Ioki the Furbaby
I’m standing in an ornately decorated casino/hotel that’s been ripped straight off the Vegas strip. I’m watching my buddy, Chris, attempt to balance a Jeep on his chin from the opposite end of a long hallway blanketed by a rich red paisley pattern. Yes, a Jeep, a Wrangler soft-top. He is very determined to pull off this feat and he’s assured me that he’s done this many times before.
He is surrounded by three or four puny little drunk frat boys trying their damnedest to hoist this Jeep upon his willing chin. I watch them struggle for a bit and then decide to help. As I’m slowly walking my way towards the fray, I hear the DJ at the nearby bar announce my appearance to the Jeep-chin-balancing act. He proclaims the enormousness of, well, me in general. I’m flattered. I look to my sides and my arms have more than doubled in size. I’m ready for this shit.
I promptly plop the Jeep upon his chin and he balances that heap, by God; I’m impressed. Chris and another group of friends wave goodbye and head off to bet on sports games in front of the seemingly hundreds of large TVs smothering the rear wall. I’m left alone by the bar, my arms have deflated back to normal. I hear a baby cry. A sweet looking little blond girl. Her hair is bright yellow and shiny, twisted into cylindrical curls. She’s probably just shy of a year old, still in diapers. Suddenly it’s a ghost town in the hotel and it’s just me and the baby, Ioki.
I learned her name telepathically, she never actually speaks. We walk into a room to the side to get away from the main casino floor. It’s quiet and there are tables and chairs stacked up near the right wall. It smells musty like a crawlspace. There’s a TV on the wall and I turn it on to break the silence. I sprawl out on a couple of chairs positioned side-by-side to allow me to put my feet up. I drift off to sleep with baby Ioki in my lap.
I am rudely awakened by a foul stench and a wet feeling in my lap. Ioki took a huge, rank, liquid shit all over me. I look around and I’m covered in this viscous, molasses colored diarrhea. I decide that we need to get cleaned up. Ioki is no longer a cute little blond girl. She more resembles some sort of mutant baby like the one from Eraserhead. She’s mostly motionless, has no hair and no clothing; just a bursting-with-shit diaper. I respect my charge as keeper of Ioki and decide that we need a shower.
We walk through the corridor to the rear into another room, much like the last, but with an awkwardly positioned luxury shower to my immediate right. How convenient. I begin to remove the diaper from Ioki as she hangs limply in my arms. There’s still dripping molasses excrement all over my forearms. I pry off the diaper like an old band-aid from her bottom and notice that from roughly the belly button down, she’s covered in dense fur. We enter the shower and get cleaned up nicely. The room has opened up since we entered the shower and the color pallet has shifted from deep red to bright blue.
We are now inside of some random family’s mansion and proceed to meander aimlessly through a never ending series of rooms until we reach an enormous great room. Ioki has her pretty blond curls back. And apparently, Ioki has her family back too as she jumps from my arms, now able to walk (and jump and run), and scurries off to her family waiting conveniently for her by their plush blue sectional. I try to make eye contact with the family without success. I am nothing but a shadow to them. I inspect some additional rooms of the house in wonderment and then wake up.
Subliminaly Poetry
I woke up the other day with this stuck in my head:
The cucumber popsicle girl
had long sinewy legs
that cut through the winds
like dolphin fins
her brown hair she liked to twirl
Weird…
Save the Dog
On a calm spring day, I look out the window of my house (which is an amalgamate of my actual house and my parent’s house) towards the back yard and notice the sky has become very dark all of the sudden. Without warning, a monstrous black tornado drops from the sky and proceeds to thrash trees apart like they are toothpicks. It is barreling towards the house. For a second I think about loading up the dog into the car and driving away, but the tornado is moving too fast.
I yell for the dog and she comes to me. We run downstairs for shelter underneath the landing that leads down into the garage. I throw the lawnmower, throw the blower, throw every piece of junk I have stashed under there out into the garage and yank the mutt under with me. The walls of the house vibrate and groan deeply as the tornado cuts into the structure. I hear all kinds of cacophony for a brief minute or two and then everything just stops. It’s over.
I release my kung-fu grip on the pup and walk outside; the garage door is now conveniently open for us. It’s sunny now, the rain has stopped; only a swath of light gray remains in the sky. My roof is torn to hell and back, it basically doesn’t exist anymore. I no longer have a car. Evidently I still drive the 90′ LeBaron I had back in high school because there it is, parked in the driveway with a tree on it. Nice.
I’m then magically teleported to a most appealing car rental establishment in the midst of a random ghetto where I’m trying my damnedest to find some kind of wiring harness to go with the car I have just rented. It’s a beaut of a car: 70′s era Crown Vic, pearl white finish, white wall tires, plush velvety purple interior. No dice on the mirror though. I was kind of disappointed by that. Its best feature was the remote control that unlocked the doors. A simple unlock button was not good enough for this rig, no, it had a full on joystick control instead. Up for the hood, down for the trunk, left for the driver’s side door, right for the passenger’s. I toyed with this contraption for a minute, pondered what the hell I was doing, and then woke up.
There’s a Virus in My Pool
I’m on the internet one day, doing my thing. Listening to some music, wasting time. A banner ad pops up on the bottom of the screen. It wants me to buy an antivirus program. I thought I already had an antivirus program. I close the ad.
It pops up again. All my icons are gone from the desktop. The start menu disappears. But there is that goddamn banner again. It seems that I have a virus. And the virus is trying to force me to buy the cure for itself. A virus with a conscience. He knows he’s an asshole and he wants to get better, so he’s showing me the way. The “way” costs $29.99 coincidentally.
It becomes clear that this virus was made by the antivirus software company to get people to buy the cure for the virus they’ve given you. A clever marketing plot. I’m an elite hacker right? At least my grandmother seems to think so. I can fix most networking problems by hacking routers. And by hacking I mean unplugging them and then plugging them back in. Elite. I try to fix the problem to no avail. Screw it, I’m going outside.
It’s a dreary day in the neighborhood. Small white houses with side-yard moats line the street. The clouds are a dark ominous gray and are moving fast. The wind is whipping all of the huge oak tree limbs around. It’s the kind of weather I hate – it looks like it’s going to rain, but it wont, the clouds just wont come together right. An ice cream truck shows up. It is a filthy white truck that bears the logo of that same damn antivirus company that has been hounding me. No ice cream man jingles accompany the arrival of this truck.
Two men get out of the truck dressed in filthy white jumpsuits. They both have black hats and long greasy hair. One is a fat, black haired man with thick framed glasses. The other is a slim fair man with his faced hidden by an unkempt beard. They proceed to the back of the truck where they open a hatch and wrangle out a slimy dark green sea creature and slip it into my moat. It is some sort of large eel, about eight feet long with huge triangular teeth. It seems to enjoy the environment. The cool, muddy water pleases it.
After watching the little eel muck around in my muck for a short while, the upstanding gentlemen released a much larger, much more “teethy” sea creature into the moat. I get it now. they are illustrating a big bad virus attack on my poor little unprotected eel computer. This mega eel violently rips apart the little one in massive splashy thrashes. What a way to sell an antivirus program. Jeez.
A New Wife
I was going to write about the dream that lead up to this dream. One about a video game like adventure to avenge a college professor’s father’s death from an alien race. I piloted spacecraft with mysterious orbs, shot at alien marines, “respawned” after I died. But it was the short dream right after all that that made me wake up crying.
It was Jessica, lying on a wooden board that rolls back and forth, I’m staring down at her face. Her eyes are closed. She’s younger, maybe five or six years younger. She has a beautiful smile on her face, it’s as if she is sun bathing with a warm orange glow on her freckled cheeks. Her fine brown hair hangs across the board and falls downward.
I realize at this point that she has no idea who I am. We’re meeting again for the first time when she opens her eyes and says hello. At this point, everything we’ve had together, everything we’ve done together only exists in my mind. I look down past her face, past the rolling board she’s laying on and see that what it rolls in to. It is a huge furnace. It is a crematorium. She’s clearly still alive and happy. But “we” are dead.
I started crying and woke up crying. I went to my phone and saw a text message. It’s a grocery list from my wife. She’s fine and wants steak for dinner. That makes me feel better.
