Steve Martin and the Bloody Nose

"Waved to Sal, he's Filipino!"

Amelie Gilette at the Onion AV Club wrote about Saturday's SNL with this really cringe-worthy banjo performance by Steve Martin. I was aware that SNL had stopped being funny, but I hadn't thought about Steve Martin. I know he's a comedy legend, but all I can think about are Pink Panther parts 1 and 2, Cheaper By the Dozen parts 1 and 2 and this. IMDb is telling me he was in The Man With Two Brains, but I don't think I believe them. Was Steve Martin ever funny?

Regardless of history, this performance is not for comedy's sake nor is it for an upcopming children's album. It is an honest-to-God, sincere song for adults. Shocking.

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I don't normally write about truly personal things here. It feels exhibitionistic and cheap to me. But I felt like sharing today.
Last night I think I had my first dream truly dealing with my dad's death. I had a dream a couple of weeks ago where he was around and I had to wake up to remember he was dead, which was strange, but this was different. In my dream I was reading out of an imagined childhood book I owned, personalized with a main character named David Bow. In the book David finds a briefcase containing paternal signifiers like a trenchcoat, fedora and pipe. When he opens it his father magically comes back. I was reading from the book to friends, but when I got to the part about opening the briefcase I just started crying so hard I couldn't read. All my friends understood.

Earlier in the dream I was at a party with some people. The party was like a child's themed birthday, with giant inflatable barnyard buildings we were informed were empty. I thought that meant there would be no animals, but I found a pen with some coyotes inside. The pen-keeper told me and my friend that they called them "big porcupines," which made sense to us when he grabbed one by the scruff of its neck and lifted it, yelping, outside the cyclone fencing. He then proceeded to lay it on the ground, where it exposed a big, jagged mouthful of teeth.

I couldn't tell what he was doing to it, subduing it or killing it, but he had a knife out and was moving around its body. Blood started to come out of its nostrils and, it seemed, elsewhere, forming a big river of blood in the mud at our feet. I was startled and my own nose started to bleed. I wiped it with my hand and ran to the bathroom across the dirt road to wash up to save me the embarrassment of having the man notice I was bleeding as well. This is the third night in a row where I've dreamed of my nose bleeding in response to being startled by things (last night it was a horse rearing at me). This is weird in a lot of ways, one of them being that my nose doesn't bleed when I'm startled (though once it bled in 6th grade Humanities class when the teacher said "Regina, Canada" and I contained my laughter so much I think it created some kind of pressure).

I have a book from 1938 about dream interpretation that I consulted when I woke up this afternoon. It says that a nosebleed is a good luck sign and "augers health and relief from anxiety." Or at least it did in the '30s. Online dream journals all say different things.

Anyways, I dreamed for so long that I woke up very late and now I'll be awake again all night.