December 22, 2008

• Another Mad Dream

  In the dream, I was Willie Nelson:  same long graying red hair, same wrinkles, same Texas twang, and that bare hint of a smile that hides a million little secrets and a lot of pain… but, when someone asked for my autograph, what I signed was, “Bookstore.”

  I was employed as secretary to a hospital administrator.  At the time of the dream, however, I was on leave for an injury.  A spider had bitten me on the butt.  No, really, it was serious… serious enough to hospitalize me… only the hospital was full.  So there I was, limping around my workplace with a nurse, trying to find a bed to lie down in.  No luck, so they moved a bed into my office for me.

  My office was the anteroom to my boss’s office, so throughout this thing, he was coming and going through my hospital room.  The dramatic tension in this story was supplied by a bind I was in.  My butt was getting better, but I couldn’t admit that because if I did I’d have to get out of bed and I didn’t have anything to wear.  I couldn’t go back to work in my backless johnny, but if I didn’t get better and go back to work they were going to amputate my butt… or Willie’s butt, poor Willie.

  My boss strode through one morning, waking me up to ask how I was and when I was coming back to work.  I told him I thought I’d be able to get to work, “soon.”  After he went in and shut his office door, I got out of bed and started rummaging in my closet for something clean enough to wear.  I found a long green skirt draped across a hanger, but it was too creased to wear.  As I was thinking about running the shower to steam the wrinkles out, I noticed that there was a lot of marijuana in the closet.

  If you are picturing stacks of bricks, or a big stash can, or bags or boxes of the stuff, wipe that picture from your mind.  It was plants, hanging from the clothes rod, drying, and laid out on egg-crate trays to dry, up on the overhead shelf and across boxes stacked on the floor.  Anyone walking into the room would see it and I’d be busted, so I slid the door shut.

  Just then, a nurse walked in with a new patient, saw my empty bed and proceeded to bed the new woman down there.  So, there I was in my johnny, hiding in the closet with felony-weight weed and a pile of dirty clothes, threatened with amputation of my right buttock and/or loss of my job… and I woke up.

  Whew!  I’m so glad I’m me.  It could be ever so much worse than it is.
  

  • 1:38 pm
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