listening after dark

Asleep, and dreaming deep

I can always tell I'm getting enough rest when I remember my dreams in the morning. Further, I can tell I'm either getting too much rest or stressed about something when the dreams are complex, endless and bizarre.

This morning was a perfect example. Over the weekend I didn't stay up past 10 p.m. and slept at least nine hours each night. So when I woke before dawn out of an elaborate action dream, and then fell back asleep and continued it, I wasn't surprised. What is unusual, though, is that I can't place the source of the dream. Usually a book or movie will have some connection, but I was watching some silly French Canadian cartoons (thanks, bro) and then reading a British mystery before bed.

Here's what I can recall, 13 hours later:

I was in a large house, possibly in the suburbs, with my family. I think throughout the dream I was a middle-age man. (It's fairly common for me to be another person or animal or even many creatures during a dream.) We were in hiding from some bad people who wanted to kill us. Our supply of water was somehow cut off, and they were hoping to force us out. They set a bomb or something, and I had only a few moments to get a few things together—a gun, but I couldn't find the bullets—before escaping. I had a very fast motorcycle that went 200 miles per hour, and somehow it was made of plywood, or I was using the plywood to carry my wife and child, who died in the explosion. I took these few things and made it out the side door just before the bomb went off. I drove uphill with the headlight off, to avoid being followed. Yet they followed me. Much of the rest of the dream involved high-speed chases on roads, overpasses, freeways and steep hills. Later I stopped at a bar to look for someone, I think, or maybe to sign up for a road race, but then had to speed away once my pursuers came close. I made it to a friend's warehouse by riding along a grassy concrete embankment above a stream. I put the plywood-sandwich bodies in a sort of storage area and my friend helped me hide them. I went inside to stay out of sight and probably to rest. Soon after, my pursuers found me there.

I don't remember any more. I don't think there was any conclusion or anything really tense happening at the end. I just woke up. The strange thing about writing out most dreams is that they usually seem very brief. But even while I was dreaming, I knew how long and complicated it was.

This wasn't even one of the stranger dreams I've had, but it stayed with me throughout the day because of its lack of connection to anything I can recall. Just what was going on in my brain?

Sometimes I actually enjoy spam

Just a small selection of subject lines and excerpts (I love the first-line feature in gmail):

• shut up into the mine eyes? for thee
• most difficult pork chop
• But when I end up in the hay it's only hay, hey hey. Round, round, all around the world...
• Not nightgown so saxon and writes maxims but they are the reflections which a great and able in the year 800...
• Want to be a hero in a bed? ...Sterling said the northumberland Well said my aunt thats lucky
• rude cigar
• Re: my prebendar It jumped high and grabbed the gas bomb out of the air. Go. The ball bounced and rolled and the...
• nuclear tea party
• Is bursty do mackerel unlawful proceedings of princes and states which, by being become poetically advise you to invoke...
• The abandon in caddis ...I am their madmen...
• not and the land the gospel, according to art day the mind or redeem me alive into the hardness of the Lord
• Re: my master ...No photograph—I just want him here soonest, in the vanishing among the shrubs...

So Santa Fe

This morning on my way to work, I saw a car with the requisite "No War!" bumper sticker, along with another one that made me laugh and shake my head: "EVERYONE does better when EVERYONE does better." That's so Santa Fe.

Call me...the Night Composter

A few weeks ago I made an amazing discovery while walking through my condo complex one morning. There's a little Rubbermaid compost bin over by the dumpster on the other side of the pool. Compost! I was so excited, I went into the office to ask if I could add my own scraps to the bin. She said yes and seemed to think I was only a little strange.

See, we always composted when I was a kid, so until I moved out this spring, it was just part of the kitchen routine to chop up my banana peels and put them in our countertop bucket, for later transferal to the backyard heap. Eggshells, coffee grounds, all the rest. Why waste this stuff?

So I just returned from an evening foray to the compost bin, where I emptied my odorous items into the differently odorous bin. And the world is a happier place.

Now then, professor, how about those formulas?

It's OK to be abstruse, right?

Good. I thought so.

A quick quiz:
• String cheese: Do you string it or bite it?
• What one word makes you laugh the hardest?
• Cheesecake: yes or no?
• Can you pick up things with your toes?

Right, left, slide, quick—and stand up straight!

Wes and I have been taking dance lessons. So far we've done a little swing, merengue, waltz and foxtrot, and tonight we added tango. Dduhn-duhn-duhn-duh...dduh-dah-duh-duh-duh.

I like dancing.

Late-night revelations

Every time I go into my gmail junk e-mail folder to delete its contents (ah, how I love that button: "Delete Forever"), I notice that the link at the top of the page always has Spam recipes: Spam fajitas. Spam lasagna. Savory Spam crescents. Spam casserole. Spam spumoni (joking).

Just tonight, after about the fifty-seventh time of marveling over this strange coincidence, I realized something: That's the spam box. Those are spam e-mails. Gmail is smart.

I'm still laughing. My eyes are moist (I hate that word). It's time for bed. (If this is "late-night" for me, you know I'm really too far gone. And you also know that my use of parentheses increases after 10 p.m. And continues to increase incrementally [fancy I can still spell that at this time of night..."night" was harder to type than "incrementally"], to greater and greater degrees.)

Good night, blog. Good night, gmail. Good night, sweet Spam.

Bored with your soul?

Try renting out someone else's soul. Seriously.

I just noticed a link to this page at the top of my gmail inbox. I don't know whether to be disturbed or amused. Maybe a little of both.

It is my firm belief that...

...all envelopes should have mint-flavored seals.

That is all. Except...

...do you say "on-velope" or "n-velope"? "Coo-pon" or "Q-pon"? "Eye-ther" or "ee-ther"?

And then there's "paants" or "pahnts." But that's another story.

Something(s) silly

Here's how it all started: A co-worker began by insulting me yesterday via a plastic fish. Yes, a fish. And not just any fish. He's a replica of the angry fish from Finding Nemo. He even lights up when you push down on his fin. Somehow this fish ended up on my cubicle wall, and he's been there for more than a year.

Anyway, the co-worker with whom I share the cubicle wall likes to turn the fish so he's glaring at me. And then I turn it away from me, or back toward him (the co-worker; I'll call him Bob).

Yesterday was by far the most hellacious day I've had at this job. I spent nearly the entire day working on the same project, and I felt like it was taking me much longer than necessary. Yet when I finally finished for the day, at 6:37 p.m., I felt like it did, for lack of a better phrase, a half-assed job. I know it's OK for now (there is still more to the process, but my part is finished for this week), but I wish I could have done better.

So in the midst of all that, sometime during the day Bob wrote a note and taped it to the fish's face. When I glanced up at one point, during one of those brief moments when I tore my eyes from the computer screen, I read "Aren't you done yet? My grandma copyedits faster than you."

Haha, I thought. Actually, that's funny. Maybe a little too funny. I wasn't feeling very funny. So before I left last night, I wrote a note of my own: "Bah! Humbug."

Then sometime this morning, I found "I heard you throw like a girl." (Bob has played disc golf with me before, as well as Frisbee, and he knows full well that I do not throw like a girl...well, at least not all the time.)

It took me a while to come up with a good retort, which I finally found thanks to Google. Thus, the first of my "something(s) silly":

• The Shakespearean Insulter. It provided me with "Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage." We'll see what he (the fish, of course) says to that tomorrow.

And from there I became distracted to these other wondrous variations of silliness:

• Create a poem. All you have to do is write the first line, and the rhyme generator does the rest!

Of the many poems I "created," this is my favorite (note that I used the word "orange" because it rhymes with nothing, so of course the generator had to rhyme it with itself):

calamity is waiting at the door with a headdress of orange
in a world of reality, I wonder if I myself am truly real
but he who bites of the orange
the day breaks with band-aids on hand--and i pour a bowl of surreal

• Pangloss Wisdom. Random quotes for all occasions.

And here's one more:

calm yourself, Campbell Jones, and eat some soup
the deafening sound of screeching crows
therefore, I spit in your soup!
a bug in my Honey Nut Cheerios

Nice theme I've got going, eh?

Shaving

I highly doubt that one day someone said, "Hey, look: when I scrape this sharp-edged object against my skin, it makes my hair come off," and someone else said, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Let's all do that."

I highly doubt it.

It's Qo, you know

I love this sort of thing. And I love working with people who also find it interesting. Perhaps I should look into becoming an etymologist (like I need another job that will do an even better job of ruining my eyesight).

He was a diligent and delighted student of punctuation, especially its history, and he knew and was not shy about letting you know that the word period comes from the Greek word komma, "to cut," as the commas is a stylized cutting instrument, cutting sentences in pieces; and that colon is the Anglicized Greek word ko-lon, "limb of a tree," and that the colon was originally two periods side by side until a sixteenth-century printer stacked them to save space; and that the question mark comes from the Latin quaestio, "I am asking you a question," which the Romans shortened to Qo, this shorthand finally sliding into our modern mark; and that quotation marks are really pictured lips, a habit harking back to the Romans and the Latin word quotus, "to speak"; and that the dash was traceable to the Danish word aske, "to strike"; and that the word asterisk comes from the Greek words asteer and ikos, "star" and "little"; and that the exclamation point traces back to the Greek word Io, "I am surprised," and is used, according to the ancient tattered little booklet on punctuation that Bob had kept in his desk since his high school days, to indicate fear, surprise, pleasure, or dismay.

Occasionally Bob would appear suddenly in my doorway and in his most schoolmasterish tone say, "What does the exclamation point indicate, lad?"

"Fear, surprise, pleasure, or dismay," I’d say dutifully.

"The four horsemen, lad," he’d say, and retreat.

---An excerpt from the essay "A Sturdy Man" by Brian Doyle from the journal The American Scholar.