Good News/Bad News

So the other evening I was bored at home and decided that I should go...somewhere and do...something.
Which is what I did, ultimately finding myself in an unfamiliar area and pulling into the parking garage of the local town center.
I wandered around for a while, finding that despite the unfamiliar surroundings it was just the same as any other place, with all of the same stores and restaurants, and so I decided the whole endeavor had been rather pointless and that I should just go home.
On the way back to my car I stopped at a Taco Bell to grab something to eat for when I got home.  I was subjected to terrible service, but eventually got my order and headed back to my car.
Except that, apparently, I had gotten kind of turned around and had gone in the opposite direction of where I'd left my car.  I wandered around for a while, getting more and more lost, and finding that my phone's battery was dying, so the GPS wasn't offering me much assistance in finding my way back.
It was getting dark, I was in what appeared to be a bad neighborhood, and my food was, by this time, ice cold.
At some point I realized that nothing that had happened made any sense, and I really didn't remember how I'd gotten to wherever it was that I had traveled to - and indeed, I had no idea where this "unfamiliar place" actually was - and that the last thing I remembered was climbing into bed on a Saturday afternoon to take a nap.
As I began to make my way back to consciousness, I felt the anxiety that had been building throughout my ever-worsening circumstances begin to lift.  Just a dream.
So the good news was that I was only dreaming and I was not lost in some unfamiliar and potentially dangerous place, but, as I fully regained consciousness, I realized that the bad news was that I didn't actually have any Taco Bell waiting for me once I awoke.

A Retro Pastiche That’s Never Going To Be A Breakaway Pop Hit

While in the waking world I’ve only ever written two songs (Note:  They were bad, and they made me feel bad), I’ve written many, many more songs in my dreams.
Kind of, I guess.
That is to say I’ve had a lot of dreams in which a songs were present, and, so far as I know, they weren’t existing songs that I’ve ever heard before.
Most of the time I don’t really remember anything about them upon waking, other than some vague recollection of the melody or something.
Sometimes, as was the case years ago when I had a dream that there was a movie based on my character Fontaine which featured a song by Queensrÿche on the soundtrack, all I remember is the title (“Cold and Deadly,” in that case).
I often suspect that they aren’t wholly original creations – and even if they were, given the nature of dreams, I doubt that, lyrically, they’d be anything other than a random word salad to conscious ears – but rather a combination of elements of different songs I’ve heard in my life.
After all, as is evidenced by the two songs I’ve written – or would be, if I still had them anywhere and were willing to share them for the world to laugh at if I did – I don’t really have any talent in that area, so I don’t suppose that my unconscious mind is capable of much more than mashing up existing songs.
In any case, the reason I mention all this is that while taking a nap yesterday I had a dream in which there was a song playing on the radio or something, and while I don’t remember any of the details of the dream itself, much of the song actually managed to stick in my head after I woke up, including some random backstory details about the song.
The song I heard in my dream was a cover of a very old song – one that could be considered something of a “standard” – and while I don’t recall who the singer was, it was some semi-contemporary singer or other.  Someone who had once been a musical superstar, but who has since been relegated to having the occasional moderate success.
Further, the song was a considerable departure from his usual style.
Given the odd specificity of those poorly-remembered details, and how much of the song actually stuck in my head, I suspected that rather than being either an original creation of my mind, or even a pieced together mishmash of songs, it was an actual song.
A search of the Internet revealed – as I suspected – that there are several songs that share the title (which is part of the chorus of the song), but I haven't found an exact match in terms of the other lyrics, or even the specific style of the song.
Anyway, here’s what I remember of the song:

And from my point of view
I’m going to keep on
Loving you only
So I’m begging you,
Whatever you do,
Baby, please
Don’t let me be lonely

In terms of the style of the song, I’m not sure what you would call it. 
The line breaks in the way it’s written out above kind of indicate the cadence, though I’m not sure how to call out where specific notes are held (like with the “my” in the first line).
I’m reminded of “Please Come Home for Christmas,” which probably serves as a big part of the basis for the song and its backstory, given that Jon Bon Jovi did a cover of it…
So I don’t know…did I make it up?  Is there some other song that I could be thinking of?  Several songs my brain remixed?

Even In My Dreams

I took a nap earlier today and ended up engaging in a certain level of lucid dreaming.
I've managed it a few times in the past, though the degree of control I've been able to exhibit - as was the case today - has always been spotty at best.
The thing I've always seen about lucid dreaming is that the key is planting some sort of idea in your subconscious that will, when it appears in your dream, clue you in to the fact that you're dreaming.
(Because apparently the fact that things are constantly shifting and don't really make any sense isn't enough for our brains to figure it out.)
At that point, having recognized the fact that you're dreaming, you can begin trying to assert control over the world inside your own mind.
Most of the suggestions I've seen for such dream signals are things like specific colors or items.
For my part, what I've found to be the surest indicator that I'm dreaming is that somehow everything is even more of a pain in the ass than it is in the waking world.
For example, I might find myself in a dream trying to put on my shoes and discovering that it's taking me hours just to tie the laces.
That's usually the best indicator - in the dream I'm already late for something, and my attempts to try to make up for lost time are stymied at every turn, in ways that are just too outlandishly over-the-top even for me.
I can't help but wonder what it says about me that my dreams are where I find myself getting even more frustratraed and having even more things go wrong than in my conscious life.

Maybe It's Just Me

I don't know about you, but when an attractive actress appears in your dreams and complains that you aren't drawing enough pictures of her, it seems to me that you ought to do something about that.
So, Kahterine Heigl, here's hoping that if you ever show up in my dreams again this will put you in a slightly better mood.

To Dream The Possible Dream

Last night I tossed and turned for a couple of hours before I finally got to sleep, then I was treated to an incredibly vivid dream in which I had a heart attack.
So that was fun.
On the other hand, at least I’m not wasting my sleeping hours dreaming about airy impossibilities and things that will never happen…
In any case, it all made for a very tired Jon this morning, which made the day seem interminable, even with the summer hours that allow me to leave an hour early.
Still, by the time 3:00 finally rolled around I was out the door, and was home by about 3:30.
By 4:00 I was taking a nap.
Never let it be said that I don’t know how to make the most of my weekends.
In the time between arriving at home and climbing into bed, I thought about mowing the lawn, but then I thought about not mowing it, and that seemed easier.
Of course, while I was napping I had a dream about mowing the lawn. I also had a dream that involved an evil talking dog that was trying to bite my hand off. I asked the dog what it wanted, and, as its eyes glowed red, it responded, with a gravelly, dog-like voice, “We want you to burn, baby!”
Again, at least I’m not wasting my sleeping hours dreaming about airy impossibilities and things that will never happen…
After getting back up I ventured out into the world to get something to eat, then came home and watched a movie (Semi-Pro. Meh. Will Ferrell really needs to let go of the 1970s.).
And now, like a true party animal, I’m writing a blog entry. The weekend! Yeah! Whoo!

The Go-Cart Signifies Awesomeness

A while back I wrote about a dream in which my hand and part of my forearm were cut off and my hand was reattached to my arm minus the missing section of wrist and forearm.
When I mentioned this to Kathleen, she asked if I’d looked it up to find an interpretation. I hadn’t, but when I did later, I wasn’t able to find anything, really. Just a few instances of people recounting dreams in which they did things like cut their own fingers off with scissors, which was interpreted as having to do with paring away unnecessary items in their lives or something.
What I’m really curious about, though, is the dream I had this morning shortly before my alarm went off in which I found myself playing hooky from grade school so that I could spend my time tooling around in this kick-ass futuristic go-cart that I’d built using old snowmobile parts.
Interpret that, Freud.
Other than dreaming about kick-ass go-carts, not much of interest has been going on. Today was really long and really boring.
I did see that cute girl from the elevator that I mentioned seeing shortly after I started at the new job, and who I saw again a while back and then discovered afterwards that my fly was open.
In any case, I saw her today, appropriately enough, on the elevator, and I think she was wearing the same outfit that she’d been wearing the first time I saw her.
As we were riding up and she stood over on the other side of the elevator in a much less friendly and more defensive posture than the one she had taken back in my first encounter with her, I found myself wondering why, given that there was just the two of us, three buttons were lit up.
When we stopped at the third floor, she looked over at me and reluctantly admitted, “I pushed the wrong button.”
I laughed and said it was okay, then she got off, rather quickly, when we stopped on the fourth floor, and then I continued on my way up to the sixth.
And that’s seriously as exciting as it got today.
No go-carts at all, not even of the non-kick-ass and futuristic variety.
I’m sure tomorrow, being as it is my last day before taking a week off, will be even longer, more boring, and just as go-cart free.

Crack 'Em Up

Having the day off and lacking anything better to do, I decided to take in a matinee of Shoot ‘Em Up, a movie that I knew I’d pretty much have to see by myself if I wanted to see it, as the R rating excludes Scott, and it just didn’t strike me as something Brian would want to see.
So how was it? Let me start off by checking off a list of action movie clichés:

Anti-hero protagonist who is a dark loner with a tragic past and nebulous “special ops training” who follows his own personal code of honor, has several eccentric quirks, a penchant for one-liners, and is unwillingly dragged into a situation that will make him rise to the heroic occasion and will wear down his hard exterior, revealing the sensitive soul that lurks within? Check.
Twisted, evil, yet oddly charming villain with his own share of eccentric quirks played by a respected serious actor who has taken the part not just for the paycheck but for the opportunity to flex his campy muscles and leave bite marks all over the scenery with his over-the-top performance? Check.
Hooker with a heart of gold who is at least 300 times more attractive and 300 times less crack-addled than any hooker in the real world? Check.
Rocking soundtrack? Check.
Everyday objects used as lethal weapons? Check.
Acts of acrobatics and marksmanship that couldn’t possibly be performed by anyone in real life, the sort of things that even attempting to do have led Jackie Chan to break his back multiple times? Check.
Thin, yet convoluted plot – with a twist – that exists only to serve as an attempt to string together various kick-ass action sequences and to allow the audience to catch its breath during the exposition? Check.
Jon buying a hot dog and consequently getting ketchup and relish all over the front of his shirt? Check.

Seasoned with Shoot ‘Em Up’s cast, its particularly snappy patter, and the skillfully choreographed action sequences, if you threw all of these elements into a blender, the resulting puree would be a somewhat above average generic action movie.
However, if you put all of these elements in the blender, cranked it all the way up, and never turned said blender off, the result would be something much like Shoot ‘Em Up, which was not so much an action movie as it was a black comedy masquerading as – and poking loving, though not-so gentle fun at – every action movie ever made.
The over-the-top nature is so far over that you can’t even see the top. Even the standard movie connection between sex and violence is taken to an entirely new level in one particularly memorable scene.
It wouldn’t be fair to characterize Shoot ‘Em Up as a parody, simply because it was so much better than most parodies, but rather as the ultimate action movie, a pure action movie, one in which the people behind it said, “This would never work if we tried to take it seriously, so let’s just make it beyond ridiculous.”
Clearly they drew more inspiration from the work of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck than from Stallone and Van Damme.
If you don’t have the kind of sense of humor that this movie is designed for, you will absolutely fucking hate it. The whole thing is ridiculous nonsense and you’ll want your money back and will question the intelligence of anyone who found it to have any redeeming value whatsoever and you would leave angry comments on their blogs calling them names and just generally being inappropriately angry and, oddly enough, racist, even though in this case racism would be even less called for than it is in any other situation.
If you’re a serious fan of action movies, you might pick up on the fact that the movie, while being off the genre is also making fun of the genre, and that might confuse you and make you angry (call it the Last Action Hero Effect).
As for me, I liked it. A lot.
It’s totally unrealistic action that makes Transporter 2 seem like a documentary, but it’s unrealistic action that serves a comedic purpose and which is delivered with a knowing wink.
And besides that? Motörhead! (Ace of Spades played during one of the big gunfights.)
For comic book fans, I think it could best be described as the 90’s comic Nomad if it had been written by Garth Ennis.
‘nuff said.
I ended up catching the matinee at the fancy new theater in Brambleton, simply because it was starting a little later than at Regal in Sterling, which gave me a little more time to sit on my ass before getting ready and venturing out.
Of course, I’d been considering going to Regal because I also wanted to check out the selection of desks at the nearby Office Depot in Sterling (which is larger then the Office Depot in Leesburg).
Not particularly wanting to go home after the movie I ended up driving out to Sterling anyway, though I ultimately decided that if there is a desk that I’m going to buy from Office Depot (which I’m not sure I’m going to do), it would be a desk that they actually have available in their Leesburg location. D’oh!
Given that all I’d had to eat for the day was a hot dog and a box of Junior Mints, I decided to stop somewhere to get something to eat.
I went with Uno’s.
The waitress there was a pleasant woman roughly my age or a little older, who might have been really cute at one point in her life, and was still reasonably attractive, who wrote her name and drew a smiley face on a napkin while taking my drink order:



Apparently, though I don’t really see how, it’s pronounced “Shauna.”
Owing to the combination of her being kind of cute, the little napkin thing that I found rather endearing, and the simple fact that she was actually a she instead of the he I usually get when I eat somewhere (especially Uno’s), I gave her a big tip (roughly 50%).
Oh, and for the record, I did the ring check, and yes, she was married (or was simply wearing a ring in an effort to keep guys like me from hitting on her).
Speaking of which, this morning I awoke from an odd dream in which I was taking some sort of class in which I’d met an attractive woman with whom I’d hit it off. We’d hit it off so well, in fact, that it seemed obvious even to me that I should ask her out, which I did, with complete and utter confidence, with nary a stammer and without the oppressive sound of my pulse pounding in my ears.
I was poised. I was focused. I was supremely confident.
So naturally, without even pausing to think about it, she said no and then walked away.
Not even so much as a “I’m flattered, but…” Just no.
Then, just to make things baffling, right before I left she came over and, without saying a word, through her arms around me and hugged me very tightly before walking away again in silence.
I think the obvious inspiration for the dream was the episode of The Office that I watched on TBS the other night in which Dwight was similarly shot down summarily.
The confusing hug, I think, was just my subconscious representation of my inability to understand women in any meaningful way or to recognize and decode any signals they might (or might not) be sending me (a la the Asian girl at the bookstore the other day).
In any case, waking up from a dream of failure and rejection doesn’t really set a great tone for the day, though, thanks to the matinee, things did start to look up eventually.
And that’s pretty much been my day. There’s a bunch of phone calls and that sort of thing that I could have (and probably should have) made today, like to the power company, to Verizon, to moving companies, etc., but they’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.

The League of Extra-Hairy Gentlemen

Last night for the second time in as many weeks I had a dream in which Alan Moore (this time with special guest Neil Gaiman) made an appearance. I don't recall much about it, other than that Alan was extremely clever and I was jealous of his friendship with Neil. However, Alan did give me an extra-special copy of Watchmen that was in some indescribable way infinitely more fabulous than my mere Absolute Edition.
In the earlier dream, Alan appeared as someone providing me with guidance through a difficult and dangerous situation, and he had the ability to manipulate reality as easily as he constructs a story.
Sometime after that dream I had one in which a bearded hermit, looking rather like Will Ferrell as The Unabomber, played a central role.
Given that Alan himself looks rather a lot like someone who should live in a secluded shack and spend his time writing manifestos (which is, perhaps, not so different from how he does live), I have to wonder about the preponderance of hirsute men in my dreams of late.
In any case, on his blog, Neil linked to this scan of a two-page comic he and Mark Buckingham did in honor of Alan's 50th birthday.
(Readers of Fables will note the uncanny resemblance of the boy asking his fortune to Buckingham's version of Pinocchio)

Perchance To Dream

This past weekend was an especially irritating one at work.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are different stations on our desk that we take turns working . Thanks to the way things had rotated, Thursday was my day to work the busiest and most frustrating station.
Luckily it turned out to be a relatively easy day, though still more irritating than the other stations usually are.
Still, as Scott pointed out, I at least got it over with right away and didn’t have to have the thought of working that station hanging over me for the rest of the weekend.
Of course, that was before Scott was out sick on Saturday, the day he was supposed to work that station, and I had to fill in for him.
Saturday is usually the easiest day to work that station, though, as most of the issues that we deal with on that station are Monday through Friday sort of problems.
Not so this Saturday, which apparently felt it had to go out of its way to make up for my relatively easy Thursday.
Throughout it all I kept semi-jokingly repeating Dante’s whiny line from the movie Clerks: I’m not even supposed to be here today!
Oh well. At least it’s over now.
Until the next weekend.
But for the record, that’s how I spent my St. Patrick’s Day, though given that I’m not Irish and am no longer a practicing drunk it’s not as though I would have been out celebrating anyway.
Still, the stress of work and the fact that I hadn’t slept too well on Thursday and Friday night left me pretty tired when I got home, so I went to bed relatively early last night.
This, of course, only meant that I woke up incredibly early, so I didn’t actually get any more sleep than I would have if I’d gone to bed at the normal time.
Even though it was still dark out when I woke up I couldn’t manage to get back to sleep, so I got up and sat around doing pretty much nothing for about an hour before finally taking another crack at sleep.
When I did, I had semi-lucid dreams about having semi-lucid dreams.
It was very strange, and I have to wonder if dreaming about dreaming won’t tear a hole in the fabric of spacetime or something.
(I’m reminded of that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is at work daydreaming, and we see that he’s daydreaming about napping, and that in his daydream about napping he’s dreaming about eating.)
In any case, I was dreaming that in my dreams I couldn’t quite control the action, but I could at least direct it to some extent, all of which led me to a room full of hot chicks who were very…friendly, which ultimately led to disappointment in the form of me waking up, both in the dream and in reality.
Or did I just wake up into another dream?
It’s hard to say; most of my dreams, like reality, tend to suck, so anything’s possible, I guess.
Once I did get up I eventually whiled away the hours by doing some more search engine submission. Talk about a dream come true!
At one of the submission sites I encountered this error:

Error
The url submitted belongs to the directory or is in process of acceptation

Yeah, it’s just like they tell you in rehab: acceptation is the answer to all of life’s problems.
Wait, I just realized that Word isn’t flagging that as an error. Acceptation is an actual word? WTF?
This isn’t a dream: it’s a nightmare!

Waiting For The Bad News

This morning I awoke, relatively late, from a dream in which I was watching an epic battle (a la Lord of the Rings) playing out, and in which, as an observer, and as a writer, I was trying to suss out just what was going on and who the major players were.
It seemed to involve three separate armies all waging war with each other at once, and at the heart of it was a wedding and a broken treaty. One of the combatants was the bride, whose beautiful wedding gown was tattered and bloodstained and it was clear that there was some significant symbolism in the fact that her marriage had been consummated in blood.
What does it all mean? No clue. I have no idea what brought the dream on or who any of the people were supposed to be.
In the night I had woken from an odd dream about these disgusting lizard-like creatures giving birth to equally disgusting lizard-like babies and found myself unable to get back to sleep very easily because I felt all creeped out and kept thinking about this episode of Dirty Jobs I’d seen, and which I just saw clips from at the theater in the little pre-trailers show when I went to see Ghost Rider, in which the host was having to squeeze some kind of snakes to get them to vomit up their last meal, which was resulting in him getting bitten a lot and having snake shit squirt all over the place.
All things considered, I preferred the epic battle dream.
In any case, once I did get up I looked out the window to see the world blanketed in white. I’m actually kind of impressed by the amount of snow that has fallen and continues to fall. It’s guaranteed that schools are already closed for tomorrow, and possibly for Tuesday.
I’m just glad I don’t have to go anywhere today.
After talking to my mother, I decided that I was still kind of tired and that this was the perfect sort of day on which to take a nap, so I climbed back into bed, but was unable to get to sleep thanks to some couple that felt the need to take advantage of the weather to show how cute and fun and playful they are by having a noisy little snowball fight right outside my bedroom window.
So I decided to get up and eat some blunch and watch a little TV.
Of course, because it’s snowing and because my cable company’s equipment consists mostly of a satellite dishes located here on the property, dishes that are, naturally, covered with snow, a good 90% of the channels I’m supposed to get are unavailable.
So I’m writing this.
Over the weekend we completed the annual review process, so I found out what my annual merit increase is going to be. Extra money is always a good thing.
I also found out that because I keep having overages in my escrow account, my mortgage payment is going down $55 dollars a month, and it also seems likely that I’ll have my car paid off in about six months.
And tomorrow I’m supposed to meet with Kathleen’s boss to talk some more about doing some part-time work for her company, which means even more extra money.
Naturally all of this seemingly good news has made me suspicious, particularly when I consider that I still have to do my taxes for 2006, which is the year in which I won $10,000. So I’m sure that when the other shoe drops, it will drop hard and splatter mud all over the place.
Anyway, I suppose I could go out and brush my car off a little and put my wiper blades up so I have that much less work to do cleaning it off tomorrow.