beautiful, funny, sad & true

In this dream, I’m walking through a Beatles museum. It’s a round building of a very modern design. It consists of a long, curving main hallway with a multitude of small, separate rooms on each side of the hallway. All the walls and floors are white, but each one is decorated in a slightly different style.

Each room is crammed full of pictures, and some of the rooms are devoted to clothes that were worn by the group. Others are devoted to guitars. Still others are filled with vintage four-track tape machines which visitors can use to listen to rare recordings, and make their own remixes (for a steep extra fee, of course).

As I’m walking by myself through this museum, I turn and walk into a newly-built room that is filled with only a few smallish pictures on two of the walls, a large blackboard on the third wall, a white tile floor. . .and three of the actual, live Beatles. It’s John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, looking as they did in late 1964 or early 1965.

The three guys are sitting on the floor, leaning back against the blackboard wall. They are talking with each other and laughing, as a group of about eight or ten children sit on the floor and color. In the middle of the floor there is a small, round white viewing table with a glass top. The table spins slowly, thanks to a small electric motor inside it. The kids’ teacher walks in the room, so I sit down on top of the table.

It is only then that we all notice what the kids have been coloring all this time. They’ve been using their crayons to color the individual tiles on the floor of the room. They have also written a bunch of short phrases and letters all over the white table top. The teacher is horrified, and she starts to talk very seriously to the kids. She grabs the little cardboard box and starts to collect all the crayons, but the Beatles are actually impressed with how beautiful the multi-colored floor looks now, especially compared to the stark white of the rest of the museum. Ringo tells the teacher to “let ’em keep at it,” and Paul starts to theorize about how “in a million years, this room will be the most famous room ‘ere, ’cause it’s our favourite” and because “we actually hung out in here and all that.”

The teacher seems to think I’m a member of the Beatles, so I decide to play along and pretend to be George Harrison. Since I’m still sitting on the table, she asks me if I’m the one who wrote all over it. I say, in a very distinguished-like Liverpudlian accent, “It might appear that way, but it wasn’t me. I only thought about it.” I point at one of the kids. “He’s the one who wrote it all.” Everyone in the room laughs. I leave my arm outstretched, and as the table spins around to the kid I pointed at, he grabs my finger, holds on, and runs around the table like it’s a merry-go-round.

It’s a very sweet and hilarious moment, and that’s when I woke up.

* * * *

p.s. – I don’t know why I’ve had so many vivid and strange dreams lately, but I’ve certainly enjoyed them, and obviously I’m happy to keep posting them here.

p.p.s. – It’s snowing!

Tonight I was supposed to drive to WestHillsSuburb to buy a guitar pedal that I found online. When the time came, however, my car balked.

It started, died after about three seconds, and then wouldn’t start up again.

I went back inside and looked in the repair manual, then went out and looked at the engine. Everything looked normal, but I didn’t hear the little humming noise that usually happens every time you turn the key. I kept trying to start the car, but it was all for naught.

Grrrr. I decided to let the engine sit for a while and see if maybe it was just flooded or something. I hung out and listened to the news and caught up on all the blogs that I haven’t had time to read lately. I also e-mailed the guy who was selling the pedal to tell him my car wasn’t starting, and that it looked like I was gonna be stuck at home for the night.

After about half an hour, in the interest of empirical research, I decided to try to start the car again. It started right up like the little champ that it is. I love it and simultaneously hate it when stuff like that happens.

Okay, okay. . .I get it; I’m not supposed to buy that guitar pedal.

J: Are you at a zoo, surrounded by chimpanzees?

me: No, I’m at Lloyd Center [mall in NE Portland], and there are a bunch of screaming kids everywhere. It’s pretty much the same thing.

J: (laughs) That’s hilarious. You should put it in your blog.

You have to love cell phones.

One time I was hiking in the Columbia river gorge, along a dirt road that was covered with leaves. I called my brother to say hello. A couple of minutes into the conversation, my brother asked me, “What are you doing? Are you crunching potato chips right into the phone?”

“No, why?”

“Because it sounds like you’re doing that.”

“No, I’m hiking. Those are leaves.”

“Oh man, that was so loud I couldn’t even hear what you were saying.”

The moral of the story is that I’m not going to buy another Motorola phone. Mine isn’t even a cheap one, but the sound quality is terrible. I don’t recommend them; in fact, I recommend against them. They also make this buzzing sound that never goes away. Almost every single conversation I have goes like this, at some point:

them: “Hey, do you hear that noise?”

me: “Yeah, it’s my phone.”

them: “It’s really annoying. And loud.”

me: “Yeah, I know; everybody tells me that. I hear it too.”

them: “It’s kind of a buzzing sound.”

me: “Yeah, I know. It’s my phone.”

them: “Man, that’s loud. You should go get a new one.”

me: “I know. This one sucks. It was expensive, but it still sucks.”

them: “Wow, that’s really lou–”

me: “Yeah, I know. Can we talk about something else now?”

“It’s not that you are foolish, it’s just that your comments may be perceived as criticism.”

Wow. Instead of “Libra,” it should be called “Todd’s Horoscope.”

Tonight two cool music-related things happened.

The first was that I went to the cast-and-crew screening of the independent film Blue Angel, which Crystin Byrd and I contributed a song to. Crystin and her husband Aram were there too, of course, and it was a great time.

Afterwards, C&A and I walked across the street to FamousIceCreamPlaceNamedAfterTwoGuys to have some ice cream and talk in a place where we could actually hear each other. (The party was in a loud basement bar, and we couldn’t hear a thing anyone said unless they were shouting directly at us.) So we’re sitting and talking, and all of a sudden I hear a familiar-sounding guitar part come over the speakers in the place. It’s my guitar part from “Lost In July” by the Young Immortals! I asked the girl who worked there–who, incidentally, looked like Natalie Portman–if the music was something they brought in. “No, it’s the radio,” she said. “KINK.”

It was an amazing surprise, and a great night for the ol’ musical self-esteem.