On Dreams.

Howdy all. I’m back. Took some time off to figure out a new contract gig I’m hoping to land. Wrote a scene as Homer Simpson but it wasn’t for The Simpsons. Maybe I’ll get to talk about it sometime.

Also took a day off writing because it was my birthday and I don’t have family in town and my wife was away. Thought that’d be a nice little treat, but I wound up spending the whole day dully regretting it because of something I believe from the marrow of my bones: 36 is not a birthday. You don’t really have any business commemorating it.

Eighteen? There’s a birthday. It suddenly gets legal to join the military and I dunno, commit sexual intercourse or something. Twenty one? Absolutely a birthday. You’re through with college and you can legally buy the booze you previous had to make grad students buy for you. Thirty? One hell of a birthday. You’re officially an adult and they take away the get-out-of-jail free card of “hey, I was in my twenties, it happens.” You have to go be whoever you decided to be. But 36 is nothing. Maybe a couple friends call you. It’s a decent but hollow excuse to spend too much at a restaurant. But most of the birthday wishes you’re gonna get will be from credit card companies, and I’m still trying to figure out how to never hear from those again.

And I never really celebrated my birthday anyway. It’s on June 14th so everybody was always out of town and it was too hot to do anything. There is some novelty to the date though. You know when people say something random and whimsical then say “there’s gotta be a joke in there somewhere” and there isn’t because that’s not really how jokes work? My birthday is not only Flag Day, one of America’s dumber holidays. It’s also the birthday of Famous President Donald John Trump, who blocked me on Twitter. Sounds like that could be funny but come on, it’s trivia. The story of him blocking me isn’t even funny. I was harassing him about how much his hotels suck so he did the same thing anyone would do: groggily smash that block button at like 1 a.m. and immediately forget about it.

Not much has happened since the fake birthday. Went to get my car smogged so I could replace the tags, and it failed. Guy said it was because it was off the road too long, so I should go put 60-100 dirty miles on it. Figured I’d just go find an abandoned parking lot and drive it around the perimeter until somebody told me to stop. Within ten minutes, that’s what I was doing. Thank God for Los Angeles, a city of infinity people that is somehow teeming with abandoned parking lots.

I also had the most insane dream of my life. To be clear, I have on multiple occasions mixed bad whiskey with worse tequila and passed out listening to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band on loop in my grandpa’s guest house that was on its way to being a shed. (The realtor called it a cottage. Love those guys. Keep it up!) This was definitely the most insane one, and it meant something. Something huge. People say dreams make them have realizations, commune with the dead, and I never believed it. I believe it now. Goes like this.

I get a job opportunity DM from a social media influencer girl. A real influencer, with half a million followers. Very pretty but in a way that’s invisible to normal people over 30. We hit it off. She says she likes Steely Dan a lot and I probably like them too because I’m old. I lie and say sure. 

Then she calls me. I accept the call. But I didn’t notice it was a facetime call, and I just got out of the shower and I’m nude. Profoundly, horribly nude. I look like a drawing of the nude guy they put on the Pioneer probe, but like if he was exploding. She sees everything and I hang up. I apologize profusely, delete all my social media, try to change my phone number. Then I remember she lives in my neighborhood so I find some huge sunglasses, a hoodie, a duffle bag, and catch a plane to my mom’s house.

I get there, finally, 700 miles away, and there she is. The influencer. Sitting on my mom’s porch swing. She says don’t worry, it’s easy to find addresses, and she doesn’t want me to be embarrassed. The job offer is still on the table and she wants to explain it, hold on just a sec, as long as I still like Steely Dan. Then a bunch of big rigs show up with a hundred alternate versions of people who look like her. A film crew starts unpacking and hauling out generators. There’s a catering van. They set up a podium in the front yard and mic her like this is when Mark Felt announced he was Deep Throat. Teamsters are stringing wires everywhere, just destroying my mom’s house. Somebody sets up a sound system and it’s playing Steely Dan. Somebody takes too much ecstasy and pukes everywhere and ruins my mom’s couch. Somebody starts a grease fire in the kitchen.

As the influencer approaches the podium, I notice a two-headed fox is standing next to her, and its ears are on fire. I’m terrified, and she says to me “oh, that’s my dog Belvedere. He’s a good boy.”

She starts talking to assembled reporters and cameras. “This man next to me,” and she gestures to me, “is special. We have something special planned. We just need to know if he’s alive or dead.” 

I run to the garage and get on my bike and take it to the police station, where I meet the old police chief smoking a cigarette. It’s clearly Michael Lerner from ‘70s television and Barton Fink. I explain the situation.

“Yeah, we’ve been tracking these guys. They call themselves a flash mob improv group, but you know they’re not that. We have cause to believe they’re associated with an evangelical church in the mountains, and we have further cause to believe it’s a front for Satanists. SWAT Team will be over in 5. Whoever these guys are, they don’t have guns. They have something else.”

I bike back to my mom’s house after waiting 5 or 6 hours. I go inside and she’s made cookies. I take one to the porch swing. There, again, is the influencer.

“You know what’s funny? You’re going to see me again.”

Then I woke up, drenched in sweat. This dream was loaded with symbolism. It was the most detailed dream I’ve ever had. I remember every frame of the thing. I’ll remember it forever. I tried to put it out of my head, forget the fear, the sense that I was dying in my real actual life.

Then I remembered an old wives’ tale. And I remembered that at 9 p.m. last night, I went to In N Out and got a double-double animal and animal fries. And I knew exactly what the dream meant: don’t eat cheese right before bed.