scandal, surrounding the girl, the doll and some kind of antiquities fraud. Her parents were implicated, and the mother, in particular, became enraged and sought to destroy me.

In the meantime, I tried my strategy of meeting with young girls who were peripherally involved with the group of young thieves. If nothing else, I was perfecting the intel extraction process: meet with a young female, start making out with her, and wait for her to spill the beans. I didn't care how far I had to go, I was committed to my cause. Goal oriented, yes, but the process was pretty enjoyable, too.

The next girl threw me for a loop, though. She was a knockout, with long blonde hair and a shapely figure. I wasn't able to get any information out of her, but she was winning me over with her wiles.

"Why do you want to go with that Ugly Betty, anyway?" she said, referring to the Cabbage Patch owner I'd interrogated earlier. 

Catlike, she straddled me in the bed of her El Camino, pawing her way up my chest and giving me kisses as she disrobed. Soon, we were a fully involved tangle of naked limbs, engaging in the most enthralling of illicit parking lot activities. She was good. I was beaten at my own game, and I knew it.

"I don't know," I said dumbly, having already forgotten her question. All I could think about was how good she felt, how good she was making me feel.

"I can do this for you all the time," she said. "Just stay away from that Cabbage Patch girl. She's trouble." I got the feeling that she was the one who was going to be trouble, but I didn't care. 

Soon, however, I was back my apartment, where I saw my stepdad Greg outside, retrieving a bicycle from some bushes. I jumped from my window into the bushes to help him out. He was not just a little concerned about my recent activities.

"You're going to have to cease and desist with the slander, Andrew," he said pointedly. "And your investigatory techniques are highly unethical. This is reminding me of when you were a teenager." 

I smiled. It was reminding me of those days, too. 

We shared a laugh over what we both knew was an incorrigible aspect of my personality, perhaps a universal aspect of any perpetual teenager. "The dog returns to its own vomit..." as King James crassly puts it. I like to think of it as a perverse form of integrity. I may be bad, but at least I'm consistent, a scoundrel through and through. I am dependable like that. There is no jelly in my peanut butter, as my mom would say.

We still had to solve the problems that my slanderous accusations about the Cabbage Patch family had caused. Rhea Pearlman was heartbroken, and her mom was pissed. She was threatening a lawsuit that could take down me and my family. And I still didn't have my wallet. 

"So let's start at the beginning," Greg said to me. "You were in the parking lot at K-Mart, and you dropped your pen..."

Sashay Chantay

 

The first day at police academy is always rough. The initial jockeying to establish a pecking order makes every interaction a power struggle. No one is exempt, and even the tone or inflection of a hello can determine where one shakes out. Who makes eye contact or breaks it first can signal one's role as an alpha or beta. He (or she) who can dish out the cruelest barbs is usually determined to be the the leader.

I'd been there exactly ten minutes when I got first ribbing. Of course, I'd also arrived late, so I had to run the gauntlet of cadets who were already in their places.

"That's a lovely color of lipstick, cadet," one sophomore cadet teased.

Wondering what the comment was about, I went into the washroom and was shocked to find that my lips were indeed a very bright shade of hot pink. Rather appealingly full and pouty lips, I thought to myself, however incongruous they might have been, placed on the rugged terrain of my stern and manly face. I rubbed them with a paper towel, and some of the pigment came off on the tissue. 

I wondered how it had gotten there. I seemed to remember someone pulling me aside and giving me one of those shocking Bugs Bunny style kisses the night before. It had been at a pre-academy bash, a last hurrah before training day, and one of the more flagrantly gay cadets had singled me out for the drive by smooching. I hadn't minded. All in good fun, I supposed.

The lipstick pigment remained, however, no matter how much I tried to wash it off. I realized that I was just going to be stuck with a mouth that looked like I'd been necking with a hooker, so I tried to play it off like it was intentional. Leaving the restroom, I walked past the cadet who was working reception, the one who had teased me earlier, and did a little sashay, affecting a swishy gait for the occasion. 

I found my seat in the training hall. It was a big white room with cheap molded plastic chairs and a blackboard at the front of the room. I'd been there less than a minute when I was approached by one of the staff. 

"You're going to have to come with me, cadet," the burly uniformed officer said. "There's been a complaint about you filed with HR."

"If it's about the lipstick, I can explain," I said.

"No," he said, "this is a much more serious matter."

He led me to an office where another cadet was seated in one of those cheap plastic chairs. She was a rather attractive black girl of about 25 or so, with short, lightly tinted orange hair. She was wearing a sundress, and she was smiling and joking with a couple of other cadets in the office. When she saw me, her demeanor changed.

"That's him!" she cried. "He was the one who tried to choke me." She put her hands up to her neck in a Strangelovian, self-choking gesture.

"I certainly did not!" I exclaimed. "I would never!"

It didn't matter. The incident was going to be reported, and it would be in my file forever. Assaulting a fellow cadet, a black female no less, racist and sexist allegations would most likely ensue and dog me for my entire career. I couldn't let this stand, but I couldn't fight it, either. I waited around in the office for a while, but no one ever came to interview me, so I left to return to the training hall.

I wasn't able to find the training hall, however. I wound up stuck in a long hallway that had a conveyor belt walkway system. It wasn't the traditional type, where one stands on a rubber belt. It was more like a ski-lift, the kind where one is dragged along by holding onto nylon ropes. Instead of snow skiing up a hill, one was propelled down the hallway by skidding across the smooth polished linoleum floors. At least that's how I thought it was supposed to work.

The belts were a nylon mesh, about 4 inches wide. The top belt was moving in one direction, and one would hold onto it to travel in that direction. The bottom belt was on the floor and seemed to be moving at twice the speed of the top, in the opposite direction. I accidentally stepped on the floor belt and was hurtled back to the beginning of the line and unceremoniously flung against the wall. 

I decided I'd had enough for the time being and left the academy to go to K-Mart. I didn't really have any shopping to do. I was supposed to be at the academy, but I couldn't bring myself to get back in that line on the conveyor belt, or return to the HR office to face the charges against me. 

I looked at my watch and it had gotten very late. K-Mart would be closing soon. I realized that my window of opportunity at the academy was closing, if it hadn't indeed already closed. It was 6:30 PM, and I was all out of options. 

Luckily for me, I woke up, and that was that. I hit the eject button, and joined the land of the living, or semi-living, at any rate. My lady friend is fast asleep, and even the cats aren't moving from their warm beds. Why I am here, retelling this uneventful dream drama, is beyond me.

Mr. Constuction Fraud, Esq.

 

I dreamed I'd been unable to work for some time, but my company was loathe to let me go. I'd been out on family leave, and now it was time to return to work, only my position had been filled in my absence. Technically, they couldn't fire me for taking the leave, but instead, they offered me a position that I was in no way qualified for. I suppose the plan was to let me flounder for a bit and then fire me for incompetence. 

I never was told exactly what my job title or description was. I surmised that I was a construction supervisor, architectural consultant or customer liaison. I was to oversee the projects brought to us by famous people who didn't know exactly what they wanted but had boatloads of money to make their dreams a reality. 

I wandered around the facility, which looked like a lumber mill but also had a functioning automotive repair facility inside of its sprawling structure. Silva, my ex-coworker, ever the archetypal worker drone, was deconstructing some pallets to reclaim the wood for a future project. I thought I'd build a table to set parts on, so I asked about the status of the stacks of wood he had piled up against the wall.

"Can I rob you of a few pieces of lumber?" I asked politely.

"Rob all you want," he said. "You're the boss, right?"

It still hadn't sunk in that I was actually in charge of anything. I was just looking for some busy work, in case the real boss showed up. I grabbed a few scraps of wood and began laying them out. 

"I don't guess you guys need a table right here, do you?" I asked. We were right outside the men's washroom.

"Probably not," he said, "but take all the wood you need."

I realized that I was completely deficient in even the most rudimentary carpentry skills, so I put the wood back and wandered around some more in search of a purpose. 

 

That's when I spied my first customer. It was Goran Visnjic, an actor who seems to always play Frenchmen or Europeans of indeterminate descent. He was a big deal, and when he arrived, I was supposed to assure him that his project, however extravagant, was in safe hands with our company. I had no such confidence.

"Hello, sir," I said, trying to conceal the fact that I didn't even know his proper name. Everybody just referred  to him as "Frenchie."

"How do you do, sir," he said, returning my vague politeness tit for tat. "Have you ever seen Japanese rice paper art?"

He pulled a red leather pocket organizer from his trenchcoat pocket and opened it. He handed me a small calendar, with pictures and fancy calligraphy, printed on the thinnest of translucent rice paper. It was so delicate, I hardly wanted to touch it, for fear of tearing the paper.

"I can see you are a man of refined taste," I told him, a bit obsequiously, but not too over the top, I hoped.

I showed the calendar to my co-workers and they all agreed, but in a less tactful fashion:

"He's a pansy," one of them said under their breath.

"He's the boss. Got it?" I whispered harshly in my underling's ear. "We're going to have to give him whatever he wants, so you'd better tool up for whatever kind of production he wants -- pansy, fancy-doodle-do or whatever. " I was still getting used to the idea that I was in charge of anything or anybody.

My co-workers hustled to make themselves look busy, leaving me alone with the client. I figured now was as good a time as any to come clean.

"I'll be honest with you Mr...." I still didn't know his name. I wanted to call him "Mr. Depardieu" because I always mistake anyone even slightly French for the famous 70s actor. "I'll be honest with you, sir, I don't know why they hired me for this position. I have zero experience in construction, or management, for that matter. I am a retired auto mechanic."

He looked at me quizzically. I wasn't selling myself, that's for sure, but I felt honesty was the best policy. 

"You'll do fine, Andrew," he told me. "I researched your firm, and I think your company is the best suited to make my vision a reality."

I still didn't know what his vision was, but looking around at my ragtag crew and our scant inventory of wood scraps, I had my doubts. I woke up soon thereafter, never having even begun to grasp the nature of his project or my role in it.

It would seem that's the way of things. I escape the responsibilities of life by retreating into a dreamworld, but as soon as there is the vaguest hint of responsibility, I wake up and return to my regularly scheduled routine of minimal and mostly procrastinated obligations.

Sick Day

 

It's 4:07 AM on Saturday. I guess I am going to get in the habit of writing these dreams down in the middle of the night, since I can't get back to sleep right away anyway.

I was living in Paradise, though the house was my current house. I was still working at Yuba City Honda in a limited capacity and taking care of Sharon. Although bedridden, she was somewhat able to self-ambulate using a wheelchair. Transfers were tricky, and she'd frequently wind up on the floor while was at work.

"I'm just so glad you are back," I told her, bending down to give her a hug.

My affection was genuine, and my tender administration of personal care was without rancor. I realized that Sharon being alive again was a miracle and that I was being given a chance to do things better this time. She smiled up at me, glad to not be the recipient of my anger and frustration for a change.

I was, however, getting frazzled. The time was getting close for me to leave for work, and I had the usual number of duties to perform before I could safely leave her alone for the day. Each last minute item ticked precious minutes off of the clock, and doing the math in my head, I realized that I was going to be late no matter what I did.

I had been planning to drive her power chair to work. Rolling into the shop in a wheelchair always garnered sympathy from my co-workers. When I looked at the clock, and it was already 8:07, I knew that I'd have to take my car instead. It was an hour commute down Hwy 99 by car, so I don't even know what I was thinking with the wheelchair business. It would have taken all day. 

I was still picking up things from the floor, trying to ensure that Sharon would have a trouble free day. I had about three pair of shoes that I was planning to take to work, but I couldn't find the shirt to my uniform. I looked around in all the drawers, but I only made a bigger mess rifling through the clothes.

There was a UV strobelight that was blinking at a frequency that resonated with the plaids and patterns on my shirts, making everything appear a uniform blue. This made it impossible to identify my uniform from the other clothes in the drawer. I shoved the clothes back in the drawer and looked around for the source of the strobelight, but I couldn't find it.

I looked at the clock again and it was 9:15. I was well past late already, and was likely considered missing in action by now. I picked up the phone to call in. I figured I could talk to someone down there and ask how busy they were, and perhaps I could use a sick day. 

"Yuba City Honda. How may I direct your call?" It was Sherry. She was always sympathetic, and was usually able to gauge the likelihood of my absence causing a problem. 

"How busy are you guys today, Sherry?" I asked, wincing as I waited for her reply.

"Not too busy," she said. "Are you planning on calling in sick? I think they have enough guys to cover it."

I was relieved. I thanked her, and that was that. I wasn't going to work after all. I knew that my not being missed at work wasn't altogether a good thing and didn't bode well for my future there. I didn't care, though. I couldn't. Things had been at their breaking point with my juggling of work and caregiving for some time now.

I slowly began picking up the items that I'd carelessly strewn about when I'd been so frantic to leave. I woke up, a little anxious still, but glad for the overall outcome of the dream. I had made the right choice, staying home with Sharon. Seeing her alive again, up and about in any capacity, however limited, is always such a pleasant surprise. 

5:07 AM. Back to sleep, to try to catch the sequel.

Warehouse Position

 

I dreamed I was working a temp job in a warehouse type environment down by the sea. The air was a gray mist of soot and clammy fog. The floor of the warehouse was concrete, spotted with oil stains and covered in a layer of beach sand. In the middle of the floor, there was a swimming pool size hole in the cement, filled with unfathomably deep seawater which was presumably adjoined to the ocean. 

The working atmosphere was one of continual chaos, as the conveyor belt of new hires like myself required constant training. No one really knew what they were doing except for the boss, and he had to keep referring to a chart on the wall for basic operating guidelines.

"Get yourselves acquainted with this chart, gentlemen," he said, pointing to a list of about 4 items, written on white paper about the size of an eye exam chart, taped to a blackboard in the break room.

I couldn't make out the writing no matter how close I got. The chart was up too high and the angle was impossible. I had to guess at the items and try to piece together the instructions from several other posters and flyers that were taped haphazardly across the blackboard in a cryptic, ransom note fashion.

One of my co-workers hopped into one of the semis and drove off in search of an empty trailer. On his way out, he turned the corner too sharp and clipped the side of another work truck, causing extensive damage to its cab. He kept on driving, even though there was quite a bit of damage to his own truck as well. I knew when he got back, the shit was going to hit the fan, and he would be called out for his recklessness.

I decided to go fishing in the seawater filled hole in the floor. I grabbed one of the available fishing rods and immediately hooked something pretty big. I reeled in what looked like a grouper or a cod. It was so heavy that it threatened to break the pole. I grabbed the line with my hands, and it dug into my flesh, so I put on a pair of work gloves and hoisted the fish out of the water by hand.

I got a look at the fish as it squirmed on the line. It had been bitten in half. The bite was clean, with jagged tooth marks, as if the fish had been cut in half with a giant pair of pinking shears. I surmised that it had been partially eaten by a shark. I ran with the still squirming, half-eaten fish and tried to locate the boss to show him.

I couldn't find the boss right away, so I ditched the fish, tossing him back into the sea hole. No point bringing my boss half a fish anyway. I was curious about my co-worker who had damaged the truck. He was now in the boss's office getting chewed out. I lurked around the corner, trying to listen in.

While I was waiting around outside the office, I grabbed a necktie and a suit jacket from one of the lockers. It was a mustard brown polyester job with a pink tie, not the snazziest outfit, but it would do. I was trying to impress the boss, since I hadn't crashed any trucks that day.

He looked around the corner and gave me the thumbs up while continuing to bawl out my careless co-worker. I went back to the charts, trying to decrypt the instructions, but I never could. I woke up soon thereafter, remembering that I'd dreamed something, but like the half a fish, this was all I came up with. 

Valerie Murders Sharon At Funeral

 

It's 3:50 AM, and I am as mad as I've ever been. I was in a dream, a horrible dream, where Sharon was near death but still very much alive. She and Valerie had planned some elaborate living funeral/assisted suicide drama which was to be performed as a dramatic exit for Sharon. It was to take place at a church, in front of the entire family, and it was staged to resemble a hunting accident.

It started as a normal memorial service. Sharon was lying in a casket, wearing a wedding dress. After the priest said a few words, Sharon rose up from her casket, and she and Valerie floated up toward the ceiling, suspended by wires. I didn't know what to expect, so I was watching, breathless, as the two of them faced each other above the crowd.

Then Valerie pulled out a shotgun and blasted Sharon in the chest, killing her. Blood sprayed the crowd below as Sharon's limp, lifeless body was lowered back down into the casket. Valerie took her seat with the rest of the family and sat smugly, as if waiting for applause. It never came. The family was silent, all waiting for my reaction.

It seemed as if everyone was in on the surprise ending but me. They were expecting that I'd go along, or perhaps even be pleased with this dramatic event. I was the opposite of that. Covered in blood, I stood up from the table where the family was seated and told them all off. I went around the table and yelled in each family member's face, starting with Valerie:

"You evil bitch! Bitches, sons of whores, all of you! Murderers!" I screamed at the top of my lungs.

No one tried to console me, and everyone dispersed, each to their separate hotel rooms. I was still fuming when a maid came in. She told me that she thought there was something fishy about how the whole thing played out. Like maybe Sharon wasn't in on the surprise, and this was actually a case of murder, rather than some bizarre funerary euthanasia ceremony. 

"I saw the two of them talking about the upcoming event," she told me. "Sharon wasn't supposed to die. It was just going to be a mock shooting, with fake bullets and blood. But I saw the one girl, Valerie, was it? Yes, her, loading the real shells into the gun."

Armed with the testimony of the maid, I confronted Valerie and the family again:

"How could you do that to Sharon? You're supposed to be her sister! Sharon was still alive. Now, you've killed her. This isn't over. And the rest of you, fuck you all! I never want to speak to any of you again, you hear? Ever!"

I felt the finality of my words, as final as Sharon's death. I vowed to myself to avenge Sharon. My mind was racing, and I couldn't focus or plan anything, so I just woke up instead, still agitated and full of adrenaline. Sorry, if my little thumbnail isn't as detailed or amusing as you might like, but this one isn't meant to be entertaining. I simply had to jot it down before I forgot.

I'm going to try to go back to sleep now. Maybe I'll get revenge, or maybe Sharon will let me know that it's OK, it was just a horrible, horrible mistake, a joke that I will never understand. I may have some difficulty falling back asleep, though. I'm still pissed.

----

The next day, back at the hotel, the family was still torn in two over my outburst at the funeral. The two camps consisted of me vs. everybody else, since the maid was no longer present, as her shift had ended. I was still mad, but I was going to wait for a sign from Sharon before making my final decision. I didn't want to hate her family forever.

I walked into the conference room, which had been reserved for the funeral/wedding party. It was brightly lit and appointed with pew-like seating, made to resemble a church or perhaps the waiting room in heaven. It was themed white, with gold trim. Everything had a slightly overexposed look, but not hazy or blurry, just radiantly bright.

I spied Sharon sitting on a pew next to her brother Harold. She had a little darker hair than usual, and it was a bit shorter, but it was her. I walked over to her and looked her right in the eyes to be sure I wasn't mistaken.

"Are you really here?" I asked. "I can't believe it! You are OK!"

I noticed that no one seemed to be paying her much attention, like she was invisible or something. 

"Am I the only one who can see you?" I asked.

"Pretty much," she said. "Harold is the only other person who can see me."

Harold and I exchanged a few words. I apologized to him for my outburst against the family. Next, I sought out Valerie and gave her a hug. I realized that the whole ordeal hadn't been easy for her. I still didn't have an answer from Sharon as to why she had chosen such a dramatic exit, but she'd assured me that she was OK, so my questions just evaporated.

Last Job

 

Living in the Paradise house with my mom was cramping my style. I was part of the Pulp Fiction gang, pulling jobs with Jules and Vincent, and we were in between capers, planning our next gig. Winston Wolfe was trying to give us our instructions and discussing logistics like where to stash bodies, how to elude authorities and get from point A to point B, etc., but my mom's presence in the living room meant that he had to speak in code, which annoyed him.

"Andrew, I suggest you sell the front half of your submarine, and buy a boat," he said cryptically.

"I don't know what that means," I said.

He and the others went outside to finish the discussion in the driveway. After all of the roles were assigned, I found that I had been cut out. The last job had went OK, a little shaky perhaps, but we had gotten through it. I was confused, so I asked him what he wanted me to do. Lookout perhaps? Play an innocent bystander, hanging around for backup in case things got dicey? Surely, there was something.

"I told you to sell that submarine," he said firmly. "We can't use you. That was your last job. You're out." 

They sped off in Winston's Acura and left me standing in the driveway, picking gravel from my teeth. I was bummed, and I went in the house and began lamenting to my mom. 

"But they were my friends!" I blubbered, "and I'm going to miss them!" We'd had some good times together.

"You'll make new friends," my mom said. "Besides, I never liked that bunch. They always seemed like there was a criminal element they were concealing." She didn't know the half of it.

I had always told her that we were doing improv, or rehearsing for a play at the local playhouse, and she'd bought it. I knew I should have conveyed that to Winston, so he didn't have to tippy-toe around with his instructions. It could have worked, I thought. It still could. I jumped on my quad, determined to go after them, hoping to plead my case.

I'd lost sight of them, and after driving the quad out of Paradise, I found myself in the southeast section of LA, near my old apartment on Imperial Highway, in Downey. I was still a couple of towns away, and there was traffic and the threat of law enforcement to contend with. My main problem was the quad. I was driving an unregistered off-road vehicle on the busy city streets.

I tried to remain inconspicuous, but that's hard to do when your vehicle will barely keep up with the flow of traffic. Some gearing problem was keeping me from reaching top speeds, so I kept it slow and stayed in the bike lane, weaving in between parked cars and driving on the sidewalk when necessary. To make matters worse, the engine started bogging down and stalling, and I had to keep restarting it.

I drove through a department store, timing my entrance with the opening of an automatic sliding glass door. The quad barely fit through, and once inside, I found that the rear exit doors were smaller and wouldn't accommodate an easy escape. I'd have to get it up on two wheels and try to drive through leaning sideways. That's when the first security guard saw me.

"You can't go through there," he said amiably. 

"Thanks," I said, quickly putting the vehicle in reverse. I put my finger to my lips, giving him the signal to shush. "Let's just keep this between us, shall we?"

That must have activated his cop mode, because I saw him reach for his radio. I wagged my finger at him, and he stopped. He seemed to be fearful that I was armed, and he smiled and pointed me to the front entrance. While I was distracted and looking in the direction of the door, he reached over and pulled the key out of the ignition. Cheeky monkey. He wasn't so dumb after all.

I snatched the key out of his hand, jammed it in the ignition, and away I went. Too close for comfort. I knew he'd be radioing for backup soon. 

Down the road a ways, I encountered another obstacle. The police station lay directly in my path to get back to the apartment. It was a huge building, taking up a whole city block. I found a narrow alleyway between two sections of the building, and I putted my limping vehicle through the opening. That's when I encountered the second cop.

He was a real cop, not the mall security variety, a middle-aged diminutive figure, Caucasian, of Scottish descent, with thinning strawberry blond hair, combed over Trump style. His face was wrinkled and scarred, as if he'd seen some action in his day. The wrinkles were crow's feet, though, and belied a slightly devious and mostly friendly demeanor.

"You're going to have a hell of a time getting this thing home in this condition," he said, hopping on the back and riding double with me slowly up the alley.

The terrain got steeper once we reached the other side of the alley. With its current engine trouble, having two of us on the quad slowed our progress almost to a standstill. We inched up the hill, with me revving the engine full throttle to zero acceleration. It stalled several times, but I kept restarting it. We finally made it to Imperial Highway, and the cop got off the quad. 

"You should be fine from here," he said. "You can pedal if you need to."

"I really appreciate your help," I told him, surprised that he'd put his cop job on the line to help me get my illegal vehicle home.

"I don't know what that is," he said, smiling. "I love that line from Pulp Fiction. The one where Winston says, 'I don't know what that is.'" 

I laughed and agreed with him, although I didn't remember any such line. It was just good to have a friend in the cop business. I explained to him that I was in an improv group, and we'd just been doing a theatrical version of the story. He seemed satisfied with that and waved me on as I fired up my sluggish quad one more time.

It sputtered and coughed as the last of the engine's nine lives expired. I supposed it could have just run out of gas, but I had no way of knowing. There were no gas stations between me and my destination. I looked down at the pedals. They were silly little things, the size of moped pedals and had an annoyingly short stroke. I was only a couple of blocks away at this point, so I resigned myself to the task.

<cue exit music>

I woke up to Miserlou by Dick Dale playing on my TV stereo speakers. Playing the same movie over and over as a sleep therapy has its advantages and disadvantages. I can fall asleep relatively quickly and stay asleep all night, but my dreams become infiltrated by the soundtrack's seepage into my subconscious. Perhaps Harvey Keitel was telling me that I need to find a new set of characters to cast in my nocturnal improv.

Runnin' and Gunnin'

 

I was in near the waterfront in Marina del Rey, walking along the bike path next to the bay. It was a fairly busy day, people were walking dogs, biking and playing Frisbee on the grass. Some were reading books, laying on towels in the afternoon sun. I was carrying a backpack on my back and had a folding chair in a bag slung over one shoulder.

I passed some apartment buildings, where I noticed some men crouched down behind some bushes. My spine tingled when I noticed they were aiming guns in my general direction. I kept walking and tried to remain calm. They were engaged in a standoff with some other guys down the beach from me. Shots were being fired, but since the guns had silencers, no one on the beach seemed to notice. 

As I passed by the building, I looked down at my feet and saw a submachine gun stashed in the sand. I picked it up and looked at it. It appeared to be in good condition. No sand had gotten into the barrel. It's bad when sand gets in the barrel, I thought to myself, everyone knows that. It should probably be cleaned before using it, but in a pinch it might do. 

I rearranged the backpack and chair, slinging the firearm over my shoulder by its strap. I tried to conceal it by carrying it next to the folding chair, but it was an uneven load and the gun kept poking out, plainly visible to passersby. Eventually, I stopped in my tracks, put everything on the ground and re-balanced the load. While I was at it, I fiddled with the safety, making certain that it was in the off position.

Just then, a man ran past me, and I got the idea that I should run with him. The men in the bushes were in pursuit. We got to a parking structure and ducked inside, and I examined the gun a little closer. The barrel had come loose from what looked like a plastic stock. Cheap-ass workmanship, I thought. I hadn't dropped it or anything, but the barrel looked completely bent.

"Manuel isn't going to like that," the man told me as I fumbled to straighten out the barrel.

I assumed that this was Manuel's weapon and that Manuel was some kind of gangster, associated with the current shootout/pursuit in progress on the beach. I got the weapon in a semi-workable condition and fired a few test shots in the direction of the pursuers.

"Seems to be ok," I said. "Let's go."

We resumed the chase, circling back around, hoping to ambush our attackers from the rear. After going through a few buildings and narrow alleyways, we were nearly upon them. I looked at the gun and now the barrel had completely broken off. It seems that the barrel was constructed mostly of a wood, with only the smallest metal ring at the tip where the sight was located.

Try as I might, I could not make the pieces of wood go back together. It looked like a broken broomstick. I examined it further and noticed that the firing mechanism, which consisted of a chain with some gears and latches, was completely out of sync. Stupid machine gun, I thought. Who designs a wood and plastic chain-driven machine gun of such low quality, anyway?

Fortunately, I woke up before Manuel showed up to inquire about his firearm. I was glad to be back in the real world, where I don't have such concerns.

Mario Saves My House (and I may now smile again)

Another fire dream. I'd better really start taking these to heart. I'm racking up quite a collection. This one was brief, but to the point:

It was a warm summer morning, and I was in outside on my front porch, gazing out towards the south, lazily observing the flight of birds across the sky, thinking of nothing in particular. I had a lovely view of Payne's Peak, the minuscule mountain where my internet comes from, rising up out of the canopy of oaks and digger pine that fill the small valley. The treetops were all green, but beneath them, the grass was dead and orange, typical for this time of year.

From just beyond the peak, I noticed a faint wisp of smoke rising up, creating the steamy aura of a piping hot meatloaf, fresh from the oven. I rubbed my eyes, not wanting to believe what I was seeing. A second look confirmed my deepest fears. Little orange spots were showing up on the top of the peak, and it in a matter of seconds all of these incendiary dots connected, forming a giant blaze that covered the entire mountainside. 

"FIRE!!!" I screamed. "FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!" 

I poked my head into each room of my house shouting my warning to no one in particular. I don't know if I had houseguests or not, but it was imperative that I made sure the message got out. I ran outside, screaming loud enough to alert the entire neighborhood. I was going to get the jump on this situation. There was no wind, and it didn't appear that the fire was moving particularly quickly at that very moment, still the urgency remained.

I spotted former cult member Mario Huante in my front yard. He was running a network of garden hoses, setting up sprinklers and aiming them at my house. I had a moment's relief as a light breeze started blowing the fire and smoke away from us, to the south. Suddenly, the wind began to shift, and now the fire was racing across the tiny valley that separated us from the fully engulfed mountain. It would be upon us in minutes. 

The wind picked up, and soon embers were flying past us, above the rooftops and starting small fires in the dry grass that lines the periphery of my property. A wall of flames was approaching from south, eating up huge swaths of real estate along Loma Rica Road and eliminating any chance of escape. There was now no way out except on foot, and the fire was moving far to fast for that. 

"We're going to have to ride it out," I told Mario. "Let's get the animals into the house."

I don't know why I thought that inside a wooden structure would be any safer, but Mario had done a pretty good job of wetting down the roof, and my house does have a small defensible space of mowed green grass surrounding it. We dodged the sprinklers and piled into the house, which was dripping wet from the prophylactic soaking.

Inside the house, Mario's menagerie of hybrid farm animals made a ruckus as they rooted about in my living room. There were pig-donkeys and goat-pigs and donkey-goats all running around squealing, braying and bucking, slipping and sliding and leaving muddy hoof marks on the tile floor. I wasn't so worried about all of that, although I did have to grab one pig-donkey-goat by the leg to prevent him from kicking me in the face.

I looked out the front window and noticed that the sky was clear again. The giant wall of flames had evaporated, and the fire had raced past us. The fiery angel of death had passed over us spared our house and our little ark full of oddities. 

"Look!" I cried joyously, "We've been spared! The threat has gone!"

"Hallelujah!" Mario exulted. "God is good."

I didn't know about all that. It was actually Mario's quick thinking with the sprinklers and garden hoses that did the saving. Simple physics, combustion properties and fire dynamics. But if it walked and talked like a miracle, I wasn't going to dispute it.

"Now, about these animals in my living room..." I said, gently herding them out the front door with celebratory slaps on the flanks. A few remained, choosing to make a new home with my cats on the couch. I guessed they could stay, if they behaved themselves.

----

Meanwhile, in the real world, I may now find myself one smiling motherfucker, as Marcellus would say. For months, I have been mourning the slow death of my pearly whites, having lost the battle (or so I thought) to enamel erosion. My teeth were looking like candy corns, stained at the tips, as if I'd been sipping wood stain from a teacup. No amount of brushing, flossing or Waterpic use could remove the tarnish. I even tried that 5 minute teeth whitening gel, leaving it on for the maximum of 20 minutes, twice a day, for weeks at a time. Nothing. 

I had resigned myself to the idea that I'd just go to my grave a tight lipped, grimacing ogre, never smiling for pictures, timidly hiding my teeth in conversations. It was destroying any hope I had for the illusion of a happy, smiling me. I contemplated implants, veneers, false teeth -- but since those all involve going to the dentist, I assigned them to the category of "things to procrastinate, hopefully until after death."  

Last night, after brushing my teeth, I noticed that the toothbrush had done an incomplete job of cleaning between my teeth. That's nothing new. I've been achieving less and less satisfactory results, despite all of the above mentioned rituals. I'd been brushing twice a day, and things just seemed to be getting worse. 

But this particular bit of plaque looked fresh, and I decided to poke at it with a sewing needle. It scraped off easily. I ran the needle over the stained bottom tips of my four front teeth, the ones I used to do my smiling with. Slowly, but surely, I noticed that I could etch off the rough surface staining and reveal the smooth enamel underneath. In a matter of minutes, I had brought back the front surface of my choppers to a uniform color. No more tobacco colored sunburst. 

OMFG! This was amazing. Why hadn't I thought of this before? I finished up with the needle, just on the outside of my upper front teeth, and they felt smooth again. This wasn't erosion, it was simply hardened plaque. 

I went online and ordered a proper dental scaler, you know those curved picks that the professionals use to gently (or not so gently) scrape the plaque from your teeth. I will be glad to have this instrument in my arsenal, being mindful not to scrape too hard, as one can easily go past the plaque and into the actual tooth enamel if one isn't careful. 

But even now, waking up to teeth that don't look like a homeless tobacco chewer, even if it's just the fronts of the fronts, is like a dream come true. I think I'll smile at inappropriate times, just because I can, maybe even take a selfie or two. Yay, me. 

Who knows, I may even subject myself to a long overdue visit to the dentist for a proper cleaning, something I've avoided for most of my adult life. The last time I went was 2015 for an extraction. I said maybe. Baby steps.

Surfrider Car Wash Smog

 

Nothing to see here. Just me reporting in, as ordered. In the last few days, my dreams have been scant and devoid of plot, so here are the brief, random perceptions that I can recollect:

I was working at a carwash, I believe, with Manny Salazar and a couple of the other guys I used to work with. I remember leaving the tunnel of the whirly scrubbers and spray nozzles and crossing the street, where I entered an office building with beige carpeting and a few cheap walnut laminate desks. 

Luis Ramirez handed me an envelope containing my last paycheck. Apparently, I'd forgotten to renew my smog license, and now my services would no longer be required. Manuel Silva's name came up, as a possible replacement for me, followed by howls of laughter. I may have been unlicensed, but Silva was about as qualified to do smogs as a tree sloth. 

Last night, I was at a garage party, again, Manny Salazar's place. The instrumental "Surf Rider" was playing, and I picked up a guitar and played along with it perfectly. People were enjoying the vibe, and I was amazed that I'd learned the progression and could play it without difficulty. I usually choke up in situations like that.

My mom was there, and she picked up an acoustic guitar and started playing a flamenco version of the song. Her style was unique, in that she was using complex chords and hiding them by bending her wrists in such a way as to block all view of the fret board. 

"Trade secrets," she said smugly, when I asked if she could show me how she was playing it. 

The rest of the dialogue was word for word quotes from Pulp Fiction. (I really have to get myself a new sleep aid. I am literally reciting Ezekiel 25:17 in my sleep.)

Hope's Breakfast Club and my dance with Mia Wallace

 

The last thing I remember, I was making myself a bit of a nuisance at Hope's pancake breakfast. She'd invited over a few of her close friends for a nice brunch of pancakes and beer. Yeah, OK, that doesn't sound like the best combo ever, but these were hipster ex-punks she was serving, so it wasn't completely out of line. 

"I need to make a sign saying, 'no beer for me, thanks,'" said the Asian lady seated next to me. 

I made a note of it, although I wasn't planning to offer her any beer. I also noted that she'd taken nearly all the pancakes from the serving table and stacked them on her plate, nearly a foot high. I went and took the last remaining pancake from the serving platter and brought it back to the table along with the syrup and some melted butter in a serving cup.

The first thing I did was spill the butter all over Hope's husband Blaine's sweater. He was nonplussed and calmly got up to go change. In a moment or two, I managed to do the same thing again, this time staining Hope's sweater with the last of the remaining butter. She appeared a bit agitated, so I suggested that maybe it wasn't too late to try to get the stain out before it set.

"I'll have to go get some knitting needles," she said, stripping off the sweater right there at the table.

With my one last remaining condiment, I accidentally drenched the Asian lady's stack of pancakes with syrup. She looked at me with mild disgust. I was batting 1000 on the clumsy oaf scale. 

"Oops," I said, "That was meant for my pancake." I specifically said pancake, perhaps to point out the inequity of our respective portions. "I hope you aren't diabetic."

"No," she said. "Just don't bring me any beer. I must have had a hundred people ask me if I wanted a beer today."

"No problem," I smiled weakly, pouring the last remaining drips onto my lonely pancake.

I ate quickly and was still famished. I thought perhaps the Asian lady might offer me a few of the syrup soaked pancakes, but no dice. I waited around the serving table to see if any more might show up, but that never happened, and I woke up soon thereafter.

Prior to the pancake breakfast, I'd been attending a sleepover dance party at the Wallace's. The famous gangster, Marcellus Wallace was out for the evening, leaving just me and Lance Mathyssen alone with his attractive young wife, Mia. Mia wanted to dance, so Lance and I both took turns dancing with her over the course of the evening. She was very fun to dance with, I must admit, and her enthusiasm was contagious.

"Again!" she'd laugh as one song would end and the next began.

The tempo kept increasing to a frenzied pace, and Lance bowed out after tiring himself on a particularly fast number. Mia and I kept the party going, shedding clothing layers as the temperature rose between us. I felt myself falling under her spell, her touch lingering as we pressed our cheeks together during a few slow dances. She was being extra flirty, and I was liking it.

Naturally, I was concerned that Marcellus might arrive home at any moment and find us in a compromised position, scantily clad, dancing in just our undergarments. I heard the front door opening, and I hastened to throw some clothes on. 

"I had a lovely evening," Mia said to me, and she ran over to greet her mob boss husband at the door.

At some other point in the dream, I was sitting in a living room at someone's house where some kind of televised music festival or rocket demonstration was about to begin. It wasn't the greatest venue for that type of event, but I'd gotten there early, so I grabbed a spot on the floor in front of an old cathode ray TV set. 

As luck would have it, the venue got moved to an even more crowded room in the house, the bedroom. There wasn't much seating available, so I had to sit on a pile of laundry and lean up against the wall. In the process of leaning against the wall, my back pressed against the plastic laundry hamper lid, making a dent in the drywall.

"I think this is going to need some spackle," I said, immediately owning up to my mistake.

"That's OK," an unidentified voice assured me. "Stick around. You don't want to miss the show."

I stuck around, but I don't remember much of the show. Since I was in some kind of a random event kaleidoscope, the next thing I remember was dancing with Mia. I believe this sequence jumping phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that I fall asleep to Pulp Fiction every single night, even playing the movie multiple times if I wake up in the middle of the night to pee. 

Yeah. I'm a strange duck. And apparently, a clumsy one, at that.

Musical Commune

 

I dreamed my neighborhood was rebuilding and renovating after a fire. Neighbors were being more neighborly, leaving doors open, or in some cases off the hinges entirely. One could walk in and say "howdy," begin rooting around in the fridge for something to eat or sleep with a neighbor's daughter without a second thought. 

I walked in to one living room where the whole family was sitting around taking turns leading the group in song. First one, then another, would start playing something on acoustic guitar and singing a verse or two, then the rest of the group would join in for the chorus. One bearded fellow had quite the charismatic, boisterous voice and a dramatic fingerpicking style that garnered a round of applause.

"Way to go, Jose Feliciano," one of the brothers said, jokingly.

It didn't matter how terribly awful one played, all were encouraged to give it a try. I wanted to join in, but I wasn't familiar enough with the material. I wished they had a hymnal or something with the words, so I could at least fake it. Some of the songs were originals, so the words were known only among the family members.

Next door, at Jeff's old place, a family had renovated the dining room area. It had come out pretty nicely, and was set up like a restaurant, with ample seating for about 50 or so people. The room was filled with the sound of clinking silverware, and a lively discussion across the many tables gave it the air of a religious group during social hour.

I was seated next to Chris Knoll, who looked exactly like he did in the cult days: bearded, jeans and t-shirt, laughing and smiling with his chipped tooth. He handed me a bottle of wine, which I promptly knocked over, spilling half of the contents on the floor. No one seemed to make much of it, though I felt quite embarrassed as I grabbed some napkins and towels to clean the floor.

As is usual in a dream, the small spill turned into a floor drenching mess. I kept having to get fresh towels as I crawled under each and every table, making sure that I got all the little pools of wine from around the table and chair legs.

"Hey, at least this wine works well as a floor cleaner," I joked to a pair of legs under the table.

"No problem," said the person who the legs were connected to. It was the host, jovial as ever, unperturbed by my knocking about under the table.

"They did a nice job with the floor," I said. "This tile is much nicer than the crappy asbestos stuff they had in here before." I was referring to the gummy old faux brick red linoleum that was exactly like the stuff I'd had in my house in Paradise. 

As I finished up, I noticed that the nice tiles had stopped in the kitchen, where the old flooring was still in place. The insurance only paid for the flooring in the rooms that had burned in the fire, apparently. My compliment, I realized, sounded more like a slight, and once again I felt the crimson tinge of embarrassment creeping up my from behind my ears.

Somewhere in a lower part of the house, Robert Eckerman, a group leader at Sutter-Yuba Behavioral Health, was sitting in his newly appointed office. He had a small pickup parked right outside the door. Without asking, I jumped in the truck and started backing it down the driveway. 

I was only intending to move it a few feet, but I soon discovered that the brakes were nearly inoperable, and it required all my weight pressing down on the pedal to get it to slow down. I decided to just go with it, and I took the truck on a tour of the neighborhood. I knew I could slow down eventually when the road leveled out.

In my travels, I saw a man and his son heading down to the creek to do some fishing. I rolled down my window to talk to him.

"You'll never catch anything down there," I said to the man.

He looked up at me and produced a fish, still squirming on the line. It was a rather large bluegill, and the man smiled at me proudly as he waved it in front of me. Apparently, he'd already been to the creek once and was now going back with his son for a second trip.

I eventually got the truck back to Robert and proceeded to stroll through another neighbor's front door where a family was making dinner. I grabbed a tortilla from off of the stove and started making a burrito with some of the ingredients that were in pots. The husband looked at me approvingly, and I took a bite, nodded and thanked him. 

"This is a lovely place you have," I told him. "Such a nice neighborhood, too. I've met some great people in the last few days. Some really nice people." 

I was perhaps a bit too emphatic about the "really" part. It had been his daughter that I had slept with a few nights before, and he eyed me suspiciously after that. I left soon after that, fearing that I'd pushed the neighborly thing too far.

Next, I found myself in an older couple's home. A lot of landscaping was still being done on the exterior. There were muddy piles of dirt everywhere and freshly excavated areas carved into the hilly terrain. It was going to be nice, eventually, you could just tell. 

I tried not to get mud on the floor as I walked around their house. The lady was kindly as she shooed me outside, where I saw the husband and followed him down to the garage. It had been freshly rebuilt and stocked with tool boxes and workbenches.

"What a great garage," I said enthusiastically. "Say, if you need a hand with this earthwork, I know a guy." I was thinking of Stan, my neighbor to the east. Stan is Polish, so there's a little language barrier, but he works cheap and is very good with his Bobcat. It would be a good fit, I thought. 

....to be continued (or not). That was about it, really. I have a tele-therapy session at nine.

Shameless YouTube Plug

 

I'm running low on fresh dreams to write about. I am incapable or unwilling to turn my laser focus on my life to write, in any great depth, about the events that have transpired in the last 6 months to a year. Like that time I "beat" cancer. Or my new lady-friend. Or any of the routine occurrences that might be titillating to the average rando who happens upon this blog. But fear not, here is a link to my YouTube channel, where I have a couple of Imovie clips that I edited last year and have saved for just such an occasion. Enjoy. 

----

One thing about YouTube, for those who are easily frustrated, like myself: make sure you press the "Play All" button, and then scroll through the videos as you please. Otherwise, YouTube will queue up a bunch of suggested garbage, and you will be wondering why I have this crap linked to my channel. I don't. That's just their way of promoting other channels and such. Alternately, you could keep hitting the back button and selecting different videos from the main page. 

OK, enough of my preemptive geriatric tutorial. You'll figure it out. I know you will. You're smart like that.

Uh, Mom...FIRE!

 

I was spending some vacation time up in the hills with my mom. It felt like someplace in the Tehachapis, though I can't say for sure, since I've only ever been as far as Lake Isabella. I spent a few lazy days mucking about in the creek, observing frogs and the like, and then the fire weather hit. 

I decided that it would be a good idea to head back to LA on foot. Not such a good idea, really. I spent an inordinate amount of time navigating a small ridge, just trying to get to the main highway that runs through Kern Canyon. I kept getting mired down in mud or finding terrain that was too steep to navigate and having to retrace my steps. 

I wound up back at the B&B, which was run by Gracie and Jere, an unlikely pair, but significant perhaps, since both were influential surrogates for me growing up. Grace was my alternate grandma, while Jere was my stepmom, my dad's second wife. My mom and I were just packing our things, since we'd heard there was a fire in the area, and we wanted to be ready to go at a moment's notice.

Suddenly, the wind picked up, and smoke began to fill the horizon to the east. Our packing took on a more urgent pace as we scanned the news channels, looking for any kind of information about the fire.

"Why don't we just leave?" I implored. "I have had many fire evacuation dreams, and I'm pretty sure this is the real thing. We need to go, NOW!" 

Between the two of us, I had been through several fire evacuations, and had been caught in the middle of a wildfire, so she took my word for it. We stopped packing, grabbed what we could and headed for the door. 

I had left some keys in a pair of pants in a laundry bag, hanging in the bathroom, and I went back to fish them out. Every second that I spent digging through the clothes felt like an eternity, and eventually, the urgency of the situation compelled me to just grab the whole bag and go. We could sort out the laundry situation some other time.

Outside the wind howled, and the sky darkened, illuminated only by the embers carried by the wind and the spot fires they created when they touched down. Our prospects didn't look good, and I woke up before we ever managed to leave the hotel.

Baby by the sea

I dreamed I had been entrusted with the care of a newborn baby. Who the parents were was a mystery; they could have been sea turtles for all I knew. The baby had been left in the sand near a pier, in a shallow hole that resembled a nest. 

Hannelore couldn't believe that someone would leave a baby in my care, much less abandon one in the sand, and she demanded that I take her to it.

"She is sleeping right now, but I'll show you," I told her. 

We walked from the end of the pier where we'd been doing some whale watching. The orcas were migrating, and this was a threat to babies who had been placed in nests too close to the water. 

"Don't worry. They can't get at her up here," I said as we approached the sand shelter.

It wasn't much more than a small indentation in the sand, but it was enough to keep the baby from being spotted by land and sea predators alike. It also made it hard for the mother to spot, which was possibly why this one appeared to be abandoned. I didn't know the whereabouts of this particular baby's mother, but I assumed she was out foraging for food, which didn't automatically imply abuse or neglect. 

In one of those subtle dream transitions, the baby somehow morphed into a fully grown Sharon, bedridden and incapacitated, lying naked in the cool sand. Hannelore was satisfied that I had things under control and left me to attend to Sharon's needs.

"Let's see what you've got going on here," I said, rolling her on her side to check her bottom.

At this point, the beach scene had become our familiar bedroom, and the sand had become a bed. In the process of rolling her on her side, I accidentally rolled her right off of the bed and onto the floor. 

"That's so typical of you," Sharon scolded me. "Never careful. Now you have to try to get me back up on the bed."

I was used to this sort of thing, and solving logistical physics problems was my strong suit. Whether swing dancing or rescuing his beloved from a tumble onto the floor from the bed, a 150lb man with a 300lb wife has to find workarounds.  I managed to hoist her, one limb at a time, using the division of weight method and sheer determination, and she was back on the bed in seconds.

"Oh-oh. There's a poop that wants to come out," I said cheerily, as if noting the first rosebud of spring.

Her backside had a rather unique opening, more like a manta ray's mouth than your typical butthole. There was a flap of some kind, and beneath it, the aperture was just starting to crown, revealing a baby seal sized turd. This kind of thing was also old hat for me, so I took my position and waited for the thing to come out on its own timetable.

Sharon laughed with me. We'd been through all of this before, and it wasn't the big deal that it had been back in the days when it was all new to us. I had that feeling one gets when you find that the test you've been diligently studying for is just a review of material that you have known for years. 

That's about it. Just a day by the sea, my baby and me. I'm sure Sharon would have enjoyed the change of scenery, even if she had to exchange her comfy bed for a sandy sea turtle nest. We both always loved our trips to the beach.

The Randy Situation and my melanoma, streaking and a dine and dash

 

This dream started nowhere and wound up nowhere. While still dreaming, I tried to recount it to David and Sharon, but in both instances, I was interrupted before I could get anywhere close to finishing. 

I was living in a roommate situation with Randy Mitchell, Jeanette Antoine and some other people. None of us had our own room, and all of us had to share couches. I shared a couch with Jeanette, but it was strictly a feet to feet arrangement. I had to try to explain that to Sharon, who wasn't thrilled about the arrangement, dream or no dream.

Randy was being his usual loud, drunken self and was becoming quite the unwelcome guest. I guess he'd been doing some handyman things around the house, and he just became kind of a permanent fixture. His constant stream of crude remarks toward the ladies was starting to piss me off, so I told him in no uncertain terms that it was time for him to go.

"I think it's time for you to step on, brother," I said from my supine position on the couch.

He stared at me blankly. My statement hadn't registered in his primitive brain.

"It. Is. Time. For. You. To. Step. On. Brother," I repeated the words singly and with emphasis, so that they would sink in.

His eyes widened, and his nostrils flared. I could see his neck veins start to bulge. Typical bull behavior. This was why he had to go. He leaped over the table and towered over me as I lay there on the couch. 

I looked up, expecting a rain of blows, but to my surprise, it was Michael Cardenas who delivered the punch from behind. He drew back like he was going to wallop me, but pulled back at the last second and gave me an exploding fist bump to the chin, like something you'd do to an old friend who you were teasing or telling to "buck up, old chum." I still wanted to get Randy out of there, but Carnitas had diffused the situation for the time being. 

The Randy situation had me rattled, and it was having a deleterious effect on my health. I looked over my body, and all these new melanomas were popping up. I tore my shirt at the neck to get a look at my shoulder, and there was a huge spot that had grown larger and was beginning to ooze a dark brown fluid. I decided I had better get out of that toxic environment right then and there.

I left the house to go for a jog. At that point, I noticed that I was naked as a jaybird, carrying only a rolled up bath towel. I thought about stopping to wrap the towel around my waist, but I saw that some other joggers were also naked, so I just tried blend in. Streaking was making a comeback, I guess, since no one was making much of a fuss about it.

After a bit, I managed to fashion some rather crude clothing out of the bath towel and an old gray sweatshirt that I'd procured from some homeless person's belongings. Then I went inside the local diner and sat down to breakfast with David Chanh. I was trying to recount my dream to him, but I kept getting interrupted by the formalities of the dining experience.

"Can I get you boys anything else?" the waitress asked with a smile, after we'd cleaned our plates of the last remnants of breakfast.

"Just the check," David replied, winking at me.

He made a gesture to me that said, "We're getting out of here. Now!" and we left without paying. I had on some makeshift shoes, made from rags, that were binding up on my feet. I had to stop and cut them off with a pair of scissors, which slowed our getaway considerably and garnered a few snickers from the other diners.

Ding. Ding. My text dingy awakened me for the second time, and things wrapped up quickly after that. The closing credits for Pulp Fiction were playing to the sound of surf music.

Thumbnail Clippings: Sharon's doppleganger, Uncle Frot and shopping mall bumper pool

 

I don't have enough material for a sketch, a vignette or even an interesting doodle, but I did dream that I briefly bumped into Sharon last night, so here is my thumbnail. Actually, it wasn't her but a ringer. In fact, they were so alike that if I'd gone out shopping with one and wound up taking the other home by mistake, I doubt I'd have caught the error.

I was in a busy shopping mall, and bumping into people wasn't uncommon. People were accustomed to getting bumped into, grabbed onto or brushed up against without so much as a "pardon me, ma'am" or "excuse me."  It was literally that crowded. A frottagist's paradise.

Time stood still as I first caught sight of Sharon's double.  Her hair was long, flaxen and wavy, dirty brown streaked with sun bleached highlights, and her eyes were a laughing bright baby blue. She was wearing a faded beige flannel overshirt and blue jeans that were frayed around the edges.

"Hey, baby," I said casually as I grabbed her shirtsleeves with both hands and gave her arms a familiar squeeze.

She looked at me with a saucy look that said, "I know you're a stranger, and I'm not who you think I am, but I'll play along." She didn't actually say that, but I got the vibe that she was OK with being mistaken for my wife or lover. 

I didn't get to take her home, however. It was a fast moving mall, and I barely had time to lock eyes with her and give her a quick greeting before we were each swept away in different directions by the crowd surge. 

Elsewhere in the mall, I saw Lance Matthysen posting up in a furniture store. His game was to sprawl out on a recliner with arms and legs akimbo, draping himself over the arms of the chair, like a giant spider waiting for prey to fall into his lap. But Lance wasn't waiting for dopplegangers of long lost loves. He was waiting for kids. Lance was a pedophile.

"What'cha doing, Uncle Frot?" I asked maliciously. I was onto him.

He glared at me, trying to silence me with an icy stare. It didn't work, and I pressed him further.

"Cop any good feels lately, Uncle Pedo?" I pushed the boundaries of teasing past their limits.

Jennifer Anniston looked up from her cell phone, surprised to hear such talk. Apparently, she and Lance, along with the rest of the furniture store crowd, were just about to play a game together, one in which everyone would seal their cellphones in old cassette tape cases for a day, thus preventing any phone usage. It was some kind of "Wayback Wednesday" or "Throwback Thursday" type of game, where use of pre-millennial tech was prohibited.

I got the impression that I was spoiling the party, so I stifled the urge to comment further. I left the furniture store trolls to go about their business, and I rejoined the giant crowd out in the mall, hoping to perhaps bump into Sharon again. I knew it wasn't her, exactly, but I didn't care. If she was game, so was I.

----

Once again, I awoke at 7:44 and it is a Saturday. Maybe I'll harass the cats with my new robot vacuum while I cook breakfast and make my coffee.

The dragon down the road

 

Last night I dreamed I was in Paradise. No, not the Muslim version of heaven described in the Quran, silly. The one in Butte County, CA. The little hillside town where I spent 10 years with Sharon. The one that was destroyed in the Camp Fire. That Paradise.

Anyway, I was on Bennett Rd., the street Sharon's folks used to live on, trying to get to their house on foot. This would have been a nice walk down a country road, had it not been for the dragon that lived at the end of it. I'm not one to go overboard with hyperbole, but that is the only way that I can describe this monstrous miscreant, the evil stallion that resided at the end of South Libby.

One has to travel to the end of South Libby Rd. to reach Bennett, a small dead end street that appears out of nowhere and goes nowhere. There is only one way in and one way out. Not the greatest set-up for fire evacuations, but if you were a fire breathing dragon of a horse who enjoyed stomping pedestrians into a puddle, this corner location was ideal. 

Everyone who lived there knew not to travel on foot down this section of road, and anyone ignorant of the rules got just one chance to test their survival skills against the evil beast. I was blissfully unaware as I rounded the corner and headed for Sharon's folks place. 

I'd almost reached the Vixie's when I heard the sound of snorting and scuffing from behind me. I whirled around and caught a glimpse of the massive black stallion about a hundred yards away or so. His red eyes were locked on me, and he let out an evil screech that sounded more like nails on a chalkboard than a whinny. I didn't actually see fire come out of his nostrils, but I swear the mist from his hot breath looked like it could've been steam, if not smoke.

I turned and ran as fast as I could, knowing that he would overtake me in a matter of seconds. It was simple mathematics. The horse could outrun me by a factor of ten, and at this distance, he'd be upon me before I could reach any kind of shelter. I had nowhere to run, and the gap was closing as the singularly focused monster bore down on me, galloping at full speed. 

The hoof beats were so close that they shook the ground, and just at the moment I thought I was to be trampled, I threw myself at the ground and hunkered down, waiting for death. 

Death only grazed me, though, as I'd made myself a smaller target. But he wasn't done yet. He skidded to a stop on the rough pavement and spun back around for another pass. I was still hunkered down and couldn't have gotten up to run if I'd wanted to. He leaped at me with his front hooves in the air, ready to strike down upon me with great vengeance and furious anger.

I rolled out of the way, and this left the horse with a lot forward momentum and nowhere to go but down into the ravine on the side of the road. He tumbled end over end, rolling down the steep hillside, finally coming to a stop against a large pine tree at the bottom. 

I got up and I brushed myself off, shocked to find myself still alive. I looked down the ravine and saw the horse getting to his feet. He was uninjured, but it would take him a minute to get his bearings and to navigate the steep terrain. I knew revenge was still on his mind, so I made like a tree and got the hell out there.

 

Besides my little brush with the apocalyptic nightmare horse, I'd had another little run-in that day. Earlier, I'd been at the lake, where the wind was kicking up and making some waves that resembled ocean swells. This was causing quite a problem for people who'd come to the beach for a day of fun, and now found their cars imperiled as the rising tide threatened to inundate the parking lot. Police Chief Wiggum was on the scene and was none too happy about the state of affairs. 

"Why don't you make some handmade signs to warn people about the dangerous parking situation?" I suggested.

"That's absurd. How can you even suggest such a thing? We need to keep this parking lot open," he replied indignantly. It reminded me of the scene in Jaws where the mayor is poo-pooing the sheriff's campaign to close the beaches on the Fourth of July. 

With a single offhanded comment about parking lot signs, I'd now made myself a very powerful enemy, as Police Chief Wiggum was also Mayor Wiggum. And yes, he did resemble the porcine buffoon on the Simpsons, although completely lacking the anachronistic charm of the small town animated policeman. Life in Paradise wasn't going to be easy with Wiggum as my foe, since half the town was on his side, and the other half lived in fear, trying to stay off his radar.

That's all I can remember. But now that I think of it, someone should put some signs down at the end of South Libby to warn people about the dragon that lives there.

The next generation of stock analysts

 

I dreamed I worked at a very old, decrepit dinosaur of a financial firm. Their old four story walk up building was in a high growth district and looked out of place among the newer architectural designs, despite having undergone a facelift or two over the millennia. I think the last one was done in the art deco days, since the corners all had a rounded appearance, like a 50s era toaster or refrigerator/freezer.

Inside, it was business as usual. Phone calls were being made from a boiler room. Not quite a literal boiler room, but the exposed plumbing and electrical conduit did give the place an industrial atmosphere. I think the hot water pipes actually did provide the building with heat, although the management seemingly generated plenty of that with their incendiary motivational speeches. 

"Leads are for closers," Walter Klein intoned the famous Glengarry Glen Ross speech. "So you losers won't be getting any of them. You will be making cold calls and developing fresh leads for me."

We were each handed a copy of the financial section of the newspaper and a rotary telephone. With only these two tools, we were supposed to enlarge the company portfolio by dialing up random people and picking stocks from the paper to sell to them. We were like bookie pimps, lining up sure-fire bets for the unwitting, ever gullible, greedy public. 

Fishing for greed in a sea of greed wasn't too hard, and some of our picks actually paid off. We operated under the Spaghetti-Wall/Monkey-Typewriter Theorem: throw enough spaghetti at a wall and furnish enough monkeys with typeriters, and you will eventually have a rose colored fresco or produce the Magna Carta, provided the monkeys don't get distracted picking the bits of spaghetti off the wall instead of banging away on their typewriters. (Note to self: for future versions of this metaphorical experiment, keep the monkeys away from the spaghetti.)

It was my first day on the job, and I didn't know what to do. I set about to shadow another employee, Edmund Leon, an old friend from the cult era who just recently passed away from an overdose. Let me pause for a moment to reflect on the significance of encountering a departed soul in a somewhat hellish boiler room environment in dreamland. Ok. Enough of that. I just gave myself the chills. I don't want to think about the very real possibility that we may go on to even more tedious mundane existences after mucking it up in this one.  

Edmund didn't want me shadowing him, for fear that I'd actually pick up some of his trade secrets. There wasn't much chance of that, since he used the pretty much straightforward blindfolded, one-finger method for picking stocks. Likewise, there was nothing special about his random phone number dialing technique. He kept no notes or logs of the many failed numbers he dialed. He simply put his finger in the dial and spun it until it started ringing. He could have been dialing the same number over and over, or calling some deli in China for all I knew. 

His success rate would indicate that he was doing something right, though, so I continued to follow him around. He went out to his car to eat his lunch, driving a full block before parking in a designated lunch parking lot.

"If you're going to follow me on my lunch break, you've gotta at least buy me something," he said between mouthfuls of baloney sandwich.

"I'll do that next time," I promised. I never seemed to think out my strategies in advance.

Lunch ended soon enough, and it was back to the desk, the newspaper and the telephone. I started circling some interesting looking stocks. They were interesting because of the acronyms they formed and because of the way they stood out on the page, not because I knew anything about the companies they represented. About that, I was as clueless as a newborn baby. I think that was why they chose newbies for this job: we had completely fresh, untrained eyes that weren't tainted by such things as knowledge or perception.

The company would go on despite my success or lack of it. I would be there for a spell, but the old edifice would remain a presence on the busy city street, despite being five makeovers out of date architecturally. Presumably, Walter Klein would remain on as well, as the perpetually old, yet never aging, curmudgeonly operations manager, reciting the Glengarry Creed to infinite future generations of frightened new employees.

Toilet Paper Mountain

 

While I was out walking in the mountains, I came upon a section of hillside that was comprised entirely of rolls of toilet paper. It had been an abandoned factory, an underground paper mill that had collapsed, leaving a feathery, pillowy wall of disintegrating toilet tissue as a memorial. Naturally, it was a sought out tourist destination for thrillseekers with a macabre taste for haunted venues.

People would reenact the collapse of the factory, entering the mineshaft-like maze through any number of manhole-sized passageways or bomb shelter door type openings at the top of the mountain, which had a well-maintained city park on its plateaued pinnacle.

I witnessed a bunch of people emerging from the mound, wrapped in shreds of the decaying toilet paper, laughing as if they'd just reached the end of a particularly exciting amusement park ride.

"Break on through!" and "Let's go again!" they shouted, wiping bits of tissue from their lips.

I saw Manuel Silva eagerly looking for one of the openings. He was with a group of people, but they weren't acknowledging him at all. One of them was McCoy, from Star Trek, and the other was that actor who plays Mini Me. They both walked faster and feigned deafness as Silva tried to engage them.

"Hey, wait, guys," he pleaded, to no avail. 

"They're gone, man," I told him.

"That's ok," he told me. "Looky what I found!"

His excitement was undiminished, as he'd found an opening to the factory. It was a standard manhole cover. He pried it open and found a small stream running beneath it. It was mostly filled in, and a person would have to crawl over some wet rocks for quite a ways in order to get anywhere. 

I was underimpressed and suggested we look for a different entryway. Soon, we found a more suitable entrance, an old metal plate door, typical of cold war era bomb shelters. He swung it open, and down we went into the cavernous labryinth. 

"Didn't a lot of people die in here?" I asked as we followed the shaft deeper into the heart of the mountain.

"More people still will," he said ominously.

The walls were a moist, mossy earth, and there was a chill in the stale air. We walked on until we reached a large open room near the site of the original cave in. It had been re-excavated at some point, and a car dealership now resided there. This open area was supposed to be the showroom, but it had a bit too much dirt still on the floors to be very showy.

"How do they get the cars in and out of here?" I wondered out loud.

I didn't get an answer. At that moment there was a rumble, and the walls started to shake. Parts of the ceiling were giving way, crumbling in a torrent of damp dirt clods. There was a growing excitement in the crowd.

"This is it! Break on through!" the enthusiastic tourists shouted.

With dirt raining down around them, they began frantically digging at one wall. After a seeming eternity, someone reached the layers of old toilet paper rolls which comprised the outside wall of the mountainside. Using a breaststroke-like technique, they swam their way through the fuzzy substrate, emerging, breathless, into the sunlight. 

"Hallelujah! We're born again!" the enthusiasts exclaimed. "Go again?"

I didn't opt to go again. I was magically transported, well, not so magically-- just a quick cut scene, and I was back at my house. I arrived just in time to witness a huge water drainage problem that threatened to flood my garage.

I'd dug trenches around the house and cleaned the rain gutters in preparation for the runoff from a recent rainstorm. The storm had left a permanent stream flowing right in front of my house, and there was a waterfall depositing water on my roof that was swelling my rain gutters to capacity. 

There wasn't anything more I could do, so I just stood there, mesmerized by the flowing water.

"Someone really ought to have planned this out better, when choosing this as a home site," I mused to myself.

Then I woke  up. I was 7:44 AM. Saturday, my favorite.