You're a dipshit, Charlie Brown!

 

 

I dreamed I was in a convalescent home, convalescing. Perhaps it was a nursing home, I don't know. There were nurses attending to me while I was laid up in bed bed. I had a pretty blonde nurse, but I don't think she liked me very well, and I can't say as I blame her. I was kind of a grump. 

"I'm just going to give you your art supplies, Mr. Golding," she said, and she left me with a coffee cup full of pens and a notepad.

I picked out a fountain pen and made a crude drawing of a Peanuts character on the pad. The pen began to leak, so I held it upside down, and it started dripping black ink on my fingers. I scrawled a caption to my sketch in an off-kilter, ragged font: "You're a dipshit, Charlie Brown!" 

The nurse came back in a few minutes to check on me, and I handed her my drawing. She must have thought it was meant as a critique of her nursing skills because she gave me a scowl and crumpled up the paper.

"We'll have no more of that kind of thing, Mr. Golding," she chided as she took the pad and pens away from me.

She brought me a half a pot of cold, stale coffee and set it on the bedside coffee maker, flipping the little orange switch to reheat it to a safe, lukewarm temperature. This is what I got for crossing her, I supposed, reading the thoughts she was telegraphing with her brusque manner. 

"It wasn't about you," I said weakly. "It was just a drawing. The pen was leaking, and I had to write something or the ink was going to leak all over me." My words had no effect, and she turned her attention to the person in the next bed, ignoring me entirely.

Sometime earlier in the dream, I'd been in an automotive training school with Chris Knoll as my teacher. I was learning how to fabricate a tire from raw rubber, spinning it on a lathe and cutting the material to make nice beveled edges and a smooth, slick surface. I wasn't getting the hang of it, though, and Chris had to stop me before I ruined the piece entirely. 

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Tex," he said as he eased back the feed mechanism. "You'll burn through that thing in no time. Slow and steady." 

"Now we know whose to blame for this mess," another student chimed in. He was an older fellow with an Aussie accent. "We're all doomed," he went on. "Doomed by the very breath we are about to breathe. Thanks a lot, mate."

(I get a lot of bleedthrough in my dreams, so I suspect it was my TV putting dialogue in my characters' mouths from "On The Beach," a movie that I have queued to play in my all-night sleep soundtrack.) 

I laughed at his spot on Aussie vocal intonation as he taunted me. Chris left me on my own for a minute to practice my technique on the lathe, but he was back before I could make any significant improvement.

"You're clearly not cut out for this," he said, looking at the pitifully uneven surface. "Look how much material you've wasted, and it's still not right." Chris was a perfectionist and was just being nit-picky, I thought to myself. My skills had improved slightly, at least with the beveled edges.

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Well, I'm awake now, I guess. It is still early, so maybe I will open the gate for the tree cutter, and I'll try to hit the resume button on my dream. I hope I get the pretty nurse again.