This beautiful little animated short film needs to be shared with the world. Fans of the accordion and of Hugh Manatee–a.k.a the human spirit–will find it particularly touching.
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I’ve been sick for over a week now, and I have to say that my favorite thing about it is that my cold medicine has given me even more vivid dreams than I normally have.
This morning, I dreamed that I had just joined a well-known Portland band, and we were in the process of filming a new video. Each of us was dressed in black, with matching black leather boots. They got a shot of me walking across the stage, lip synching to a verse and a chorus of the song, and then I walked off. I heard someone make a comment about how loud my boots were, so I sat down to take them off. The director walked over and asked what I was doing, since the boots looked ‘so awesome’, so I put them back on. While I was doing that, a female journalist came over to interview me, in a very flirtatious way, about what it was like being the newest member of the band. Very strange.
Yesterday, I dreamed that I was the owner of a company that made titanium chariots (?!), and we were trying to incorporate them back into horse racing. We decided that in order to prove how fast our chariots were, we could take any random person – especially someone who wasn’t even a jockey – and they would either win the race or come very close to winning. It was decided that I would race. I came in second, and our point was proven. Our team won the overall competition. I seem to recall that there was blood involved, somehow, but I don’t remember the specifics.
The day before that, I had three vivid dreams, of which I can only remember one. I was in a city by a bay, that was full of steep hills, in the same way that San Francisco and Seattle are. I kept waking up and going back into the dream city, with different friends and family members each time. The first time was with my brother. The second time was with my dad and stepmom. The third time was with my friend DoctorLove. Each time, we started walking down a main thoroughfare of the town, 38th Street, which ran east-west into the sunset, and got progressively steeper as it got closer to the bay. I would stop to show my dad and stepmom the bookstores that Brother and I had explored, and I would stop to show DoctorLove the restaurant that DadAndStepmom and I had chosen, as well as the bookstores that Brother and I had found. By the time DoctorLove and I were walking through a neighborhood on the top of the hill, I had become very familiar with the town, and I felt almost like an actual permanent resident. As we were walking, I noticed a nearby house down the hill that had caught on fire, and I pointed it out to her.
We stopped walking, and overheard a few neighbors with varying theories about the cause of the fire. “So is that it?” I asked one of them, a Chinese man in his mid-forties. “Was it arson?”
“No,” he replied tersely.
DoctorLove and I watched as the house became completely engulfed in flames. The top story collapsed into the second story, and then both collapsed to the ground. A different neighbor asked the group of us rubberneckers, “Any idea what caused all this?”
Someone answered, “I think it may have been the fireworks from the hotel next door.” The dream’s point of view expanded just then, and I could see that there was a huge party happening at the hundred-year-old, six-story brick hotel next door, and there were indeed fireworks involved, the sparks from which were dropping onto the house in question, a fact which everyone in the hotel seemed to be completely unaware of. We looked down the street, and saw that there were similar fireworks displays happening in other neighboring buildings, including a tall apartment building and a waterfront restaurant. End of dream.
A few days before that, I had a dream that I was on a road trip in the desolate part of Nevada, and I had pulled over to sleep alongside the highway in my first car, a 1976 Toyota station wagon. At some point during the night, a guy and his girlfriend had parked their car next to mine in order to get some sleep as well. In the morning, they started to unload their mountain bikes, and I pulled my blanket up over my head to ignore them. Or so I thought. Suddenly a young man appeared with a knife, which he held to the woman’s neck. They broke into my car, and he made the woman drive because the Toyota was a stick shift, which he was unable to drive. I asked him why he would even bother stealing that car, and he waved the knife vaguely in my direction, saying, “It’s all about power.”
I laughed and replied, “If you had any real power, you wouldn’t steal this piece of shit.”
He was clearly flustered then, and he raised the knife over his head a little bit in order to try and threaten us, but both the woman and I knew that he was on the metaphorical ropes, and rapidly losing his confidence. We stopped at a left-turn signal, and when the light turned green, the woman swerved into the path of a large four-wheel-drive pickup, which slammed into us head-on. I laughed and cheered, and the guy jumped out and ran.
There, you see? Being sick isn’t ALL bad.
While driving home from the store today, I saw a police car along the side of the road with the words “UFO Response Team” emblazoned on the back, and the little kid in me got all excited thinking about all that stuff again. You see, when I was young, I had an endless fascination for UFO’s. I had a stack of books about them (by authors like J. Allen Hynek and John Mack) and I watched every TV show I could. The Air Force used to have a special team called Project Blue Book that investigated sightings and stories, and for about two seconds in the late 1970’s, long before “The X-Files”, there was a TV show based on Project Blue Book cases that was called “Project U.F.O.”
Long before conspiracy theories abounded or distrust of the government became de riguer, there seemed to be a kind of mythology about UFO’s. One show described an ancient site in South America that was given the insipid name of EarthBaseOne, which (after decades of retrospect) looked like an Inca temple. It was a large square, with no roof, and in the walls of the square were carvings of skulls. One was human, and the others (all around the walls) were slight variations on human faces. Some were very similar to our current visage, while others were grotesquely misshapen. A quick Google search revealed that the site’s real name is Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia.
Anyway, the show put forward the idea that extraterrestrial life forms created humanity, and that Tiahuanaco was the place where they worked out their ‘design’ for us. Â An interesting theory, and one that I’ve never forgotten.
So anyway, I got to thinking about all that UFO business again this afternoon, and I really wanted to see the show “Project U.F.O.” again. It took longer than I would have thought to scrounge up an actual episode (Due to a government cover-up, perhaps? KIDDING!), but here’s one for you.
Warning: WATCH THIS CLIP AT YOUR OWN RISK. It may have been based on an interesting premise, but the show is a complete and utter turd. Do not attempt to drive or use heavy machinery after watching it.
You’ve been warned.
There, see? I warned you.
Last night’s dream took a while to get going, but it ended in a classic BFST way.
I am sitting in the back seat of a van in the driveway of my childhood home in Yakima with my two estranged stepsisters and one’s husband, drinking a concoction that the younger stepsister made from lemonade, vodka and whiskey or something. We are sitting and talking awkwardly, and the husband calls me by a different name, so I say automatically, “You mean Todd.” He gives me a little laugh and shrugs it off.  I set down my mostly full glass, stand up, climb out of the van, and walk across the front yard into the house.
As soon as I get inside, the dream’s location changes to that of a busy office setting. I duck into the bathroom, pull down my pants, and start to. . .um. . .go Number Two. As I’m doing that, the door starts to open. It’s C, one of my real-life friends, so I tell him, “Hey, I’ll be out in a second.” I reach over to lock the door, but the lock is broken. I stand by the door, pants down, and try to maneuver the door into position in such a way that it will latch and lock. C says, “Oh yeah, I think they said something about the lock being messed up. Here let me just [he opens the door enough to reach through] try and jimmy it.”
I say, “Just. . .hang on. I’ll be done pretty quick. Let me finish up in here first.” C ignores me and continues to fidget with the door. Pretty soon, there are five or six people walking around in the large bathroom, which turns out to be sort of a hallway that leads elsewhere in the building; a very high-traffic area normally. I tug at my pants and tell everyone that I’m almost done, and that they should be patient for just another minute. I finally get them corralled out the door, when a co-worker of mine runs into the room, smiling mischievously, knowing that she’s consciously disturbing me.
I make a sort of growling noise under my breath, and she asks, “What?” She has her hand over her mouth, and is clearly trying not to laugh, which makes me totally furious.
I can’t contain my anger anymore. “I’M WIPING MY ASS, EVERYONE,” I say loudly and exasperatedly. “GO AWAY.”
She runs out the door, and I wake up, laughing at another crazy ending to another crazy dream.
This is dying to be shared with everyone. It’s the original Apple iPad, courtesy of Mad TV, FIVE YEARS AGO.
