Even my nightmares are stupid

Well, you know you're out of stuff to talk about when you start talking about your dreams. So here goes.

Last night--early this morning, probably--I dreamed I was in one of these stupid Saw-type horror movies where you have to do all of this weird crap or else something bad will happen to you or a loved one or a puppy or something. Along with several other people (none of whom, oddly enough, I knew, either in the dream or in real life), I was being held captive in a house by a psychotic guy.

How were we held captive? That's the thing. We knew we were being held captive, and there was some vague threat about leaving. But this guy was nonchalant enough about the whole business that at first I kept thinking, "Why the hell don't we just gang up on him and kill him?"

Alas, none of my colleagues could be talked into it. So then I thought, "Why don't I kill him myself?" I'd like to think it was because at no point during the entire dream did the psychopathic villain harm anybody. But in fact I was probably afraid of ludicrously complex booby traps or something. What a stupid nightmare.

To be fair, he did keep the mummified remains of his mother (golly, how original) stashed under his bed. But these were cool, interesting remains ... a hardened, resinous boglady type mummy, not a nasty drippy dead body. I remember thinking, "That's really cool ... I wonder how he did that."

Still, there's this vague sense of dread. When he takes a nap (yes, the psychopath(et)ic villain naps daily), I broach the subject of murdering him, but by this point, my heart isn't in it. Instead, a bunch of us apparently go out to a SCHOOL BOARD MEETING. At which point, my unconscious's voluntary suspension of disbelief comes to a screeching end. What a stupid, stupid nightmare.

If you only click one of these links, please make it the "puppy" link above! Oh, and "house." You won't be sorry.

When I was back there in middle school

I loved this book when I was a kid. I can't wait to read it again. For free. On my Kindle, baby! Also available as a free audiobook, if that's the kind of thing you go for.

I don't remember much about it, so it will be interesting to see if I can remember why it spoke to me or what it said when it did.

What I remember most about middle school is hating middle school. I remember a kind of creepy PE teacher who, in my imagination, looked and talked a lot like Col. Kilgore. Rumor was, he was still going overseas and flying missions on the weekends.

We didn't have recess; we had "Recreation" every other Wednesday, and it was a pubescent version of the prison yard. There was a kid who was called "Dirt Ball," and he had a game named after him. Somebody would yell "dirt ball!" and everybody would pelt him with footballs, basketballs, baseballs, whatever. And he would cry. I don't know if he was dirty, but I'm pretty sure his family was poor. Ah, the innocence of youth.

Not my scene, even though I wasn't Dirt Ball. I hated it, so I asked Kilgore if I could spend recreation in the library instead. He looked at me as if I were a pathetic, greasy-haired little punk in clothes his mom made him. Which, to be fair, was not far wrong. He let me go, though, probably because I was beneath his considerable contempt.

As an aside: this was recreation, not PE. PE was worse, because Kilgore could not tolerate lazy, idle little schemers who wore their underwear under their shorts rather than a jock strap. There were spot checks. And he was very concerned with cleanliness. After PE, the communal shower was excruciating, and if there was horseplay in the shower, the punishment was to assume the pushup position, unpleasant enough at the best of times, even worse when you're twelve, in shower with twenty other twelve year olds, in six inches of plugged up drain water, holding yourself in the "up" pushup position and hoping your hands didn't slip out from under you in the scummy water. There wasn't a lot of horseplay in the shower under the watchful, watchful eye of the PE teacher.

I loved the library though. The librarian was a younger guy, soft-spoken, patient, tolerant. Polite but not personally friendly. I and a few other unathletic types would sit there and listen to records ... Bill Cosby and Elton John are ones I remember. Once we "accidentally" pulled out the headphone jack while "The Bitch is Back" was playing, and this got us into a little obligatory trouble.

I signed out books by the armload and spent as much time in the library as possible. The librarian let me spend a ton of time in there and made sure I picked books that would make me want to read more books.

For this I am truly grateful.

Those thrilling days of yesteryear

Elsewhere I was advising somebody about where to buy plexiglas, of all things, but then I realized I wasn't talking about plexiglas at all anymore, but remembering buying glass with my dad from Moore & Moore, the hardware store in my hometown. My memory doesn't always work the way I want it to, so I guess I'll go ahead 
and lay this down. 

When I was old enough to walk on the "big road" (two lanes and paved, that is), I'd walk up there in the summer to buy my mom's cigarettes and use the change (from a ten, for a carton!) to buy a coke out of the machine, which was a very big deal. Glass bottles you had to yank out of there HARD ... and then drink them on the premises and leave them in the crate next to the cooler.

I do miss those glass bottles: the curvy coke bottles and the long skinny pepsi bottles. I tell my kids about that, and about buying cigarettes for my mom when I was ten (because the lady knew they were for my mom), and they look at me like I'm from the moon. I haven't thought about that store in years--roughsawn plank floors, half an inch of dust everywhere. It was like shopping in somebody's barn. If you went in there without knowing what you needed, the proprietor could probably tell you, because he sold the guy who had the house before you whatever it was you were trying to fix. And if he didn't know, he'd send you home with three different ones, and you'd bring back the ones you didn't need.

I try not to think about this stuff too much when I go into Lowes or HD now ... and I try not to expect too much help from the "help" there when it comes to advice about what they're selling. Some are knowledgeable. There used to be a guy at the local Lowes who knew a lot about woodworking tools, but he's not there anymore. When I need electrical stuff and advice, I go to the electrical supply store in town, not early or late in the day when the pros are trying to do their jobs, but in the middle of the day. I've gotten good advice there. Same with the glass shop, the family-owned lumberyard, and even the local Ace, which still has the family name attached to it.

Funny thing is, I'm not talking about the 40s or 50s here ... I'm talking about rural PA in the early 1970s ... not that long ago. But we're farther away from that time than American Graffiti (or even Happy Days) was from the 50s ... so I guess I can be permitted a little nostalgia for fly paper, nails you buy by the scoop in paper sacks, pipe smoke, etc.