Mouthful of ashes, my old fishing rods and reels and an ugly shirt, starring Sharon and Uncle Steve

Last thing I remember I was rinsing my mouth out in the sink. I was in the living space adjacent to a small fishing repair shop where I had taken a couple of rods and reels years before. 

Moments before, I had been sitting on the couch with Sharon as she smoked a cigarette. To be cool, I took one from her and casually held it backwards, doing the Kramer trick and attempting to smoke it with the lit end inside my mouth. That never works out, and I wound up coughing and spitting up a bunch of ashes. 

I felt nauseous as I went to the sink and found an old plastic cup stained with toothpaste residue and full of cigarette butt tea. Of course, the whole thing was good for a laugh, and Sharon was enjoying that part. 

I found myself at this little repair shop, at first just looking for some fishing lures, but later I realized that I actually had some rods and reels to pick up there. The cigar chewing proprietor seemed to vaguely remember me.

I recognized my deep sea pole with the Penn 4.0 reel that I had bought for shark fishing, after I'd seen Jaws in 1975. It was attached a pole I'd picked up in the '80s that was probably equally old. It was in the rack of items waiting for customer approval, along with a mini pole that I'd bought in Chico in the '90s,  attached to small Diawa fishing reel that I inherited from Grace and Bill. It was one of the ones that we used at Lake Isabella when I was a kid. 

The proprietor picked it up and started making like he was playing a big fish with it. 

"This would be a fun pole," he said. 

I told him it was. I told him that I had been a customer there, perhaps 40 years ago or so, before there were even computers, so he might not have any records going back that far. He seemed excited to have someone come in from that long ago as he operated his ancient cash register and tried to look me up in his antiquated filing card system. 

I was convinced that I hadn't been there for decades, but I found a picture of myself on his charter boat that would seem to prove otherwise. It was a picture of me and my two nephews, Morgan and Dylan. Sharon and Uncle Steve were also in the picture, I think. It was a black and white 8X10 in a dusty frame. As I dusted it off, I could clearly see that it was conclusive proof that I'd been there in the last couple of years. 

Some time before that I was in Lance Mathyssen's garage. I had to back up a small trailer to unload a riding lawnmower. He had a chopper with extended forks and a tiny teardrop gas tank parked right in my path. I moved it out of the way a few feet, but naturally it fell over in the process. I was able to lift it back up and half-wheel, half-drag the bike over a few feet, leaving a few scrapes in the concrete which I attempted to cover up by dragging my shoe over the dust and oil on the floor.

Before that, I had been with Uncle Steve, but I don't remember what the bulk of our communication was about. I was in an art studio that he had set up, and there were a bunch of pictures he had taken of me adorning the walls. 

He was trying to impress some chick with his artistic camera work, and I was the unwitting subject of his display. In the photos, I was wearing a shirt that I had worn back in the '90s. My "party shirt."  It was an orange, white and blue Hawaiian style or bowling type shirt with an obnoxious modern art pattern of jagged lines and triangular areas of cartoon-like color. It looked like Fred Flintstone meets Charlie Brown at a surfer beatnik convention. 

Anyway, the shirt still existed in the dream, and I showed Steve that I still had it, even though it had seen better days. The fabric was thinning and frayed from all the wash cycles it had been through over the years, and the buttons were barely hanging on by a spiderweb of cheesecloth-like string. 

The pictures were actually not that bad, so I forgave him for using me as a subject without my consent. I know there was more to this dream prior to the art studio, the shirt, the rod and reels and the cigarette trick, but I'll be damned if I can draw it out now. I guess there's enough minutia to make up for it.