* * * * * *

I’m walking on the street in what appears to be a smallish medieval English town.  A young woman walking in the opposite direction catches my eye, and after a few moments I decide to follow her and say something, so I turn around and head in her direction.  She turns down a narrow alley into a sort of marketplace that is teeming with people, and I lose her in the crowd.  As soon as I cross into the marketplace, I notice that I’m wearing different clothing, including a long, flowing robe and a multi-colored shirt underneath it.  Other people are dressed in a similarly elaborate fashion, but I seem to have the finest quality clothing.

Everyone’s clothing, while elaborate, is very much related to their job and social status.  The people selling their wares in the marketplace dress in a certain style, as do the customers and townspeople.  There is a film crew on the scene, and they too have their own distinctive style of clothing.  There are groups of teenage girls wearing garish clothing tinged with neon colors.  I’m the only one wearing a robe, however, and everyone seems to recognize me, as if I’m some sort of royalty.  This makes me very uncomfortable at first, and I try to protest, but then I decide to keep quiet and use the intimation of royalty to my advantage somehow, if I can, and to have some fun with it.

The film crew are filming the goings-on at the marketplace.  Nothing is staged or fictionalized; they are there to simply capture whatever happens, and on this particular day, they get very lucky indeed.

I see three friends of mine in the marketplace—J and B (longtime bandmates in real life), and S, a close female friend of many years—and I walk over to join them.  We start to explore the market, but a skirmish breaks out and we are separated.  The skirmish escalates and escalates until weapons are drawn.  They aren’t the usual weapons like guns or knives, either, but antiquated and homemade weapons, such as slingshots and catapults.

A handful of people come toward me and stand very close.  I can’t tell if they’re attempting to protect me or if they’re seeking protection for themselves by being near me.  Perhaps it’s both.  By this time, I’ve decided to play the role they seem to have cast me in.  A young man with his face painted like a fox tells me, somewhat nervously but determinedly, that he would very much like to meet me because he thinks I’m “perspicacious and very handsome.”  I laugh to myself, then shake his hand and say, “Thank you, brother.”

The fighting escalates again, and our little group is forced to dissipate.  I duck behind a low metal table that is used to prepare food.  A man with a gruesomely loose eyeball is standing by the table with a large stick in his right hand.  He’s not from our town, he’s from the small but fierce group of invaders who are attempting to take over the town by first conquering the market.  He raises his stick toward me, and tells me that he intends to take one of my eyes.  He looks me in the face for a long moment, and suddenly a look of recognition crosses his own countenance.  His expression changes, ever so slightly, and instead of hitting me with the stick, he hits the table.  Hard.  He hits it again and makes a strange hand gesture that tells me I should ‘play along’ with his little ruse.  The next time he slams the stick onto the table, I shout out as if in pain, so as to fool his cronies into thinking that he’s actually doing some damage to our side.  After a few more hits, he stops and motions for me to do the same.  I say to him, in a very deep and serious voice, “Brother, thank you.  You have done a very noble thing today.”  By way of a response, he scoffs and makes a sort of spitting motion with his head, which causes his loose eyeball to pop out and fly towards me.  I wish him good luck and bid him adieu.

An older gentleman appears just then, who also seems to recognize me, but not in the vaunted way everyone else does.  He seems to know me from my ‘normal’ life as a musician.  I greet him with a “Hello, brother,” and he shakes my hand warmly and genuinely.  An explosion happens very nearby, and the crowd scatters.  Panic and pandemonium prevail.  In the middle of the marketplace is a circular stage in the round, with a thick velvet curtain around it.  For some reason I decide that I’ll be safe if I can get there, so I run across the square to the stage, pull back the curtain a little, and crawl inside.  I find myself standing on a short wooden walkway, surrounded by velvet curtains, completely unable to see what’s happening outside.  I hear the sounds of fighting, but I feel very vulnerable in my hiding place.

The walkway I’m on suddenly begins to spin, and as it does, the curtain billows out enough that I can look for my various friends and acquaintances.  I see J and B (but not S), and jump off the metal walkway near where they’re sitting.  They and the people they’re sitting with appear to be high on something, and their little group is laughing hysterically, completely oblivious to the mayhem happening all around them.  I ask them if they’ve seen S, and J responds, “Oh. . .I thought she was with you!” which makes everyone else but me burst into uncontrollable fits of laughter.  I walk away in annoyance.

The fighting in the marketplace has reached its highest level of tension by now, and everyone is a state of utter panic.  Tables are turned over, there are fist fights and all manner of strange weapons and warfare are happening.  People are running through the market, beating up the vendors, and looting their booths.  Suddenly, two policemen from our town wearing black riot gear with the words ‘HAZARD TEAM’ emblazoned on the back appear out of nowhere and run into the middle of the meleé.  Everyone else stops, and we hear round after round of gunfire.  We realize that the presence of guns takes this skirmish to a whole new level, and we decide to get out of there.

Many other people and I run on the narrow cobblestone street that is the exit of the enclosed market area.  Just then, I see the old man sitting along the road by himself.  He appears to be begging for money and food.  I stop, hand him some money, and say to him, “Brother, you remember me.”  His face lights up in a gigantic smile, and I turn back to continue to run out of the market, waving over my shoulder to the old man as I leave.  As the group of us runs through the arch that designates the boundary of the market area, I take a look at the town for the first time.  It is one of the colorful and picturesque towns that I’ve ever encountered.  The beauty actually brings tears to my eyes.  I think to myself that I need to capture this scene somehow, and share it with other people.  I make broad painting motions with my arms, wishing I had a sketch pad so that I could draw the Tudor-style architecture and sloping rooflines of the village’s buildings, the entire sides of which were covered with brightly colored streamers and a myriad of tiny lights.  The town was having a celebration, and although I didn’t know what the occasion was, the town was mesmerizing to behold.  I also noticed that I was wearing my normal street clothes again, instead of the voluminous robe.

I kept walking and admiring the sights, but I soon found that the town got less and less beautiful the further I walked.  In fact, it started to look a bit like a movie set.  As I was entertaining that thought, a woman walked by and said something snide about me and the town, which brought my sense of diminishing wonder about the town to a swift end.

* * * * * *

Despite the fact that I was able to remember much more of this dream than I originally thought I would, there are a couple other scenes in the middle of it that are continuing to elude me.  There also was an actual ending scene.  If I do remember them, I’ll be sure to add them.

* * * * *

I’m in the hallway of a large office building. There is a young girl about nine years old who is either my sister or my sidekick. (I suppose she could be both.) She is Indian like I am, since that’s where the two of us were born.

We decide to explore the building a bit, and we walk through a doorway into an unused part of the building. It seems to have been vacant for quite some time, and there are huge piles of flattened cardboard boxes stacked up and waiting to be recycled. We walk through that room and into the abandoned bathrooms. The only light in this area is provided by the small amount of sunlight that’s able to penetrate the layers of grime on the windows. It’s dim, but we can see clearly enough.

Suddenly, a man climbs in one of the windows and grabs SisterSidekick by the leg. He pulls her toward the window, but she is able to free herself and we both scramble away.

This kind of thing becomes a recurring theme of the dream, and the two of us constantly find ourselves being chased, threatened, held at gunpoint (and even fired upon!), and a few other similar situations that we always manage to extricate ourselves from, or simply talk our way out of. I can never quite decide if we’re part of a television show or not.

Then the dream changes, and I’m suddenly an adult—my real-life American self—riding in a car with a beautiful woman. True to the form of the rest of the dream, she seems to be my captor, and is holding me against my will, although not entirely. She is around thirty years old, very slim, with her dark blonde hair tied into a ponytail. She’s wearing simple jeans and a light blue chambray shirt, but I know that she has various small weapons hidden inside her clothes. I also know that we’re in London, despite the fact that she’s driving on the right-hand side of the road, and on the left-hand side of the car, like we do in America, and like they do pretty much everywhere else except Japan and the remnants of the British Empire.

I look over at my so-called captor while she’s driving, and through her window I notice that we’re driving through an extremely elegant and picturesque old neighborhood. I point out a huge cathedral made of weathered red brick, and mention something to her about how We Certainly Don’t Have Churches Like That Back in the States, but secretly I think to myself that we probably do, especially on the East Coast.

I look around the beautiful neighborhood and blurt out, “I wish we lived here.” She says nothing but gives me a little smile that I’m unable to interpret. “Actually,” I continue, “I wish we could have lived here in the Sixties, back when this was the center of the universe.” Her smile fades ever so slightly, and I realize she’s lost in her own thoughts, not paying me the slightest bit of attention. Despite that fact, I attempt to continue. I start to say, “It seems like everyone back then became famous,” but about halfway through the sentence, she makes a strange gesture with her hand and a dollop of water splashes me in the face, rendering me speechless. I brush myself off and curl my lip into an exasperated grimace as I turn to her and say, “You didn’t have to do that.”

I think to myself that from here, this story can go in one of two directions. If this is the cheesiest romantic adventure story in history, she will turn to me and say, “I didn’t have to do this, either,” and lean over to kiss me. If this is one of those surprising adventure thriller stories, she’ll say the same thing but punch me in the face instead.

It is at this juncture that I seem to be unable to decide which of the dream’s possible trajectories will play itself out. I suspect that the punch will make for a better story, but she’s also very beautiful, and I’d love to kiss her. The two disparate trajectories will forever remain disparate, however, because my brain never does decide which story to follow, so the two of us drive together silently for an inordinate amount of time, at which point I awaken from this incredibly strange dream.

It started at my last job.  Late in the afternoon, a woman came to my desk to deliver a big pile of paychecks that I was expected to ‘sign and mark’ with a yellow pen that she also gave me.  I told her I could have it done by tomorrow, and she said, “Okay, as long as it’s by one o’clock.”  Not a problem.  She walked away, and I got up to do something else, which is when I discovered that I was in my first Portland apartment.  I took off all of my clothes and crawled into bed.

A guy I knew in Yakima came into my room just then (we’ll call him Michael, since that’s his name) with his girlfriend, and he was holding a small gun.  He made a gesture for his girlfriend to get in bed too, so she took off her clothes and slid in next to me.  Each of us put an arm around the other, and Michael sat down on a chair along the wall next to the night stand.  He raised his arm just enough to point the gun in my direction.  “I need your car,” he said.

“What?  Why?”  I turned my head to look at him.  His girlfriend shifted a little bit, and I slid my hand down her back.

“I just need it.”

“You’re stealing my car?”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s a piece of shit.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“No, really.  if you’re gonna steal a car, you should steal something good.”  He lowered the gun, and I continued.  “What happened to you?  We used to be friends, hanging out and stuff.  I don’t get it.  Do you need a ride somewhere?  You don’t have to do all this, I can just. . .give you a ride.”

“Okay,” he said, sheepishly.

His girlfriend got up and stood around naked for a while before she got dressed again.  I stayed in bed and tried to figure out what to do next.  The two of them left the room, and a handful of people appeared and started milling around in my bedroom.  They were both men and women, all professionally dressed, and one woman had her young son with her.  The woman and her son sat on my bed, and I wondered how to get up without just being naked in front of everyone.  I decided that it didn’t matter, so I got up nonchalantly and put on my clothes.  My cat brushed against my leg repeatedly, which made dressing difficult.  Mom, Stepdad and Brother appeared, and told me it was time to get ready for the party.

“It’s a Christmas party,” Mom said.

“Why are we going to a Christmas party in April?” I asked.  “I mean June.”

“It’s more of a halfway-to-Christmas party,” she replied.  “Some people have a halfway-to-St.-Patrick’s-Day party, we have this.”

“Well, crap, if I’d known it was gonna be a Christmas party, I would’ve finished up my stuff at work.  I’m not too excited about a Christmas party in September.  I mean June.”

“You don’t need to go if you have things to do, I just thought it would be fun.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll come, just let me pack first.”  I started to throw a few things into a suitcase.  The walls of the room sort of dematerialized, and my furniture was now sitting on a perfectly manicured lawn next to a nondescript one-story stone building.  By this time, I had sensed that the unknown people were military personnel, and Stepdad was very agitated by their presence.  He and the rest of my family members left to go the party, and one of the military people came to talk to me.

“Good thing you’re a troop,” she said.  “If you weren’t, we’d have to search all your belongings.”

“But I’m not,” I said.  “A ‘troop’ or whatever.”

“What?”

“Yeah.  I’m not a troop.”

She looked dismayed.  A couple of the others heard what I’d said, and they came over to offer her some assistance.  “But how did you get in here, if you’re not military?”

“What do you mean?  I LIVE here.  I’ve been here for a week, and this military stuff just. . .appeared.”

She turned toward the others with a grimace.  “Let’s get to work,” she told them, “we have a lot of stuff to get through.”  They walked to my dresser and peered inside.  Each drawer was filled with a huge number of small gifts and trinkets, except one, which had underwear and socks in it.  Two of them started rifling through the trinkets, and the others went to explore other parts of what had, until recently, been my apartment.

One of them, a Hispanic man around thirty years old, took me aside and escorted me toward a parking garage in the building.  He asked me a bunch of nonsensical questions that I can’t recall, but then he asked, “Why do you hate relationships?”

“What?”

“Why do you think relationships suck?”

“I don’t; I totally want to be in one.”

He gave me a look of disbelief, and shook his head.  “Just be honest.”

“I am.  I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Gimme a break.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, and I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

He grabbed my arm and walked me briskly toward the door to the building.  Great, I thought, I’m about to be more thoroughly interrogated.

And then I woke up.

Luckily, this story won’t take long, since it’s about a dream I had this morning that I don’t remember very well.  It was kinda dumb, overall—well, it was—but it did end with a funny conversation.  The dream was about international spies, which you’d think would make it inherently cool, but people spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the kinds of cars they drove (Mercedes and BMW) as opposed to those driven by the police (boring American cars).  It was as though I was watching a movie, rather than participating in the action, which is probably why it was so boring.  I’d love to be an international man of mystery, but I’ll need to get a passport first.

MainCharacterGuy had a sexy, blonde female sidekick who was twenty years his junior, and there were two other people in the dream, a man and a woman, who commented about her to each other.

“Why’s he with her?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Why’s he gotta pay her?”

“He pays her so she’ll fall in love with him.  He loves her cause—” and the second person chimed in to say, tautologically, “—he loves her.”

That’s when I woke up.

Incidentally, I haven’t forgotten that I owe you a story about hand jobs.  I’ve been trying to think of a way that I can tell it that won’t just be crass, but I’m not sure that’s gonna be possible, so I guess I’ll just keep it simple for once.

I can’t give a woman a hand job.  I mean, I CAN, but that’s not what it’s called, and I only found that out a week or so ago.  You see, I thought it was still called a hand job, whether it was done to a man or to a woman.  My friend thought it was hilarious that I used the term interchangeably that way, and he patiently explained it to me.  Turns out that the term ‘hand job’ is like ‘blow job’; it’s what a woman (or a man, for that matter) does to a man.  If a man (or a woman, for that matter) does the equivalent to a woman, then it’s called one of the million other terms that are floating around in our vernacular—which I will let you discover on your own, rather than listing them all here—but NOT a ‘hand job.’  You’re welcome.  I’m really glad we’ve had this discussion.

This calls for a new slogan.

BFS&T:  Now With 30% More Hand Jobs!

By way of a reward, here’s a hilarious video montage of all the references to hand jobs in the movie Rushmore. If you’ve never seen that movie, then see it.  If you haven’t, then this may be a bit of a spoiler, but I think you’ll find it entertaining.  It’s only a tiny bit of the overall story, and everything’s completely out of context, anyway.  All that being said, enjoy the video.

I had a dream the other day in which I was having dinner with my Chinese-American girlfriend and her family.  She and her teenaged sister were both very Americanized, but her parents were not, and they spoke very little English.  We were spending the evening at an upscale Chinese restaurant in downtown Seattle, and a waitress was placing some miniature bowls on the table and making a rather elaborate show of gracefully spooning tiny ladels of seafood stew into each one.  We watched her closely, fascinated, and we each took turns sniffing the delicious stew and commenting on it as our respective bowls would appear at our places.

Somehow the subject of dopamine came up (you know, like it does), and I was trying to explain to my girlfriend’s dad about the various functionalities it has on the brain.  He was having a tough time understanding me, and I was having a tough time simplifying the terminology enough to get the ideas across, but we were both engaged in the conversation, and we were trying to communicate with each other as best we could.  At one point, I attempted to use the seafood stew as a visual aide, but even that was unsuccessful, so we finally agreed to just drop the subject of dopamine altogether and move on to something else.  “It’s really interesting, though,” I finished, a bit disappointed at having to give up on such a good topic.

Given the conversational choice between dopamine, politics, and religion, I’m gonna choose dopamine every time, even (and I daresay especially) on a dinner date with my girlfriend’s family, their tenuous grasp on the English language notwithstanding.

So we’re sitting in a room in A.’s house, playing through a tricky piece of classical music.  It isn’t a piece I’m familiar with in real life, and I’m not exactly struggling with it, but I’m certainly not playing at my best, and we’re all aware of that fact.  A. is prepared to overlook it, but L. puts down her violin and glares at me.  “Would you get it together, please?” she asks, crossly.

“Sorry,” I say.  “I’m still warming up.  I’ll improve, you’ll see.  Do you have any suggestions?”

“You always have questions about everything,” she snaps.  “Just play better.”

“Uhhh, okay,” I say, a little bit on the defensive now.  “I told you I’ll get better as I warm up.”

She ignores my response.  “What are you wearing?  A cube? Really?”

“What are you talking about?”  I look down to see that I’m wearing a perfectly good outfit of jeans, an orange crewneck sweater, and a black hoodie. “What’s a ‘cube’?”

She rolls her eyes, then turns back and launches into me.  “Why do people hire you? I thought you had a good reputation for playing drums, or piano, or something.“  She pauses, choosing her words for maximum damage.  “Do you really think we’re ever going to call you again? This is a total waste of our time.  And why do you dress that way?”

“What ‘way’?  I’m dressed fine.”

I’m angry now, and I decide that this has gone on long enough.  I gently place my cello on the floor, stand up and walk across the room to gather up my instrument cables, jacket, and cello case.  A. picks up my cello and holds it out in front of herself so she can inspect it.  I walk back toward her and crouch down to see what she’s looking at.  There are two metal clasps on either side of the back (cellos don’t really have clasps on the back) that are hanging loose.  I tell A., “I’ve never seen those before, but I’m guessing they’re supposed to be tightened, aren’t they?”  I reach over and tighten the one nearest me, and A. tightens the other one.  I notice out of the corner of my eye that L. is glaring at me with a look of disapproval.

Next, A. pulls out a long piece of white twine and starts to thread it through the back of the cello, making a square pattern that is raised about an inch above the back of the instrument.  “What’s that for?” I ask her, which makes L. scoff loudly from across the room.  A. finishes with the twine, and I take my cello over to the case and put it inside, avoiding L. as much as I can in the process.

The dream’s location changes, and the three of us are in A.’s yard.  She is walking across the lawn toward L. and me, and she says, “I carried your cello to your car for you.”

“Oh, thanks.”  I put my hand on the back of her shoulder.  “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I don’t mind.  It was nice to play with you,” she says.

I don’t entirely believe her, but at least her attempt at platitudes is better than L.’s blatant hostility.  “Thanks, you too,” I tell her.  “See you around.”

L. stands and silently watches me grab my remaining things and walk across the grass toward the dirt road where my car is parked.  For some reason, it’s not my current car, which I also have in the dream, but my first car instead, an ancient blue Toyota station wagon.

I notice that it has a new dent on the driver’s side, where someone has attempted to pry the door open.  The back hatch is raised, thanks to A, and the car and its contents are covered in a thick layer of dust from when cars have driven past on the dirt road.  I throw my belongings in the back, slam the hatch and open the slightly mangled front door.  I brush the dust from the seats and steering wheel, sit down, start the car and drive aimlessly for a while, until I realize that I’ve left a small bag of cables and music gear at A.’s house.  I’m not at all excited to go back over there, but I need my things, so I turn around and head back, with a sense of dread and foreboding.

That’s the point at which I wake up, so you can imagine why I’m stuck feeling kind of blue today.

I’m working for a foreign-aid organization that sends people and reporters to small towns in foreign countries that need. . .well. . .aid, whether it’s in the form of food, education, infrastructure, or a variety of other things.  I am with a group of about ten people, both aid workers and reporters, and we’ve been sent to Nicaragua to build a school and bring food to a tiny village in the middle of a rain forest.

In my rare moments of spare time, I am giving singing lessons to a very talented ten-year-old boy.  Our group is only in the village for a few days, however, so as soon as the school is completed, we have to say our goodbyes to the people of the village, pack up our battered cargo truck painted in yellow and camouflage, and drive away from the village.  The rest of the group is in the cab of the truck, and I’m riding in the back by myself, as we traverse the narrow, bumpy, muddy mountain switchbacks.  The back of the truck is open, like an army transport, so I can only see behind us, but I can hear what’s going on around us, and it isn’t pretty.  There are guns being fired into the air, and I can see dirty, desperate people from other villages emerging from the jungle and running along the road behind our truck.

The road becomes so treacherous that we are forced to slow down drastically, until the group of running villagers catches up with us.  They attempt to jump into the back of the truck where I’m sitting, but I close the glass door on the back of the truck and lock it in an attempt to stop them.  Two of the men from our group climb out of the truck’s cab and hand a few bags of food to the villagers, and they thank us and let us go back on our way again.  We stop at two other villages along the road to drop off bags of food and pick up two older couples, also members of our organization, who are stationed elsewhere.   They climb up in the back of the truck, and I remove the iPod speakers from my ears so that we are able to talk.  I tell them what happened at the last stop, with the guns and everything, and they tell me, “It’s crazy to travel through the jungle without the protection of a glass door.  You just never know what these people are likely to do.”

The dream’s location changes, but we’re all still in the back of the van, which indicates that we have been driving for days on end, from Central America, through Mexico, and finally north through the United States all the way back to our home base in Portland.  Out the back of the van, we start to see signs, buildings and businesses that we all recognize, and we know we’re getting close.  Finally we arrive at our headquarters, and we climb out and stretch our weary bodies.  My girlfriend (C, a Portland friend in real life, but not my girlfriend) is there with the group of friends and family members who are greeting us as we arrive.   She runs over to me, and I give her a kiss and a huge hug, then I tell her I want to change out of my dirty traveling clothes and into some clean ones.  While I’m rummaging around in my suitcase, the leader of our group walks over and says hello.  He tells me, in his English accent, that I should get in contact with the boy I’d been tutoring, because he has suddenly become a very successful singer, and that I may be in a position to capitalize on this opportunity and make some money, for either our organization or for myself, at the very least.  Also, my boss says, the boy’s father is convinced that the boy will somehow become gay if he joins the music industry (despite his young age), and my boss is encouraging me to call the father and explain how ridiculous that idea is, and what the music industry is really like.  He tells me that he’ll get the family’s contact information and send it to me.  I thank him and agree to contact them as soon as I get back to work in a few days.

I wave to my boss, and to the other members of my team, and walk with my girlfriend in the direction of my car.  We are walking side by side, our outer arms holding one of my suitcases, and our inner arms around each other.