Goes Without Saying

It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally developed a mild addiction to Twitter. I signed up for it years ago when it was a new thing, but didn’t see it as being useful to me. I know there’s a reason for the 140 character limit, but it seemed arbitrary. Like saying you can’t use the letter G. And I didn’t think of anything to say in the ensuing years, so I’ve just followed people, never actually tweeted. But some people are really good at Twitter, and I enjoy following them and seeing how the system gets used in unexpected ways (as in today’s #RomneyStrength meme).

Last night I dreamt that I was sending my first tweet, which was “Border States say: We have edges!” Now, I can’t say what my dream self has against border states, but nevertheless this is what I chose to communicate. Then, later on in the dream I went to check to see this on Twitter, and I saw that I had typed it incorrectly. It said “Butter States say: We have edges!” Which makes no sense. I then spent some of my dream time investigating whether tweets could be edited, which was frustrating and inconclusive. I see this as a cautionary tale, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be found in the real Twitterverse any time soon.

The Weirdest Dream

Regardless of how weird your dreams are, Michael Chabon doesn’t want to hear about them.

Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. “I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,” you begin, “only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,” and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.

must have been dreaming

In fact I know I was dreaming, because I kept waking up from it and thinking “I can’t believe I’m still dreaming this”. For whatever reason, my dream world insisted that I keep revisiting to work through the narrative to its illogical conclusion. This one involved seeing a photograph of Mitt Romney visiting our street on the front page of the Chronicle.  I then tried to find a video of this visit on various news casts, but encountered typical dreamscape frustrations.  I attempted to view the video on my phone, but the image was very dark and there was a slow-talking voiceover saying, “This video is the property of Comcast, and will be deleted in five minutes” – this added to my dream anxiety level; I wanted to see what our street looked like on the TV.  And how did Comcast get involved? No idea. Along with this search for the video, there was a storytelling acoustic guitar guy singing a folk song about Mitt Romney, describing his adventures traveling around the country with Mitt.  The guitar part was actually pretty good, but the lyrics (don’t recall them in any detail) came across as contrived.  He kept referring to Romney as “Jim Mitt Romney”, I suppose thinking that adding the “Jim” would make him seem more like a regular guy. Time expired on the dream sequence, and I didn’t get to see the video of Mitt on our street after all.  There was a little bit of the newscasters talking after the video, saying how much they liked our street, with the birds singing and the nice trees. That reminds me; the dreamscape Chronicle also showed a picture of this horrible dead tree that’s in our neighbor’s yard, with the caption “Spring is just around the corner”.

leatherby

Full disclosure: this is another one of my crazy dreams.  I found an old dachshund standing on our front porch late at night, and then saw a little boy – probably about 7 years old – on the sidewalk, and he told me that he had to get rid of the dog, and he was looking for somebody who would take it.   I picked up the dog and walked them both back to the boy’s house, where he lived with three men and a lady, presumably his mom.  One of the guys had recently lost some of the fingers on one hand.  I talked with them about the responsibility of pet ownership, and how much time and effort is involved in living with a dog.  They said the dog was only in their house for about a week.  I didn’t ask them why they had directed the little boy to go out late at night and “get rid” of the dog.  They had named the dog “Leatherby”, because his short brown fur reminded them of suede or leather.  I think we ended up adopting Leatherby, because I recall a dream fragment where our kitty was sleeping alongside him.  And I believe that I had also suggested that the boy could visit Leatherby if he wanted to, or at least I intended to suggest that.

the dark end of the street

I was standing in the street in front of Mom and Dad’s old house at night, and there were no lights on in any of the houses, the streetlights were all off, and there was no moonlight.  The houses were large dark silhouettes against the night sky.  Periodically they were outlined by car headlights going by on neighboring streets.  Every now and then you could see faintly lit areas on the ground, which were illuminated by lights on planes passing overhead.

Did I mention that this was a dream I had last night?  Probably should have said that right up front.  In the dream, I made a mental not to myself to write a blog post about this titled “the dark end of the street”.