Smokeless Afternoon #1

I finally got some sleep.  My dreams were incredibly fuck-all real and I woke up after each one, pissed off that they didn’t really happen.  I remember them all in excruciating detail.

In one, I was trying to operate an crazy steam-punked DC Metro train that had to be continuously fed quarters and my friend Kyle Moir was there, kicking a vending machine.  Every time he kicked it, a different brand of Reese’s candy came out, but not the Reese’s FastBreak which is what he wanted.  Even in the world of dream steam punk, coin-operated machines never work how you want them to.  In the first car of the train an ensemble piece of pitchy, creepily enthusiatic, racially diverse vocalists performed a version of The Threepenny Opera accompanied by a small brass band with four trumpets, two trombones, a picolo trumpet and a tuba; an old family friend Becky Wallenborn with a full grand piano, a grand harpsichord and an old Hammond B-3 organ and Colin Meloy from the Decemberists with a whole slew of old antique string instruments including an old steel guitar, a banjo, a massive sitar whick he never played and a beat-up acoustic guitar signed by John Coltraine, who, as far as I and Colin knew, never actually played guitar.  There was a clarinet part, but it was played on the Hammond organ.  Both the car and my memory of the dream were uncomfortably cluttered with the musicians.  It didn’t seem unusual since we were on a steam punk Metro train.  At one point, I helped improve the Balladeer’s choreography on “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.”

In another, I was sitting in a garden, not unlike the garden where the newt-enthusiast Gussie Fink-Nottle proposed to Madeline Bassett in one of P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, with my friend Heather Creel, baring my soul and weeping.  She was wearing a top hat.  At the end of the dream, and completely out-of-character for Heather, she beats me about the head with a banjo taken from a polka musician who was serenading us with a small, lederhosened polka band near our bench in the garden.

The last one was so bizzare that I still feel like it should be Groundhog Day again.  My phone rang and I woke up, ignored the call, and saw it was 11:58 PM and that I had slept for the whole day.  I waited, and when the clock on my phone switched over, the date stayed the same.  So I went back to bed.  I actually woke up at 3:10 PM when my mom called me, ignored the call and lay in bed extremely confused that the sun was back up.

As an added bonus, the nicotine patch fell off while I was asleep.  I just applied a new one, but until this fucking thing kicks in, fuck you all.  I hope all of you are in a North Korean death camp being tortured with bamboo chutes up your urethras!

That’s about it.  I hope you’re enjoying my misery.