Or Whatever That Award Is Called These Days

First dream on the new bed. 

I’m with my dad in Penn Station in New York, and we see a knife fight at the bottom of the escalators. Two guys, circling each other like they’re in the video to “Beat It.” Dad perceptively points out that there’s something phony about it; it’s a distraction so the cops won’t be looking at – and here he looks around for a moment, then points – “this door,” he says. We see an unguarded wooden door nearby, but there’s also a man standing at a podium, looking at the door and sketching something. I tell him hi, and explain to my dad that these distraction fights are why the Village Voice always stations a cartoonist right by the door, so someone can be watching it at all times. (The Voice editorial staff and the NYPD working hand-in-hand is how you know it’s a dream. Also, the vigilance of cartoonists.) 

I leave Dad upstairs and go down to a train platform. I lie down on a bench, and a train rolls right over me (the bench is low enough that I’m unharmed). Tucked away in the undercarriage of the train is Kimmie Schmidt, who’s excited because she’s just been nominated for an Oscar for Best Mechanical Work on Trains, or whatever that award is called these days. As the train rolls over and past me, she gives me a quick kiss; I’m the first person she told!

Then Kimmie and I join our colleague (doing what? I don’t know) at our desks on the train platform, and someone (maybe Kimmie? Probably Kimmie) goes from desk to desk leaving trays of sandwiches made with organ meat – liver, kidney, I’m not sure; she wasn’t specific. I’m curious about the sandwiches, but also aware that it’s not actually my desk, I’m just filling in for someone. But then I realize that you can’t just leave organ meat sandwiches out without refrigeration, so I dig in. It turns out the first one I eat is more like grilled squid, and it’s delicious. 

I head to the station’s food court to look for cans of squid and organ meat so I can make these at home. And then I wake up…tentatively. I’m a little nervous about getting out of bed. It’s three or four inches higher than our old bed, and I want the floor to be where I expect it to be when I step down. I’m not at all confident the floor wants the same thing. 

But anyway: New bed, new dreams! 

Rob

Rififi Riff

So in my dream last night:
There was a trick, performed live on the Conan O'Brien show, where Penn & Teller for some reason had to change clothes in the back of a moving pickup truck, and when Teller took off his socks he wiggled his toes and said, "Sweet freedom!" on a live mic. Which was a big deal, because Teller doesn't talk onstage.
This was all part of an orchestrated uproar, for P&T and crew (of which I was a peripheral part) to steal $1.3 million from the Vatican. Which seems like money they don't really need, and is pretty much a rounding error for the Vatican, so I don't quite know what the point was.
Anyway, we were all celebrating at a casino afterward, and more and more people left, and suddenly more and more of the tab was being left to me. I'd told a couple people I'd pay for their drinks, but I started looking at what was left on the receipt, and their were lavish meals and acrobats and prostitutes to pay for. Which was not part of the bargain. (And not really part of my dream, aside from the accounting, either! Which is irritating.)
So as I'm starting to look around for someone else to pay this tab, since I'm not gonna get my expenses reimbursed by the company because I'm a freelancer, my phone rings, and it's my bank already calling me about suspect credit-card charges. (As it does about twice a year, but never *before* the fact!) And I realize...I don't have to deal with this. I'm dreaming, and this is paperwork. I have better things to dream about.
Never got back to the sex acrobats, though.
Rob

Another Creepy Dream

So, here’s a dream - or a series of dreams -- from the other night, when I still had a little cold medicine in my system. Took a DayQuil at 4 or 5, dropped off to sleep around 10, and...

Kathy and I were heading south, for a quick trip to see my family. We stopped the car somewhere on route 1, realizing we’d left our toothbrushes at home. I stopped to get gas, while Kathy took her bike from the rack and rode back to the house to get them. Meanwhile, while my car was gassing up, some people came out of the little building next to the pumps and offered me a chance to sit down and have some Turkey dinner. They were really nice, but obviously faking it. I knew they were sharks, con artists, all of them. One man asked me what kind of maps I had in the car. I told him we had a New Jersey map, and a national map. He said, “We’ll get you a new national map,” in a way that made me think he expected the borders to soon be redrawn, or that there have always been secret borders I wasn’t privy to.

I had a little turkey with them, being careful to pay only in cash for everything. Kathy returned, and we were about to leave, when one of the women of the group stopped me by the driver’s side door and started poking me with her forefinger in the shoulders, right under the shoulder blades. She looked like she was being playful about it, but I kept my hand on my wallet just the same. Didn’t trust them one bit. And as we looked more serious about moving on, I could see a large group of people in the distance, running toward us.

I woke up.

I looked at the clock, checked the alarm. Headed to the toilet and gave it a late-night watering. Then climbed back into bed, and drifted off to sleep.

Kathy and I were back on another road trip, but this time we didn’t get farther than Metuchen when we pulled over. Kathy lit out again (I guess; she wasn’t in the rest of the dream), but I waited for her in a house, talking and having a drink with David Sedaris. We were just casually chatting the the front room of these too-friendly strangers, when I passed him a note: “Do you trust these people?” He wrote back quickly, “Not even a little.”

We made noises that we had to leave, and our hosts, all smiles, implored us to stay for just a little while longer, relax, take a load off. Grinning, with calculating eyes. I took a look outside the house’s screen door, and there, at the intersection at the end of the block, was a crowd of people, slowly milling about, their eyes on the house. I said, “David, we’ve got to go,” and we left the house, our hosts protesting behind us.

As soon as we stepped of the porch, the crowd at the corner broke into a run. I was running for my car, swarmed by these people, their faces angry or in masks, some of them carrying clubs. I had the feeling of being overwhelmed, swept away by a tide of muscle and wood.

I woke again. It was maybe an hour later. I looked out my window, but there was no one in the street. I got up and walked down the hall, looked out that window, too. No one.

I refilled the water in the humidifier in my CPAP system in the dark, and climbed back into bed. As I was drifting off, I saw a tall figure in a witch’s mask emerge from the closet, and I startled awake again.

Nothing more happened that night.

Rob

Na Na Na Na

Dreamed I was Robin last night – the original, Dick Grayson. The short pants, everything. Batman—sort of a cross between the modern comics Batman and Adam West—and I were pretending to work with some warlord in order to get to the real threat—a crime kingpin? An arms dealer? I don’t know.

One night, as we were waiting, Batman mentioned David Zavimbe, who fought crime for a while as Batwing. He’d since retired, and they’d lost touch. I asked how he was doing. “Fine, I guess,” Batman said. “He’s a good man, but we’re not really friends.”

“You should call him,” I said. Batman agreed.

Later, we found one of the warlord’s shopping lists. It read “1 loaf bread, crackers, jar peanut butter.” I asked Batman if he thought the peanut butter was for himself or for his boa constrictor. Batman shrugged. “Either way, I’ve already stirred sleeping powder into it.”

The warlord saw us looking at the list. To cover up our intentions, I doodled some boobs on the page. Batman knew better, and before he handed it over, changed the boobs I drew into a map. “What’s this ridge?” he asked the warlord, pointing to a finely shaded underboob.

Later, we were making our way to a meeting, when a teenager drove up in his car. He told us the warlord told him to show us what all the buttons in the car did. He pressed one before we could stop him, and all the airbags deployed. We knew the next one would be a self-destruct button, so we told him to come out and walk with us. I asked his name, and he gave his gang nickname. Flippity something, I think it was. I can’t remember. But looking at him, with his button nose and wavy brown hair, I had a feeling his mom had named him Marvin.

Later on, we passed by a girl who was crying, sitting on some stairs. I tried to cheer her up. She was named Darla, like from the Our Gang movies, and the other kids were teasing her. Nancy and Sluggo were also there. I told them all they shouldn’t tease, and Darla dried her eyes, and was suddenly a little older, and it was right before her wedding. The other kids were older too, and all dressed up. I helped Darla to her feet and she moved on toward the ceremony. 

Batman cleared his throat. “Robin,” he said. “Her corsage is still on the stairs.” I grabbed it and got it to her before she reached the aisle.

Batman knows how to make a wedding perfect.

Rob

In which Rob's dreams reveal his deep distrust of the medical profession

I dreamed I was going to the doctor’s office to get laser eye surgery. It was a four-part process, at least, and this was my third session. As part of the procedure, after the actual laser eye surgery, I would have to chew a pill and then get shot in the head. They would hand me a pill, I would go into a little room, and someone I couldn’t see would shoot me in the head. I guess you could say this was a nightmare.

I’d been through this several times before. I always assumed the sniper was in the building across the street. Then I heard something shuffle above me. I looked up. In the ceiling tiles were hundreds of bullet holes, patched with dangling strips of bloody gauze. I started screaming. I couldn’t remember whether to eat the pill before or after I was shot, and I scrambled around the room, trying to find cover, a red laser dot following me from above.

Eventually I ate the pill and heard the shot.

Sometime later, maybe that afternoon, I’m recovered enough to leave. There’s a party for me outside, on the hospital lawn – a surprise picnic. My mom’s there, some others of my family, a bunch of my friends. It’s a big day. I only have to go through this one more time, if I’m lucky. I take off my glasses and look around. My vision’s no better than it was before.

Rob

(In no coincidence at all, I get my CPAP machine today. My worries apparently run deeper than I knew.)

Hot Tub Alarm Clock Machine

Last night I dreamed I had dinner with Mitt Romney.

It was private dinner, with Mitt and a bunch of my friends and me. It was mostly just genial chit-chat. And then someone made a joke about another friend, with connections to the media (and, in the dream, the Obamasphere), having attended a hot-tub party with Bill Clinton back in the 90s. And Mitt just laughed and we moved on, but then the person emphasized that they were just joking about the hot-tub party. And suddenly it seemed like we were covering it up. Like there was actually a Clinton Hot Tub Party, and my friend was there, and Boy Did He Have Stories. And for the rest of the night—even as Mitt was washing the dishes as we were leaving—we just continued to deny and deny this totally made-up hot-tub party. Which just made the made-up party sound truly scandalous. But Mitt just chuckled and scrubbed a pot, saying, “I know; relax; it’s no big deal.”

And I’d say, “No, really, we were joking.”

And he’d say he believed us, but we could see the gears spinning in his head, planning to use this fabricated hot-tub party as opposition research. (As if he were running against Clinton, but whatever.) But the more we denied it, the more credibility we gave the story. Hell, suddenly I wasn't sure if it had ever happened, either.

So when we got back to our hotel—where, coincidentally, a hot-tub party was going on, and my buddy was there. I told him, “Dude, I think you’re gonna be on the news.”

And then, after all the talk of hot-tub parties and Mitt Romney washing dishes in his sink, I woke up, realizing I had to pee.

Rob

P.S. Special Behind the Scenes Info! You'd think by Googling "Bill Clinton Hot Tub" I'd have plenty of (photoshopped) images to work with, but there was really just one, and it was awful. So use your imaginarium for this.

A Close Shave in Gotham City

Dreamed about Batman last night, so that’s a win.

Of course, the context of that dream was pretty unusual. It started out normal enough: a crime scene, and Batman was checking out the body of the murder victim. He’d been scalped, and part of his scalp was on the floor of the warehouse next to his body. Batman could tell—and therefore, as the audience, I could tell as well—that the murderer was no ordinary hair-thief, scalping innocent victims and wearing their hair on his head. Instead, from the position and condition of the leftover scalp piece, Batman knew that the murderer was using the dead man’s hair as pubic hair.

I recall thinking, “Of course, they can’t say that outright, because kids might read this. But it’s pretty clear to a grown-up.” Ah, the magic of sequential art.

Cut to the office storage closet that Batman operates out of. (Editor’s note: This story takes place in the days before the Batcave!) As he’s analyzing clues on the Bat-computer, he notices that there’s one less fine red felt-tip pen on the shelf than he expected... and there were red dotted lines at the edge of the incision point on the victim’s head! Which meant the killer was inside the office!

My alarm woke me up before Batman could do a company-wide pube inspection at Wayne Enterprises, so I’ll never know who the killer was. But giving it some thought this morning, I wondered what his (or her) supervillain name would be. And then it hit me: The Merkin Psycho.

The only problem is, which one will Christian Bale play in the movie?

Rob

I Write These Down So I Can Read Them Years Later and Blow My Mind

A brief description of a dream that I had the other night. I was down in Delaware, for a combination book fair and theater festival. Friends of mine from my college theater group were there -- Sharon, Bill, Karen, and Sharon's husband, Drew -- and we were all staying in various dorms. I was in a room with a cot squeezed between two twin beds, but I don't know who my roommates were.

Anyway, because this was Delaware, everyone spoke French. And I kept on having to go to the Delaware embassy to get my passport, because I had forgotten it, and just had an old, photocopied ID. I wouldn't be able to get back into New Jersey with that! So every day, I would float down to the embassy and ask if my passport had arrived.

That's right: because I didn't have my passport, I could fly. My understanding is, once I got my passport, I'd have to walk around like everyone else. But as it was, I was learning to fly, more of a floaty bobbing in air than anything directed, often overshooting the balcony I was trying to land on and setting down on the one above or below. And then having to use the stairs.

So I get back from my trip to the embassy, and float into my room, and everyone is there, having beers because it's 11am and I just missed the last performance of their play. So we had a little cast party in my borrowed dorm.

I don't have the slightest idea what any of this means, particularly since we were speaking French. When in Delaware, after all...

Rob
ETA: Photo copyright John Neel.

Water Weasel

This blog isn't going to turn into all ferrets, all the time, but I wanted to get this down. I had a dream about Gus last night. He was swimming, in a big pool where people were gathering to see some sort of music festival. I swam over to Kathy and asked where he was, and she pointed at a white streak under the water, some distance away. "There he is," she said. "He's fine."

I swam over, and he was playing under the water, doing flips and curling around like a miniature otter. He looked so much bigger under the water. And having the time of his life.

Rob

The Horse Horseman of the Asmackolypse

I dreamed I was arrested for selling heroin last night.

Now, I don’t sell heroin; I’ve never even seen it in person. And even in the dream I actually wasn’t selling H either. I was trying to, but never actually had a supplier. The whole dream was set up like the first fifteen minutes of a cop show, where they shake down a really stupid lowlife in order to get him to turn on someone higher up in the organization. Only: a) I hadn’t yet gotten into the organization yet, so I couldn’t tell them anything even if I wanted to, and b) I was extra, extra stupid.

I’m not sure how or where the dream started, since there were a variety of flashbacks, but let’s say it started outside of some fast food restaurant. There was a crowd outside, and I offered to buy a couple of likely customers a fish sandwich. (This was code for getting some heroin for them, dealt back by the service entrance, I assume.) They gave me 55 cents, but they were undercover cops. So they arrested me, cuffing me and putting me in the back of their patrol car. (Why UCs had a black-and-white, I dunno. It’s a dream.)

Apparently by my accepting the 55 cents, I had somehow agreed to sell them heroin, which is against the law. From the back of the patrol car, I explained that 55 cents wouldn’t buy them an actual fish sandwich, let alone smack, but they didn’t care. They wanted me to roll on my friends, and find out who my supplier was.

I told them I didn’t have a supplier -- they would have been my first customers, but 55 cents wouldn’t have bought them anything. Then they charged me with stealing their 55 cents, and that's when I knew they had me with their clever legal maneuvering.

So I gave them some of the details on how I intended to sell heroin (but actually never had!). These details – I don’t think you can call it anything other than a master plan – involved having painted/dyed the back end of a horse green (accomplished!), hot-gluing a diorama of some sort to the hood of a car (a work-in-progress), and contacting the city’s major supplier of heroin (wouldn’t know where to begin). I told them I would show them the horse, but I would not tell them who painted it. Or half-painted it, I guess. The horse was owned by the guy who plays Agent Burke on White Collar.

(I think the idea behind this would be to make someone think we had twice as many horses as we did. So someone would see the front end of the horse and think: “They’ve got a brown horse.” But then they’d see the back end and think, “Oh, they also have a green horse.” So: Advantage, ours! Hoodwink’d!)

We were walking down a forest trail, the two cops and I, as my dream ended. The last impression I have is that I was very nervous that we would get to the end of the trail and they would catch my accomplice touching up the paint job. I was seriously thinking about making a break for it.

So remember, kids: Crime doesn’t pay!*

Rob

*Unless you count the 55 cents.

Reading about Scientology Messed My Brain Up

Okay, so last night I dug deep into the Lawrence Wright's excellent article in the New Yorker about Paul Haggis and the Church of Scientology, and I got so wrapped up with the accusations of cults and brainwashing that by the time I got to bed, it mixed with my head cold and the premiere of The Chicago Code to mix into a dream where I had to escape from a cult led by Delroy Lindo.*

The thing I remember most about the dream was that Lindo had imposed some sort of fee for just walking around the compound, and the would go to our bamboo hits with two enforcers dressed up like Walk/Don'tWalk signs, and extort a dollar from us. I hid on my porch, but they saw me there and got my dollar. I knew it was going to keep happening, so I staged a breakout.

I don't remember the details of the breakout, but I do remember that part of it went wrong, and some of my friends and other innocent cult members were trapped in a fenced area, where someone was coming along with weed clippers to snip off their ring fingers or pinkies. It hadn't happened yet... but my fellow escapees and I somehow managed to find a helicopter and fly out of there. But as we lifted off, with armed guards chasing us, we were worried about those left behind.

I probably should have taken some knockout cold medicine before going to sleep.

Rob

*I don't know what Mr. Lindo's religious affiliation is, but I'm reasonably certain he is neither a cult leader nor a Scientologist. Though if Mr. Lindo wanted to start a cult, he's charismatic enough that you can bet we'd all know someone in it by now.

I Dreamed Last Night I Went Back In Time

Back to high school, on closing night of Brighton Beach Memoirs. I got there just as I was delivering Eugene's last monologue.

Then I hung out backstage for a while. No one was really asking who I was, but evenutally I trew all the rules of time travel out the window, and just told people: I'm a time traveler. I'm Rob, grown up.

None of the kids backstage believed me. It was only the crew back there -- I think the actors (including myself) were taking their curtain call. And I never did get to have a conversation with myself before I was called back to the future.

Time travelers, be good to your younger selves. Don't interfere.

Rob

In Dreams I Walk (and Fly and Sail and Ride) With You

Crazy, crazy dreams last night. Probably (no, definitely) had too many cinnamon crack balls before bed.

First up, I’m in a plane with pals Andy & Jeff. We’re the only passengers on the small airplane, and for some reason we learn that the pilot’s evil. (I don’t think he’s a terrorist in the sense we have in this century; he’s more like a Bond villain henchman.) So, we make our way to the front of the plane (it’s not a commercial flight, there’s no door between the cabin and the cockpit) and we fight the guy, throwing him out of the plane and into the ocean. Not that we know how to fly it. And not that there will soon be much of a plane to fly, given that our scuffle (with guns and knives and a decisive thunk with a fire extinguisher) has somehow damaged the structural integrity of the plane, and the cabin and wings are peeling apart as it drops out of the sky.

We land in the water, and somehow we’re able to keep the plane afloat and moving, even as the water continues to damage what is now the boat. And then we take the boat into New York Harbor, and up into the streets of the city, as we’re somehow able to balance the thing on its two landing wheels. We drive through the city, and photographers are taking all sorts of pictures of us, because of our amazing emergency landing/sea voyage/driving a boatplane, but also because I have lost my pants.

Yep, it’s a dream, all right.

Then another dream. I’m looking for Jeff, planning to have dinner with him. (I am again in pants, by the way.) Then, just as I see him in some distant food court, he calls me on my cell phone and tells me my cover has been compromised. So I go wandering through a deserted college campus with a box of lo mein. The only other person I could see was a security guard walking her rounds.

And then I meet an old friend—actually a giant of a guy I just met in the last six months or so, but here he is an old, old friend—and we continue walking down the melancholy streets. Then, a sweet girl I knew back in college joins us. And the three of us start talking a little about the times we had together, all of us a little sadly. And then the fourth member of our quartet shows up, a girl I went on a date with some thirteen years ago, but here she is another old friend. And I know that she is dead, and has been dead for a long time. And that is why we four friends no longer hang out together.

But we have that night, walking through empty streets and parking lots. One of us, the giant, spots a cardboard box full of clothes outside of a boutique, and pulls out a tattered sweater so big that all four of us could fit into it at once. This is our next Halloween costume, he says—a four-headed axe murderer. And we talk about it and negotiate who gets to put their arms through the arm-holes, and how we’ll all be able to drink what we want at the party, with only two arms for four heads. We resolve to practice.

And then, on a little hill between parking lots, the dead girl, Lora, sings a song. I can’t do justice to it here. It’s a light, flighty song about the insistence of existence.

It begins “Shining like an arrow in your bow,” and ends “You might think I wasn’t, but I was.” And when her song ends, it becomes clear that the four of us never hung out together, were never a group of friends. Our memories are constructed. All of it is false, from top to bottom. Even Lora is alive somewhere, and not dead and returned for this night.

Except her song is true: We might think she wasn’t, but she was. Somewhere, these four people, who do not know each other here, were connected. But even in that place, they could not hold together any longer.

This wasn’t the sort of dream I usually have, where I wake up, laugh it off, and move on with my day. I woke thinking that history was fluid, and that I could be in many places at once: Here in the life I know, and another place, and others beyond that. I felt like universes had revealed themselves to me in a dead girl’s song.

Rob

Another Tiny Dream

I just dreamed that Kathy had booked a Lewis Black concert for our driveway, and had never told me. So while she was going off to work, I had to shovel and put out some folding chairs. And keep stray audience from wandering into the house.

How much should I sell hot chocolate for?

Rob

Dreamin' My Life Away

So I dreamed that my friends from the ol’ gun mag and I were trying to kill each other. Specifically, Jim the Bastard and I were engaged in some sort of road-rally deathmatch down I-95. And somewhere in Maryland, I had to pull over to get more gas, and I made the mistake of sitting down where I thought I was safe.

Now, the Bastard and I were both wounded… it had been a hell of a fight up to that point. And at the time I thought I was safe, I knew Jim was a few miles behind me. So I sat down in the rest stop, and out of nowhere, Chicago Jerkface (another mag friend) sits down right behind me and bap. bap. bap. Shoots me in the back of the head, three times with a .22.

Which, under normal circumstances, would kill me. But it being a dream, all I could feel were these three bb-like bullets in the back of my head, right around where my skull meets my spine. I knew I didn’t have long... and I knew I couldn’t trust myself to drive, because I could black out and endanger people. (Yes… I didn’t want to hurt anyone during my Interstate Murder Race.)

I spotted a cab, and asked him where the nearest hospital was. He said “3.2 miles,” and I said, “Good, because I’ve been shot in the back of the head.”

So I got in the cab, and we got back onto I-95. And there were horrific, horrific accidents wherever I looked. And yet my cabbie was able to skirt them or run over them, and at one point actually plowed through the flaming wreckage of a school bus. At some point, the cab changed from a normal taxi to a three-wheeled ATV towing a yellow motorcycle-like thing with wings, which I rode. The ATV couldn’t fly, but the passenger area could get a few feet in the air to hop over bodies and such.

At this point, the cabbie says, “Where to?” and I say, “The hospital in 3.2 miles, remember? I’ve been shot in the head?”

Turns out we’ve been going the wrong direction. But he knows another hospital nearby. We take some back roads to get there, and I start to think going to this other hospital is probably a good idea, because the Bastard and Jerkface won’t look for me there – they’ll be going to the closer hospital to finish me off. By the time the cabbie pulls up to this new hospital, however, I notice my family and some of my friends clustered outside the emergency room. I stumble off the back of the cab and onto a gurney. My old buddy Jeff opens his wallet and pulls out enough money to pay the cabbie… at least a fifty, and some other bills. I look up at him as I’m being wheeled into the ER and say, “Thanks, man. I had no idea how I was gonna pay him. You saved my life.”

And then I woke up for a couple minutes, and then I went back to sleep and dreamed that my grandfather was finally being released from prison. So a big night for dreaming, all around.

Rob

Internet Update

Google Images isn't the only game in town. Undaunted by my earlier failure to track these two guys down, I tried Bing, and I came up with these two images of Jingle and Jangle on the first page of results.


And having settled that matter in my mind, I hope to forget about Christmas for another 50 days or so.

Rob

So I guess this is a recurring dream. How 'bout that.

My impression is that recurring dreams are ways the subconscious addresses issues that the conscious mind is unable to face. But, having had this dream twice now, I have to say I'm at a loss for the deeper meaning.

A colorful, do-gooder style ocean vessel (like a Greenpeace ship) pulls up next to a U.S. battleship. Two young men--a gangly blond man and his stocky, curly-headed friend, are escorted from the hippie ship onto the military vessel. They're led far into the depths of the battleship, where there is a room with sound baffles on the walls, and all the equipment of a mobile recording studio. And there, under executive order of the President, they will record the vocal tracks for a recently uncovered "lost" scene from The Year Without a Santa Claus. These two guys were the closest to the hapless elves, Jingle and Jangle, both physically and vocally, and the project could not be delayed.

I have had this dream twice, under two different Presidents. Both want more Year Without a Santa Claus.

Rob
(And as an aside, a Google search turned up only one, thumbnail-size, photo of Jingle and Jangle. The Internet has failed us on this most basic of things.)

My Cell Phone's Alarm Scares the Hell Out of Me

Especially since I was dreaming I was a member of the Avengers, and we were all hooked up to some sort of weird brain-scan-transfer machine, and suddenly WHOOOOOONKONKONK! Something was going horribly wrong...

Rob

Rob Dreams: New Orleans Zombie Outbreak

So Saturday night I was in New Orleans with my lovely wife and a bunch of friends. And there was a big zombie outbreak. ("Slow zombies or fast zombies?" my lovely wife asks. Fast zombies, baby. Really fast zombies.)

Now, Kathy and I, for reasons of our own that escape me now, had booked two hotel rooms for that night. The one at the hotel we were at (which was positively crawling with the undead), and another hotel across town (status: unknown). None of our friends had had the foresight to book two hotel rooms for the night, but somehow we were prepared for at least one of the hotels to fill up with brain-eating freaks, and were ready to pack up and move to the other hotel.

Not that it would be easy. There were a lot of casinos between the two hotels, and I really would have liked to stop at all of them and play a little poker and maybe roll some craps. And zombies looooove casinos. So there would be difficulty there, in fighting off the undead and trying to win a little money.

Our friends were coming with us, of course. We couldn't leave them behind, even if it meant eight of us cramming into one hotel room. I assured Kathy it wouldn't come to that, though. "By the time we get there, there'll be only five or six of us, tops."

That's not to say that any of you are expendable, dear friends. But there's only so much floorspace during the zombie holocaust, and it's best to always look for the silver lining.

Rob

So It Turns Out I Don’t Live Down the Street From Popeye, After All

I was changing the oil in my car the other day. I needed a place to put the old oil, so I was going to drain it into my coffee pot. Problem was, the coffee pot was full of fresh spinach for some reason. Ah, well, I thought, the oil will just fill in around it. There’s room enough for both.

That’s when Popeye was walking by, and noticed what I was doing. Not Popeye the cartoon character or comic strip character, but the real Popeye, the guy who played Popeye in the black and white live-action serials of the 40s and 50s, the way Clayton Moore played the Lone Ranger. He lives around the block from me and runs a small grocery now. He saw what I was about to do and said, “Son, don’t you know anything about cars?” (I don’t.) And he showed me a better way to do an oil change. But the first thing he did—the very first thing—was to find a bowl to put the fresh spinach in, so I could drain the oil into the coffee pot more easily.

Later on, I’m looking back on my day, and I realize: Not only did I meet Popeye, but I met him in a spinach-related incident! What are the odds? I have got to blog about this, I thought.

It takes me ten minutes after I wake up to realize that a) to the best of my knowledge, no one played Popeye in live-action movies before Robin Williams in Robert Altman’s film version; b) Popeye doesn’t live down the street from me, and c) Me, changing the oil in my car? Come on, now.

Rob