In Silver Lamé

Petunia has a dream where she hides in her sister’s basement while her sister conducts a clandestine revolutionary meeting upstairs in the newly remodeled kitchen. Che Guevara and the Symbionese Liberation Army are in attendance. Hot chocolate and churros are served promptly at 7:16 p.m.

(… but this is a solecism in the dream world…)

(… this is an incorrect unspooling of a dream…)

Dreams should be high on the paranoiac-critical scale, full of soft monsters in the shape of the President’s gal bladder, or the Sri Lankan Finance Minister’s peritoneum, or the Zimbabwean Foreign Minister’s show pony — and all of these elements should be whirling about in a pink funnel cloud while calliope-an music echoes from the tinny corners of the Bolivian altiplano, while the moon melts like gruyere and streaks down the ash gray sky. All while satellites line up in formation in the exosphere and spell out: Screw This! We’re Leaving Our Geostationary Orbits / You Humans are Dumb — then they head for the assured destruction of the Kuiper Belt. It is only then that a sniper shoots out the lights at that department store that specializes in silver lamé tube tops covered in melted chocolate…

Now that has the makings of the start of a dream.

What I’m Reading:

“A bike ride is better than yoga, or wine, or weed. It runs neck and neck with sex and coffee. It’s also, in my experience, an antidote for writer’s block. If you’re stuck, if you need to ungum the synapses and lift dust off the cerebral lobes, take a trip on two wheels and the words will begin tumbling out.”

— Jody Rosen / Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle