We've Got a Stacker!

I dreamed that I took my family to this new restaurant called Stackers.  It was a fancy, but very weird hamburger joint decorated nothing like a hamburger joint.  It had this amazingly ridiculous jungle theme.  Tree leaves and vines were hanging on everything and you could barely move without touching some kind of plant.  They did not need walls because the trees and shrubs obstructed your view of just about everything.

You would expect the wait staff to be dressed in some kind of Hawaiian garb, or maybe something tribal, but you'd be wrong on both counts.  They were wearing slacks, a tuxedo shirt and a vest.

The moment we were called to be seated my wife, kids and I were split up.  This was part of the restaurant schtick.  They split groups up and seat you just about anywhere they could find an open seat.  You could not avoid this.  All parties were broken up, no matter the age.

The restaurant predominantly sold stacked hamburgers; up to five or six stacks of meat, but they forbade anyone from doing the stacking themselves.  You could order a three stacked barbecue burger, but if you dared to order three barbecue burgers and stack them yourself, you could be ejected from the restaurant.

The whole of your meal the waiter staff walked around on the lookout for stackers. At any point in your meal you'd hear, “Are you stacking? That looks like stacking!” And you had to argue your case with the waiter that you weren’t stacking, these burgers came this way. But once in a while you’d hear, “WEVE GOT A STACKER!” And a group of waiters would come and move you by force. Stacking could get you ejected or just moved to another table. So people would take the risk that stacking would get them moved to a table near their party or they’d try to sabotage the strangers they were sitting with in hopes of making room for one of their original party to be reunited with them.

I spent the entire dream mostly confused about what was going on while at the table with some woman I didn't know.  At least three times in my dream we were having a pleasant conversation when a waiter came up to me and yelled, "Are you stacking?  That looks like you're stacking!"  I played a long at first, but by the third time I was tired of it.  As the waiter and I were arguing some kid claiming to be my son came running in and said, "Daddy, I told you it's against the rules to stack!"  So I just stood up and ran into the jungle of trees, hoping to find a table with someone I knew at it.

So... if I ever decide to change careers to "restaurateur"...

Kevin Smith big and Kevin Smith little

Kevin Smith big and Kevin Smith little

Kevin Smith had two bit parts in my dream last night.  He played them simultaneously; one as Kevin Smith before he lost the weight, the other as Kevin Smith now (after weight loss).  They were walking side by side in my dream.

So, in my dream sharks could swim underground.  Every now and then they’d swim up to the surface of the ground and eat someone.  After a while people figure out that the sharks could detect and locate humans by the sound and shock waves made by our walking.  In case you are thinking this plot sounds a lot like Tremors, you are correct.  I admit, my brain was not terribly creative last night, so it ripped-off an old, but awesome B movie.  But don’t judge me, Hollywood is way worse.  You know good and well you are planning on seeing Avengers 24 or Saw 19 or Aliens Recovenanted Again 2.

Anyway, I was walking through a parking lot with a large group of people; my two kids, some others I knew, some I did not; when we hear this sound from below. A person from the group I don’t know – we’ll call him Kevin Bacon – says something like, “Shit, it’s the sharks again.”

Kevin Smith big says, “Guys, stop moving.  We know they can hear us if we move.”

Kevin Bacon says, “We can’t just stand around here all day.  We’ve got to get to those cars.”

“No,” Kevin Smith big says, “We need to get to the boats.  Boats are safer.”

It’s at this point in the dream that I look out beyond the parking lot and see a dock full of boats that had hitherto not been there.

“Why boats?” I asked.

“Because these are sharks. They belong in the water.”  Kevin Smith big said.

In my dream this made perfect sense, even though every Jaws movie I’ve ever seen has some boat getting torn apart by a shark that then proceeds to eat everyone that had been in said boat.

So everyone is standing still, but we know it’s a losing situation.  We can hear the sharks circling below us.  Then Kevin Bacon says, “No way, man, if we all move at once, as least some of us can get to the boats.”  But no one moves, not even Kevin Bacon.

Then Kevin Smith little says, “Man, you just want us to move so the sharks come for us.  Then you can make a run for it while we get eaten.”

Then we hear another sound and Kevin Bacon says something like, “Screw this,” and he starts to run.  But he doesn’t make it more than a few feet when the square of sidewalk he’s on juts up from the ground and he falls head first to the other side.  In my dream we never see the shark because I have a very low budget dream factory.  But we do see Kevin Bacon get dragged below ground kicking and screaming.

At that point, Kevin Smith big and Kevin Smith little yell, “Now’s our chance!” and they start to run.  Several others from the group of those I don’t know run as well.  My kids look back at me, but I’m frozen in fear.  So they choose to stay still.

In the distance I hear some people get eaten and others get to safety.  Kevin Smith and Kevin Smith both make it aboard a boat.

Finally, a little too late, my kids and I make a break for a nearby boat.  A shark gives chase, but we make it in time.  Sadly, the boat I chose was in dry dock, so we aren’t exactly home free.  The dream gets weird after that.  

We find some paragliders in the boat’s storage.  I’ve been playing a lot of the Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, in which you use a paraglider a good bit.  So my kids and I use paragliders to sail down from the boat, several hundred yards to the ocean, where once in the water we are safe from the sharks.

Then my wife comes by in another boat and picks up and the dream is over.

-The part of "First Guy Eaten By Sharks" was played by Kevin Bacon.  Kevin Bacon was not actually in my dream last night, but I figured that since this was clearly a Tremors rip-off, and since Kevin Bacon was the main character of the first Tremors movie, he should have a role. 

Two Pack!

I had a dream that I worked out really hard for a while and managed to get the top two segments of my abdominal muscles (rectus abdominis) in shape.  So I had a two pack and below that I had my normal gut.  In my dream the two pack was smooth, but the rest of my gut and chest were hairy.  So I guess I just shaved the part of my stomach that I was proud of.

Anyway, I showed my two pack to my wife and she was not impressed.  In fact, she was a little jealous that I was getting in shape faster than her.  For the record, on the average of our marriage my wife has been in shape FAR MORE than I ever have.

So, that’s it.  It wasn’t a stellar dream this time.  No revelations about Tom Cruise or David Bowie or Joey Ramone.  Just a short snippet predicting a future where I manage to work out enough to whip 2% of my body into shape.

I digress.

I’m 42.  Soon to be 43.

If I look down at my feet they aren’t there.  They’ve been swallowed by my stomach.  If I lean I can see them, of course, but you aren’t supposed to do that.  You are supposed to stand up straight and look down without leaning forward and be able to see your feet.  If you cannot you are medically over weight.  It isn’t a value judgment.  You aren’t a waste of a person necessarily.  You’re just over weight. 

When I was two I could do this – look down and see my feet.  Sometime between six and seven I lost the power.  Then by a stroke of magic I gained the power back at 15.  I kept it until I was about 22.  Then I lost it again.  For fifteen years after I struggled to keep fit and maybe push myself further to the point of actually being healthy.  But I never achieved foot sighting again.

I gave up a few years ago.

To be fair I did not just give up on my stomach.  I gave up on so much.  Exercise, religion, music, writing, reading, going out, praying, keeping my brain fresh, hygiene, advancing my dream career, keeping my actual career and appearing to give a shit.

I’m up to 172 pounds.  I’m 5’7” on a good day.  That’s 78.02 kilograms and 170 centimeters if you’re not American.  That’s a pretty bad weight ratio.  Not the worst, by American standards, but not good.

I only shave once a week.

I don’t stand up straight.

When I was 13 my friend Brandon and I found a dragon.  Some would probably call it a lizard or a salamander.  But it was a dragon.

We were digging deep into the ground on the side of a mountain.  We hit a place just right and a whole slab earth crumbled away.  There was the side and back leg of a brilliant orange and black dragon.  I had never seen anything like it before.  It was enormous, probably five long and two or three tall and it was protected by some kind of magical stunning spell.  We froze at the sight of it and it scurried away, digging deeper into mountain side.  “Don’t follow me,” I heard its voice inside my head say.

After the spell wore off we agreed we should go after it.  We dug for hours, but never found a trace of it.

That story is absolutely true with some embellishments.

From the time I was six to the time I was 14 I was a wood sprite.  My every free moment was spent in the woods and I was the master of it.  I knew where every vine and tree bridge was.  I knew where every bike trail was.  I knew where to find water spiders and I knew where to find turtles.  I wasn’t afraid of anything except loose dogs.

From nineteen to twenty one I was Hermes.  A slow Hermes, but a god of running.  I ran every night, four or five miles.  I almost had abs.

From twenty five to thirty I was the greatest songwriter alive.  I wrote about fifty songs.  I still like most of them and think the world would too, if only…

The week before I turned 33 I woke up absolutely certain that I was going to be a writer for animation.  I started this blog and I eventually drew the attention of an Austrian cartoonist by the name of Florian Satzinger.  He hired me to write a few episodes of a cartoon he was developing.  I got paid and everything.  But the world economy crashed and blah, blah, blah.

After the writing job fell through I pressed on for another year then lost heart.  I decided that if I could not find a cartoon to write for I’d write my own.  So I began to learn animation.

News flash: animation is hard af.

From 32 to 36 I was a home owner.

No one wants to lose a home.  But when you have to leave behind so much of what you accumulated inside that home...  To this day it hurts my hearts when my kids say:

I wish I still had a bike.

I wish we still had the cats.  (The cats were given to a good home with the promise we can have them back when we have a home of our own.  They were not left in the old house.)

I wish we still lived by our friends.

I wish we had our own rooms.

One of the things people don’t realize about the poor – when they say things like “the poor are poor because they don’t work hard” – which, incidentally, when they say this they are actually channeling the devil.  The real devil; Satan.  If you have said this, and I mean this honestly and without reservation, you were the devil.  You might not always be.  You might usually be a very nice man/woman.  But at that moment, you were an awful piece of shit.  And I think you know it.  But what you didn’t know, or didn’t want to believe, though you probably knew it deep down, is that if that person had your education and background, they could do your job. 

Yep.  I said it.  You aren’t that special.  It isn't that poor aren't working hard and you are in your lap of luxury simply because you do work hard - though I don't question that you do.  I'm certain you do.  It takes work to keep a job and keep a home and keep a spouse and keep hope.  What separates you from the smelly, grimy people on the street is nothing but a long string of fortuitous circumstances. 

The poor do work hard.  It’s hard to feed yourself when you don’t have a job.  It’s hard, the first time you do it, to look at food in a trash can, and decide that you can eat that.  It’s hard to ask another person for money.  It's hard if that person is a stranger or if that person is family; especially family that you've always wanted to impress and to make proud.  It's hard when deep down inside you, you know there is a successful person.  There is a genius.

But that genius has been trampled by one foot after another.  One humiliating defeat after another.

It’s so easy to give up.

You get tired of being the only liberal in Sunday school who believes in social programs.  Week after week listening to dicks of privilege say in the same breath that they believe in Jesus and that they should not pay extra taxes for welfare.  So you give up and quit going.

You get tired of playing devil's advocate for uber conservative friends on Facebook, so you unfollow them.  Soon you’re following no one.

You get tired of waking up early to work out, so you wake up with just enough time to get the kids ready for school.  And you promise yourself you’ll work out tonight.  But you get tired.

I started a book when I was 35.  It was good.  It was juvenile literature, but not simple.  It was like Roald Dahl or J.K. Rowling, I felt.  I had 26 chapters, but the book never wanted to end.  It just kept on going.  I tried to solicit the help of friends, but no one had time.  They got tired, I guess.

I digress.

Suffice it to say, I gave up.  On me.  At some point in the past.  A little bit here and a little bit there.  Until I gave it all up.

Last night I had a dream.  A very short, but terrifying dream.  I dreamed the planet was alive.  Not just alive in the sense that living things can grow on it, but it was a living thing itself.  And after a million years of tolerating humans the planet’s immune system had decided that people were an infection.  So the planet’s immune system did what all immune systems do when faced with infection.  It got a fever.  And the temperature began to rise to try and kill the infection.

I woke up disturbed.  I thought, what if I am nothing but an infection?  Just a nasty bacteria chewing away at the flesh of the world.  Doing nothing to make the place better.  Just chewing.

For the first time in years I prayed earnestly.  I promised God - whom I believe in, even if I’m not quite sure sometimes how to believe in him/her - I promised God that I would start trying again.

And so I will.

Joey's Message

I fell asleep on the bus yesterday.  This is not an unusual occurrence, in fact, typically I try catch about a half hour of sleep each day.  It is, however, unique considering the inordinate amount of caffeine I had consumed at work that day.  I couldn’t stop tapping my foot.  I worried that the tapping might annoy the other bus riders, but when I looked around they all had their headphones inserted deep into their ear sockets.

I tried to close my eyes and force sleep, but the bright sunlight outside turned my dark eyelids a bright array of red, pink and purple.  I closed my eyes tighter, took a deep breath then released.  The colors of my eyelids darkened and pulsed like a rainbow choir.  My skin began to vibrate, out of time with the bus’s vibrations.  Out of time with my heart beat.  The vibrations were cosmic.  They were coming from beyond the earth.  It was the universe sending me a primordial message.

My eyes popped open.  I dried the drool from the corner of my mouth.  What had I been dreaming?  I looked around.  Everyone was plugged in to their own world.  My foot was tapping.

I dug through my bag and found my headphones.  I plugged them into my head and opened the YouTube app on my phone.  I pulled up Queen.  I listened to a song or two, but my thirst for new was not sated.  I pulled up the White Stripes and listened to most of an album, but I needed something else.  I played a round of Candy Crush.  Then I opened YouTube back up and found Joey Ramone’s album “Don’t Worry About Me,” released just after he died of lymphoma.  I started listening to it.  “What a Wonderful World” started playing and I could hear the rainbow choir in the background.  Red and purple flashed in my eyelids and my skin began to receive more vibrations.  Then everything faded.

Framed and matted in darkness I sat in a small, softly lit, green and mint-green room.  A distant sounding music played over the speakers.  I was sitting in a chair, but Joey Ramone was sitting on the edge of the table with this feet in another chair.  He was hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped.  He was situated perpendicular to me, but his head was turned in my direction.  I looked deep into his red shades and said, “I won’t disappoint you.”

I woke up under Spaghetti Junction.  The bus was moving along at a smooth clip, but something was wrong.  My connection to the universe was broken.  My antenna is rusty from disuse.  I tried to go back to sleep, but my foot would not stop tapping.  I started the album over, but that didn't help.  My eyes would not stay closed and my skin would not receive the vibrations.  I was in a spiritual dead zone.

What had Joey asked of me?  What had I promised?  The universe had only sent me a piece of the message.  I want to do the right thing.  I don’t want to disappoint Joey.  But I don’t know what to do.  Or maybe I do know what to do.  Maybe I’ve always known, but I’m afraid.