Some Things

Whew, I haven't found time to write in here forever. I think my readership has dropped off to zero (to match the readership of my other, more self-indulgent blog). Today I still can't be assed to make a proper blog entry, but here are some things:

• I watched Demitri Martin's Comedy Central special yesterday and laughed and laughed. Comedy Central is my de-facto channel to put on while I'm packing eBay packages because stand-up makes for good background. They've been advertising Martin's new show every five minutes until I got sick of his floppy-haired visage. I was a big fan of Demitri Martin when he was the youth correspondant on the Daily Show and I've always thought his whole schtick was just a little bit grating and I couldn't figure it out until someone told me they thought he was a smug little shit. He is kind of a smug little shit, isn't he? I don't think I could hang out with him, funny or not.
• I'm going down to Roseberg, the town of my birth tomorrow. It will be a great pilgrimage. I will take pictures of the depression floating by on the breeze.
• I'm in the process of packing my childhood bedroom into boxes. It's a very strange experience. It's given me the idea for a book, though. I've had the desire to write clawing at my brain for weeks now, but I haven't had a good subject (that's probably why I don't write in here anymore. Plus, like I said before, I have more of a life now that I'm back in the US). But I think I'm going to contrast some of the dumb shit I'm throwing out with some of the sweet shit I inherited from my dad (a machete, a skull, mysterious teeth...). It will give me something to do in Sue's class.
• Tonight I'm seeing Lykke Li. I was stoked until someone told me she was just ok in concert. Now I'm medium-stoked.
• The other night I dreamed about mice crawling all over a burlap dummy hanging from the ceiling of our garage. I tried to beat the dummy so the mice would fall out and I could catch them in a brown paper bag, but I was failing. My friend told me the mice represented petty fears and annoyances. I don't know.
• I just looked in a notebook I was keeping during travel from Belfast to home. In it I wrote a in/out list for 2009. The best one: Out - High School Musical. In - Reform School Musical.
• I started writing a couple of blog entries the other day, but I got tired of them and the fizzled out. One was about the batshit craziness of the comic strip, Safe Havens, and how I'm sad they've replaced it in the Oregonian with a terrible local strip. The local strip is called Adams' Apples and is about a teacher named Mr. Adams who teaches a class of wise-alec, adorable elementary school kids. I like to imagine it's about Sean's future. The strip looks like it was drawn in MS Paint and most of the jokes are like yesterdays: Person A: "I'm looking for those tablets that help you lose weight. What should I ask my pharmacist for?" Person B: "Girth-control pills!" That shit makes Garfield look like Proust.

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.

Dream Journal vol. 3

You know what's more boring than vacation photos? Someone telling you about their dreams. Luckily, my blog has both of these features. I figure it must be like a double-negative making a positive because my blog is the most interesting blog ever.
Nothing new from the past couple of days: I've just been hella-stressed trying to tie up all the loose ends before I leave in a couple of weeks and still enjoy myself. Did you know that I have to write 3 essays over Christmas break? Gag me. One of them is going to be about Great Expectations. I'm expecting it to be greatly boring.
I also have a test in Old English next Wednesday. I just finished cramming some of the grammar and I'm feeling a little bit more confident. I'm at least confident that I'm not a dumbass, because, in cramming I've realized that one of my main stumbling blocks was the sheer amount of grammatical cases we have to memorize. How am I supposed to remember the 16 different case-types the word "they" can take? It's ridiculous!
It's all studying from now on, though. I've just finished translating The Dream of the Rood, an Old English poem about a guy who dreams Jesus' cross comes flying into his room and talks to him. The cross tells him how horrible it was to be the cross that Christ was killed on and how sad it made him. At no point does the dreamer question the authenticity of the flying, talking, sentient, 1000-year-old cross. I guess if you're willing to accept such a thing's existence, it's not a stretch to believe what it has to tell you (especially if what it has to tell you is the same old boring crucifixion story: "They nailed Jesus to me and I was sad! Wah!" - you're a cross!)

My dreams over the last month haven't been about flying religious curios. Than what? Read on...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed I was traveling with the cast of Futurama in a black, death-metal mini-bus from Africa to a famine-ravaged Poland. We had been told to leave Africa, where the hyenas were plentiful - a common source of food - by a deceitful, giant snake. At least the leader of our crew somehow obtained one of the snake's serrated fangs. While I was showing it to the crew members at the back of the mini-bus I put it in my mouth and sucked on it, forgetting that it was venomous. Upon remembering this, I spit it onto the row of seats in front of me and determinedly fought off sleep and inevitable death.

The bus wound up at the entrance of my private high school, running over a sign advertising the Eminem concert set to take place that night. Because of this violation, Irish cops in yellow reflective jumpers stopped our bus and we couldn't go any further.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed I was a regular at a gambling parlor with Max Bussman. I didn't have the requisite entrance fee so Max spotted me enough pounds to get in, but I had to hold the pile of clothes he was carrying while he did so and I lost one of his socks.
I told him he could have one of mine once we made our way up to his bedroom and I'd scattered the pile of clothes on the floor. I convinced him my socks were clean, but it took some time.

Later, I was using the bathroom in his house when his mom came home to give a piano lesson. I held the curtain over the window that was unfortunately set at eye-level to those sitting on the toilet, giving a direct view out into the driveway. While I was attempting some modesty, his dad came through the hallway where the door was open and noticed his Buddy Holly Greatest Hits CD at my feet and he asked me if I owned it. I told him that no, I had a different greatest hits collection.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Last night in the Dublin hostel I dreamed that the hostel owners took our bags from our room while they were serving us breakfast and there was nothing we could do about it. I also dreamed that I, or a friend, had a flying machine that manuevered the swampy green fields right outside the hostel window.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed I woke up in a Washington, DC apartment I was temporarily staying in with Raphaela and a different friend while some sort of festival was in full swing. On adjacent buildings and all through the street people were committing all sorts of naked Mardi Gras-style debauchery. The apartment was even full of people no one knew, most of them drugged up on the floor or patiently sitting on the couch. None of them remembered how they got in.

My friend was gone and all that remained familiar was Raphaela's hungry pet ferret that I finally cornered in a room for it's own safety. I blocked the door with boxes so it couldn't get out. Ferrets can't climb.

I left the people in the apartment and walked down the street wearing a nice sport coat and hoping I'd run into Bill Clinton. After I struck a leisurely pose on a concrete city planter, Bill came by and welcomed me to join him and Hilary in the Capital building. We were on a first name basis.

They had me wait in a little kitchen filled with terrible, rowdy kids and an overwrought babysitter. I tried to give her advice - "Don't back down; stay consistent" - but it didn't help anything. The kids were so out of control I barely constrained myself from slapping on of them or boxing their ears, despite their age. Finally Hilary came to collect me and gave me a VIP All-Access badge to the Capital building: a white heart sticker with cherries inside of it. We then left together to have lunch in George Washington's old office, which had been kept just as he left it. Marveling at the room, Hilary and I ran our hands over all the first president's possessions, especially his lovely mahogany desk.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed my mom read my dad an article in the newspaper about Chinese overpopulation and expressed the view that this made her scared I would become the next Charles Manson. I told her that assumption offended me, but I couldn't make her understand why. I said, "As long as I grow up right, I'll be fine."
My dad's solution to growing up right: "Wheat. Oats. Cookies."

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Ok Junior Freuds out there: what does it all mean?

Dream Journal vol. 2

Last night I dreamed my mom called me vain and I wrote her a letter saying that she, the name-caller, was the one in need of reprimanding. I was really hurt.
I was staying in a wooden cabin with guys from my high school and I tried to explain to them that I'd enjoyed the camping trip we'd just been on more than any other. Kush was incredulous.

Though everyone else slept in one room, I slept in a single with a giant picture of Laurie Anderson or some frizzy-haired '80s pop chanteuse on the back wall. Looking through the door's peephole you could only see her eye. If it was light and filled with a silhouette of a sailing ship the room was unoccupied.

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I've been having a recurring dream of a Mike Patton album (sometimes with Mr. Bungle, sometimes with Fantomas) from 1999. It has a white cover with dark, inky arabesques from old marine biology textbooks. Inside there are pages of the CD booklet with flowery designs for each song followed by duplicate pages where the same designs are portrayed with Lite-Brite pegs. And the music is so fucking heavy and amazing! I want to listen to it right now!

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I had a dream in which I was the "Vanna White" on a game show in which a famous Cocker Spaniel in a transparent polygonal box circled a conveyor belt before I put him in an airport x-ray machine.

Later I was feeding a pet rat a candy called Fancy Chocolate Meiths in milk. When I tried feeding the candy to the rat without milk I was surprised by it's power as it jumped and tore the bag open, scattering Meiths everywhere. The Meiths on the carpet mingled with rat shit. I sat on the floor, shocked at the mess, feeling powerless.

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I dreamed I had to decorate the scaffold of an under-construction high rise building for a movie shoot starring stuffed-animal apes. I was given a bag of jump ropes to tie to the railings in order to make it look more "industrial." The jump ropes ended up supporting a large, haning object. I decided to tie the other end to a desk phone and snubbed the crew member who politely questioned my logic in doing this with a curt word and a quick retreat.

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Last night I dreamed a girl I dated years ago was a transvestite. I tried not to act surprised.