Hitler's Dell, A United Nations Christmas Party Sketch. Dog Run. Sheets. Data's Disastrous Airstream Love Nest. A Dance To Spring. Self-Checkout.
Marco McClean
The dream is a story about the last people in the United Nations'
special organization who maintained Adolf Hitler's little horizontal 450
MHz Pentium Dell desktop office computer. (Hitler died in the late
1970s, so he had an opportunity to use a computer to work on his memoirs
and etcetera in his U.N. office, the same as Nixon did.)
I'm a small Chinese woman like Honey in the Doonesbury comic strip
but old. I show the Dell to a documentary filmmaker. He says, "This is
it, then?" I say, "That's it." He says, "Wow. Hitler's Dell."
Now I'm who I am in real life, at my real age, but I'm in the garage
of the house where I lived when I was in seventh grade, and I have a
GUI network-configuration program running on my old 166 MHz Pentium
Dell laptop computer. I ask Jerry to confirm my understanding that the
power and reach of a network signal is related to where I put the icon
in the program window-- low-right is maximum power and reach. Jerry
says, "Ordinarily, yeah, but--" and he explains that with this computer
and Windows 98, that's only true if you have a second network card,
because the built-in one can't be recognized by this program. I show him
that there is, in fact, a second network port, on the back. This
confuses him; he takes the computer away to try to apply the rule.
My fellow U.N. cops/computer-techs put on a holiday skit involving
Hitler's computer. Each cop tells his part of the story while looking
over his own handful of memorabilia, such as a child's 45-rpm record or
a gun with extreme sentimental value, or candy, or whatever. My part is
to mention that the cop represented by the empty aquarium-like clear
glass CRT monitor of Hitler's computer (back in the closet, obscured by
coats and scarves) was a good guy, but would never participate in
Christmas functions such as this skit. (Chuckles all around.) I mention
enforcer Luca Brasi, from /The Godfather/, in passing. (Howls of
laughter.)
An actor like the one who played Hymie the Robot in the old /Get
Smart/ teevee show reveals himself to have been the glass CRT, and this
year, this time, he will participate in the festivities. Hoorah! /But/
an armed U.N. office guy waits outside the open door of this room in
case something goes wrong-- and it does: I get most of the way through
the checklist of what Hymie is willing to do, and he balks at the item
where he must meet an alien entity who will come through into our world
via the network program Jerry was working on. The office guy is about
to shoot Hymie. I say to Hymie, "Come on, Frank, you /have/ to." Hymie
(Frank) gets up out of his chair, pulls a bare fencing sword out of his
suit jacket and threatens the office guy. So it's a sword against a
gun. I say, "Frank!" He becomes all sheepish and sits back down.
/Okay, he'll do it, he'll meet the alien./ (There's no alien; that was
just a prank, part of the skit.)
Mainly, through all of this, it's about the
howling-wind/Serenity-movie-Reaver-radio-noise sound on the network
channel between here and Hell. And that's /funny/, because it rhymes
with Dell, and that starts with D, and that rhymes with P, and that
stands for pool.
This is the best Christmas party sketch ever. /Ever./
My dreams from Wednesday, 2009-12-02:
First dream. I'm on a wide gravel path that goes through several
right-angles around and past busy playings fields. Baseball or lacrosse
or grass-hockey or something. I'm with a strange dream-only family.
We're on our way back to the car after a long /boring/ day of watching
sports games, and I'm ecstatic to be leaving this place and going home.
The family's at least ten dogs sense that we're leaving and come
from every direction to converge on us. I can't clearly see any of the
dogs, even though they're all right here, but one nebulous black dog
/seems like/ my real-life childhood dog Ferd. I say, "Come on," and
start to run ahead of the others on the path, and the black dog comes
with me, so it must be my personal dog, of all the family dogs...
Except it's not Ferd. /Of course you're not. He's dead./ But it's a
good dog, and it likes me, and now I can see it: it's kind of a
wolf-poodle-sheepdog-thing. I keep running tirelessly, happily, and the
dog runs alongside.
Next dream. The same dream-only big extended family, but more like
the Partridge Family than the Brady Bunch here, has been staying in a
rented apartment in a strange city all summer for an event or task. It's
the end of the time; we're packing up to leave. I go into a back bedroom
and pull the sheets off the bed and the pillowcases off the sheets, then
I wonder if these things are even ours. Probably not. Put the bed back
together? Nah; make one of the girls do it.
Outside I walk around on streets between boxy two-story apartment
buildings whose minimal landscaping is simplified, artificial-looking.
I have a hula-hoop.
Somehow in the street I'm shown a slideshow of pictures of different
dogs, and then dogs near or superimposed on different trees. Here's an
alert-looking black German-shepherd/wolf-dog with an S-shaped
golden-flame-colored tail. The next picture is a plastic-looking palm
tree. I want to see the dog again, and its picture returns. /What's
special about this dog that I like it so much? And can I actually have
this dog? Does it exist?/
My dreams from Thursday, 2009-11-03:
First dream. The character Data of /Star Trek/ is sabotaged by being
shocked by touching a microphone in the double-decker airstream trailer
he shares with his significant other. His human friend and someone else
here don't know Data is in trouble; they sit at the pull-out table in
the kitchenette, talking and laughing. Data is up in his wall bunk; he
can't speak to warn them of the dangerous microphone. He can move,
though very slowly; he sits up and looks out the window. The trailer has
been moved to the infield of a dirt racetrack. The evil boy in the
back-story of the dream comes roaring around the track in a 1920s race
car, the kind that looks like an upside-down canoe.
Data and the guest vanish. I get Data's friend's attention and say,
"We have to leave." I pull on a pair of knee-high Ugg boots over my
bare feet. Data's friend goes to the door and says resignedly, "I'll go
start the car." I say, "No, we're flying." He says, "You're gonna fly
the car?" I say, "We're leaving the car. We're /flying/."
The evil boy will have thought of this. As soon as we're in the air
he and his henchmen will shoot at us. My point of view moves around
above the trees and the landscape; I'm trying to decide on the best
evasive pattern to fly in, not knowing where they'll be shooting from.
Next dream. With the feeling of /really not belonging here/ I park
my car near the pink house in Caspar (CA) where Juanita and I lived from
1986 to 1992. (That house no longer exists in real life.) I get a
coupon for something that might tip off the person in the house that my
intentions are not good, that I'm here to steal something --which I'm
not-- so I stuff the coupon in my back pocket, but when I pull my hand
out, the coupon and other incriminating papers fly out. I catch them in
the air like juggling handkerchiefs and tear them all up.
Now I'm a little boy, here, and there's an ominous sense of a scary
man being in the house.
I go next door to the big green house, go around the side and into a
middle room to get old newspapers, to start a fire in the stove, but
there are color comics pages here-- hmm. Some men are lounging around
in the back room, the kitchen; they see me. I say, "I'm sorry; is this
someone's private room?" The men are all okay about my getting
firestarter paper from here.
At this point in the dream I cast about for better memory of a
blonde girl I had a relationship with in a trailer like the one where
Data lived in the previous dream, but nothing comes except an image of
that trailer on the Mendocino Headlands, so I just let it go.
It's a gray moonlit foggy night. In front of Joe's Garage people
stand around talking. An old transvestite man version of (woman) poet
Bobby Markells tells a story in a Los Angeles weary/wise-old-movie-star
accent, which makes me think of telling Elly Cooney about this; she'll
get a kick out of the image-- she'll say, "Yeah, I see that. That's not
much of a stretch." A cross between Greg-the-gardener's wife and Marcie
from Gloriana Opera Company sees that I'm here and tells a story about
hanging a picture on plastic-coated nails with my mother when I was a
baby. /But Marcie is my age or younger./ I say, "Where was that?" She
says, "Here." I say, "I lived in Los Angeles--" Oh, I'm ruining her
story. I say, "--but my mother went all over. She went from Hawaii to
/Germany/ once."
Back near the pink house I find a bogus plastic spring-loaded
chiropractic device that's obviously used to make a tapping sensation on
a knob of bone or something while you look the other way. I show this to
a psychedelic-beat-poet
X-Men-Magneto/Woody-Guthrie/Alvin's-Secret-Code-"Lion-headed-man" who
has the actual head of a Pogo-comics-seeming cartoon lion or tiger, and
I tell him about how the man who managed my bio-father's career cheated
him of his inventions. Magneto likes my term /bio-father/; he sees the
ethnic Jewish influence. I say, "His name was Siskind." (I pronounce it
to rhyme kind with mind.) Magneto says, "Ah, Siskind," to rhyme with
tinned, actually the correct way. I think about an article I read once,
about scientists finding that the same subtle difference in fat type
that makes so many Jews so smart (brains are fat) also predisposes them
to neurological disorders, and this makes me think of an actress I
admire who has nerve problems.
Magneto goes to sit on a park bench in the fog, next to another
famous old beat poet, a kind of Mickey-Rourke/Tom-Waits hobo character
with a wide friendly Pogo-comic wolf head. /I have to get some shots of
these famous old people./ I go to my car, get the cheap video camera
out of the trunk, fumble to set it in high-resolution still-shot mode,
and start clicking pictures. It's sunny now but only on the men's faces,
making them shine so the pictures are all washed-out, useless. The two
men become a famous ballet dancer woman in her fifties. I follow her up
the side steps of the dance studio (in real life, the Caspar Inn), and
move around her, snapping pictures of her exercising with a dozen
teenage girl dancers.
/Okay, that should be enough. Thanks, Miss./ I go outside through
the front door, step carefully down the loosely stacked crates and boxes
that are the steep front stairs, and back at my car I feel about on my
person for my camera. It's not here. I empty my pockets-- teflon
plumbing tape, keys, multitool... wallet, some change... no camera, and
no thumb drive. How could I have lost the camera? I just had it in my
hand.
I have to go back inside and ask if anyone's seen my things. This is
embarrassing. Professionals don't lose their tools.
I woke up with the song /Gainesville, Florida/ from Randy Newman's
/Faust/ album playing in my head; and it had an extra South American sad
lilt to it. It had been playing in the dream-- the part where Linda
Ronstadt sings, "I have tried all my life to be kind to others, even
when others were unkind to me. I've been told all my life, when I found
someone he would /look/ at me, and I'd know." Of course, the boy who
/looked/ at her is the truly awful evil-because-ignorant main character
of the story, and the events that unfold result in Linda Ronstadt's
character committing suicide in prison, and the boy couldn't care less.
I seriously recommend Randy Newman's /Faust/ album. You won't be
disappointed.
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm in the corrugated metal mud-room on
the way out of a hardware store, using a self-checkout counter that's
also a recycling station. I put a box of twist bulbs through a slot, but
my old bulbs that I brought to recycle fall into the slot with the new
box. I press /cancel/ to stop the transaction, stop the machine.
Nothing stops. I hurry around the back of the machine and put my hand
down the chute that leads to a whirling separator blade, to stop the
bulbs from ever getting that far-- though isn't that where they should
go? I'm confused. And I almost just put my hand in a blender. /Marco./
A big tough biker-type hardware store clerk comes here with his
Labrador/Gordon-setter dog. The clerk and I talk about how these new
machines all come from Canada, and nobody likes them, not even the
Canadians.
The dog is frantically friendly. The man explains that the dog has
just got notice that it's been selected to go to a special convention or
meeting it's been looking forward to for a long time and it's just very
excited about it.
I say, "That's understandable. Anyone can understand that."
People like it when you like their dog.
-end-