This morning's nightmares

No changes in drug consumption, mind you: just a wider spectrum of really bizarre ideas that obviously reside somewhere in the back of my head.

The roof is leaking in the converted Sherwin-Williams store (or whatever the heck it is) where I live, and nobody answers the phone, so I drive up 4th Avenue in search of assistance, only to be stopped by flood waters which aren't exactly raging but which aren't going to allow passage either. The ferryman says I'll have to leave my car behind, but he has a chair left, into which I scramble. It's more of a bar stool with a back, actually; nice cherrywood finish. Amazing how it holds up under these conditions.

After which I am unceremoniously dropped into some dismal landscape in which the name of Lileks is occasionally spoken, usually in hushed tones, maybe reverent, maybe fearful. I get it, I thought. This is one of his dreams. Let's hope not. I have to admire some of the construction work — a machine that can fabricate funnel cakes and nunchucks simultaneously deserves some sort of accolade — and I had to grin at the idea of Alice B. Toklas having a recipe for summer sausage, but this clearly wasn't the place for me. Lileks himself appeared briefly in a doorway, looking rather like Dave Barry, had Marcellus from Pulp Fiction gotten medieval on Dave Barry's ass.

Cut to the sneak preview of a new non-Star Wars film by George Lucas, and while I forget the title, I figured the best I could hope for was something other than Willow II. Maybe THX 2100. No such luck. It came off more or less like Henry V in Space, and the much-hyped "surprise plot twist" wouldn't have surprised anyone old enough to have gotten through potty training. The credits, though, were full of in-jokes, and cards in the seatback pockets obligingly detailed every last one of them. I stayed long enough for the lights to come back up, whereupon the theater operator cut to a local radio station doing a pitch for some car show, and as I left, I heard my brother doing a creditable Darryl Starbirdesque "BE THERE!"

Downstairs, I sought to get the bad taste of Lucas out of my mouth with an arcade game, and the only one open was a truly bizarre thing with an ersatz Dick Tracy theme. It was your basic shoot-'em-up, yes, but sometimes when you shot 'em, a voiceover popped in with a list of reasons why you shouldn't have. "Political correctness," I sighed, and the fellow next to me, who in fact had been doing those voiceovers, said, "Well, it's a living."

After that, waking up was actually an improvement.

Posted at 8:47 AM to General Disinterest