fine whine

I've been having dreams involving co-workers lately. This is an odd phenomenon for me, since I'm used to a cast of unknowns in my nightly "features". This time around I was working in something outside like a lumber yard, but there wasn't any lumber around. The location and work were secondary, because evidently some of my co-workers were aliens. Illegal interstellar aliens, who looked exactly like my co-workers but were different in only one noticeable way: evidently when they defecated it was a gigantic pile of weird goo. Like elephant piles, but not dung of this Earth. They were being persecuted, or at least chased. I have no clue what the point or meaning would be.

Speaking of big smelly heaps of dung, today's the California recall. I'm almost relieved. Despite living half a continent away, I am barraged on all sides by the recall coverage. Arnold this, Cruz that, Arianna and Georgie and so on. It's tiresome. I don't need the play-by-play on an election that for a while was only a possibility and still hasn't been decided. Yes, the absentee ballots were cast along ago and by tonight the rest will have as well, but I still have three or four painful weeks of inevitable coverage on NPR and such. I've figured it out: when something like this is happening, tell me when it's over. If nothing that I can possibly do could possibly change the course of events, don't waste my time. If things are still up in the air, wait till they come back down.

I don't know about you, but I'm relatively incoherent in the morning. Especially right when the alarm sounds. Usually that infernal noise obliterates any recall I have of the dream just interrupted, but this morning I was awake before it started and had some vague remembrance of my dream. As usual its setting was completely unfamiliar. Most of what I can remember took place in some sort of store.

A lot of what I dream lately has to do with stores. Resale/junk shops mostly, but still, I have to wonder what that means. Anyway, the shop this time was an eclectic place, selling clothes, books and toys. The dream covered a couple decades' worth of world history, as evidenced by the constantly changing decor. One specific time I remember flags of Japan everywhere. The place was very political for a generic store, it would seem. The proprietor reminded me of the crazy army/navy shopkeeper from Falling down, burly, balding and rough. I only spent time in the toys section, looking at a display of puzzles of the sort where a couple pieces are put together and one needs to be removed. Over the years I browsed frequently enough to get on familiar terms with the clerk there, a nice woman who couldn't get me to buy anything. She talked to me anyway, though, and showed me the new items every year or whenever. The last time before I woke up she showed me one that looked really easy; effectively it entailed putting a rubber band around something. The woman conspiratorially told me that it was a favorite of her mistress. What sort of woman has a mistress, I wondered after I awoke...

I awoke, and was interrupted in my musings by my wife, who, already awake, was telling me the sad tale of twins named Alpha and Omega. She (hopefully jokingly) suggesting naming our kids in a similar fashion, say Sigma or Rho. This idea I vetoed outright, even for middle names. My run-ins with physics and calculus both left me leery forever of Greek letters wherever I find them. Perhaps for a cat then, she continued, and realized she'd already picked out a cat's name: Hogan.

Not named for Hulk, but the last name of the guy whose name emblazoned the lab building in which she spent much of her undergraduate days: Otis J. Hogan. She thought for some reason that I'd not be a fan of a cat named Otis, so Hogan it would be.

Which is fine with me. I'm no fan of the building or the man, but to have a house cat named Hogan would be funny... 'hogan' being a Navajo lodge., i.e. a house.

Har har.