It is the first day of fall, and for me, September is the month for remembering dreams. Here are two: one old, one new.
I’m at the San Diego Comic-Con, hanging out in a hospitality room with the guys from Stargate SG-1. I’m leaning against a wall with a huge round serving tray much like a wagon wheel that’s propped against my hip, and all of its sections are heaped with mashed potatoes, which I keep eating with a spoon. Richard Dean Anderson and the Black Guy Who Plays Tealq seem really worried about catching a flight to L.A., but I keep cracking jokes about how we’re actually in L.A. already, c’mon MacGyver, and it’s cool because they’re laughing at my jokes, and I also joke about how much mashed potatoes I’m eating. I’m feeling great about being the life of the party, but then I really have to go to the bathroom, and when I do, I look in the mirror and see that I’m wearing lots of make-up. My wife must have practiced on me while I was sleeping, and that’s why the Stargate guys were laughing at me, not because they liked my jokes.
Again with this shifty house that is the offspring of all the homes of my life. I’m in my grandma’s kitchen. There’s a baby I’m related to sitting alone at a table set with all the stuff for coloring Easter eggs. All I can think to do is stick my face in the colored vinegar and blow bubbles that burn my eyes. Then I go upstairs and it’s a mansion, and lots of rich people are gathering around a woman with a mixing bowl full of blue sand. She adds water and starts stirring with such force that the concoction sprays out, much of it in clumps on my shirt—but now it is clearly cookie dough, and turning reddish. I look around, and it seems understood by everyone in the room that all this is my fault.
