beautiful, funny, sad & true

It happened again.  I woke up at a little before five o’clock this morning, to the sound of two raccoons in the bushes cooing at each other and making sweet, sweet love.  Le Sigh.

After they had both finished and had the raccoon equivalent of a cigarette, I was finally able to get back to sleep.  I had a dream that BoringFish had been married to Eddie Van Halen (of course), but that she had recently split up with him, so she wanted to go out on a date.  She was wearing a little black dress, ready for a night on the town, so we were flipping through MessengerGodAlternativeNewspaper and deciding what to do, when we saw an advertisement for “Beautiful, Funny, Sad & True”, which appeared to be some sort of escort service.  “Did you see that?” she asked.  “Yeah,” I said, flipping the page back so we could look at it more closely.  We couldn’t believe it, and both burst out laughing.  Just then, her mom poked her head over BoringFish’s shoulder, and made a comment like, “Well, that’s the difference between [something] and poonanny.”  (How I wish I could remember what the first thing was!)  We were both uncomfortable with her mom watching us, so BoringFish turned to me and asked, “Do you want to look at this later?”  I smiled and replied, “Yes.  And no.”

Then I woke up to my alarm clock.

I hit the snooze button and fell asleep again.  My dream was in darkness, but I could feel a cat walking on the bed.  I was lying on my back, and I could feel the cat walking all around my left side, behind my pillow next to the wall, and then along my right side and settling itself next to my right hip.  I opened my eyes in the dream, and there was an orange long-haired tabby cat there.  I started petting it.  Was that my childhood pet Mickey, visiting me from beyond the grave?!

I guess I’ll never know, because I was awakened just then by someone walking down the back stairs of my apartment building, and down into the laundry room.  At 7:00 in the morning.  What the huh?

I can’t remember the third dream I had, but it was interesting enough that it got me out of bed to write all three of them down.  If I remember it later, I’ll add it.

[EDIT:  I remembered it!  Here it is. . .

It was a movie trailer, believe it or not, for a movie called “Broken.”  There was a background of pictures of war, and a plane crash, and things like that.  The film was kinda blurry (on purpose) and digitally zoomed way in, so that we could read the red letters that would fade in and out with every new phrase:  “Broken. . .when it seems. . .like nothing. . .seems to work anymore.”

That’s it.  That’s the third dream.  Nice, snappy little tag line, eh?  JBJ’s gonna love it.  Reminds me of “In space, no one can hear you scream.” and “All he wanted to do was gleem the cube. . .till they killed his brother.”  Awesome.]

Sure wish I could just sleep through the night, like all of you normal people seem to have no trouble doing, but then I guess it’s my lot in life to suffer, in order to keep bringing you this Great Art.

And now I’m going to be really late to work.  I’m supposed to be there already.  Yikes.

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday, and I called her last night.  We talked for a while, and one of the things she mentioned is that she occasionally checks in on my blog to ‘see how things are going.’  My mom reads my blog, and she’s apparently been doing it for some time now.

Great.

With all those posts I’ve written about Satan and feces and third grade memories, not to mention all the copious amounts of premarital sex weird dreams and my judicious but regular smattering of naughty words, she probably thinks that her real baby son must have somehow been swapped in the hospital for this devil’s spawn.

But the most egregious thing of all (for her, anyway) has to be my non-stop trash-talking about Yakima, which is decidedly well-deserved, but she can’t stomach it.  I have a kinda funny story about that, actually, which involves my niece’s favorite TV show, which we all couldn’t help but watch with her while we were at the beach a few weeks ago.

It’s a national show, which you probably haven’t seen, let alone enjoyed, if you’re over the age of ten.  It’s about PrecociousTeenageGirl, and it’s set in Seattle, where Niece lives.  The grandparents on the show even live in Yakima, where one set of Niece’s grandparents live.  The hijinks ensued in one episode when it looked as if PTG was going to be sent to live with her grandparents.  She didn’t want to go, and she kept making all these lame jokes about Yakima and how bad it is (“oh, the sweet smell of Yakima”, et cetera).  I kept waiting for them to actually take her there, and have some scenes set in the town, which I’m sure they would have filmed in Salinas, California instead, anyway.  It has the exact same feel and look as Yakima, except for the fact that Salinas has the brilliant John Steinbeck rooting for it.  Raymond Carver and I are Yakima’s vox populi spokespeople, and we have nothing good to say about the place.

But that’s neither here nor there.

I found that episode surreal and hilarious.  No wonder it’s Niece’s favorite show; the writers practically frickin’ wrote it for her, and set it in the two places she knows best in the world.  I couldn’t stop cracking up at the irony of the situation, so between my incredulous laughter and the show’s cloying laugh track in response to every generic joke, my mom got angry and had to go upstairs to get away from it all.

I couldn’t tear myself away from the stupid show, and I actually watched the thing in its entirety. You’ll be glad to know that PTG did not, in fact, get sent to live in Yakima, because GenXGuardian (her older brother?) came through in the end to prove that despite his slacker appearance, he really was quite the responsible young gentleman when it came to raising her.  Awww.  Wipe my tears and cue the organist.

I suppose I don’t have a real reason to feel weird about my mom reading all this.  She knows (pretty much) what I’m like, this is all real stuff, and I feel like it’s a good representation of me, slightly-glossed-over warts and all.

But it still does feel weird.  I’m sure you understand.

This morning, after trying valiantly to go back to sleep, I actually managed to succeed on two occasions.  Both occasions were entirely too short, but they were long enough to have two short dreams.

The first involved two large, flappy, annoying insects that were flying around underneath the covers of my bed.  They flew very close to my face, which startled me and made me throw back the covers in alarm.  Once free, they increased dramatically in size and flew around the room.  They flew next to my head again, and this time it woke me up.

I went right back to sleep, and had the second dream, which involved the girl I met the other night.  She, one of her guy friends (not the one I met) and I were planning a trip to BigCityNamedTwice.  She’s been there before, but I haven’t, and I told her that I have a couple of friends who live there, one of which we might even be able to stay with.

Last night I had a fairly short dream involving a plane crash.  I was on the plane, which took off out of Seattle.  It had some sort of technical difficulty, so it turned back around to head back to the airport, but it never got there.  It kept going slower and slower and slower, until we were forced to land on a wide street.  Miraculously, we didn’t hit any cars, but we did slam into a mall.  (No, JBJ, it was nothing like a mini-mall.)

No one on the plane was hurt, but I don’t know about inside the mall.  Immediately after that, the pilot backed the plane up and taxied down the street.  I couldn’t believe he was trying to fly the thing after slamming it into a mall, but then I guess he knew best.

Then there was a scene in which I was walking down the street in Seattle the next day, and I saw a pair of little kids (ages two and four) who had been on the plane with me.  They were sitting on a bench next to their mother, who was reading the newspaper.  There was a story about the plane crash, and it included a picture that had been taken by someone on the plane.  The two kids were clearly visible.  They saw the picture and said, exactly in unison, ‘Who AM I?  I mean who ARE we?”

Weird.

OneYearAgo

This morning I had a beautiful and strange dream, which, I suppose is par for the course for me.

* * * * *

I’m driving through the English countryside in a sort of race, but it isn’t really a race so much as an homage to a Victorian writer who packed all of her belongings into a smallish buggy and traveled around England with her cat, Imogen. There are about twenty of us, each following her route across England. Some are taking this as a fun little trip, and others are trying to actually mirror her trip as closely as possible, dressing in Victorian-era clothing. There are even two buggies that are replicas of hers, which are quite impressive to the group, as you can imagine. Two or three people, myself included, bring a cat with them on the trip. I have a small cat the color of cafe au lait, whose name is also Imogen. She rides (mostly sleeps) in her cat bed, which is on the passenger seat of my red Honda, which they allow me to use in England even though it’s left-hand drive. Isn’t that nice of them?

The group is traveling sort of together and sort of separately. We’re not in a caravan, but we meet up at various points along the route to eat and talk, and at those times, the two buggy owners will take the participants for rides. All of the participants are either married couples or single people. There are no tour buses or large groups on this trip. I suspect it has something to do with the writer herself, a solitary but free-spirited person whose writing inspires wanderlust in her readers, as she encourages them to shake up their lives and not to be lulled into the trance of everyday living. She was far ahead of her time, and all of us who are on the trip feel a very close kinship both for her and for each other, despite the fact that none of us had met prior to this.

In the middle of the afternoon, we arrive at the main stopping point along the way, a large and grassy park near the ocean, with tall, leafy trees scattered plentifully throughout. The buggies are polished and gleaming, and the people who dressed in period clothing are out in all of their Victorian finery, laughing and talking near the buggies. One man is wearing a monocle and a pocket watch, and another man is wearing an elegant black suit, and his wife is wearing a long, white dress. Another woman shades herself underneath a parasol. There are about ten or twelve people wearing antique clothes, some of whom changed into them only for this part of the trip. I am wearing modern attire, jeans and a button-up shirt, with a gray, European-style suit jacket over the top.

My mom is at the park, volunteering, serving food and refreshments for the participants, but she is unfamiliar with the writer in question. She loves to volunteer for things, and she knew that I would be a part of this event, so she signed up. She walks over to one of the buggies, runs an admiring hand along its side, and makes a somewhat nonsensical comment about how ‘compactly’ people used to live back then, which makes a few of the people around her chuckle. The buggy’s owner is standing next to it, and she asks him to tell her a little bit about this writer. I pick up Imogen the cat, climb into the front seat of the beautifully restored buggy, and place her on the seat beside me. She sits in the sun and purrs, clearly enjoying herself.

* * * * *

This was one of those dreams that was very beautiful to experience, but when I tried to write it down, I found that I had a hard time capturing its mood at first. I laughed just now as I re-read the first sentence; it’s just so strange and funny. Each of the individual words is completely normal, but there’s something about the way they are strung together into that particular sentence that is instantly both surreal and hilarious. A moment like that is why I think it’s so much fun to write out dreams and share them. It pitches you right out of reality in a very satisfying way.