beautiful, funny, sad & true

At lunch, Sister-in-Law told Niece that she’d always love her, until the end of time.

“When’s that?” Niece asked.

I chimed in with the type of random comment for which I’m famous (or maybe infamous) in my family.  “I’ve been watching Doctor Who – which is all about time – and the end of time is the year five billion and something.”

There was a slight pause while everyone gave that comment the merit that its gravitas deserved.

“Uncle Todd,” said Niece, quietly.

“Mm hm?”

“No one’s laughing.”

Suddenly, everyone was laughing.

This afternoon in rehearsal, I experienced déja vu for the first time in quite a long while.  I was playing the snare drum, and the five of us were sitting in a particular way, working on a particular song, stumbling over a particular section, and then working out that particular section.  It lasted almost a full ten seconds.

This reminded me that I have a drummer friend (as of four years ago, anyway) claimed to have never experienced déja vu, and to the best of my knowledge, he still hasn’t.  He revealed that fact while we were on a long road trip, the kind where you talk about everything and nothing for hours on end; it’s one of the best things about being on tour.  One of us in the group – there were six of us riding together in a motor home – had a déja vu and described to the others, and that’s how the subject was started.  The drummer claimed not to have had one, and we all fell about with shock.  “Really?  How is that possible?  How can you have made it into your thirties without having one?”

At that point, he asked us what the feeling is like, and we had a very funny time trying to describe it.  Each of us said miniscule variations on the same theme.  “It’s like you’ve experienced the situation you’re in. . .before.”

“Somehow you just know that you’ve done this thing, whatever it is, before.”

“You feel it while it’s happening; that it’s happened before.”

It was like trying to describe an orgasm, or what it feels like to be drunk or high.  Each is very difficult to explain to someone who’s never experienced it.  For the record, I’ve had plenty of orgasms, and been drunk plenty of times, but still never been high, which is probably a whole separate story in itself.

Monty Python has a classic Flying Circus episode called “It’s the Mind” that explores this phenomenon in a very funny way.

Oh, and if you’re my drummer friend and you’re reading this (assuming that you still haven’t experienced déja vu), it isn’t really like that.  It’s more like. . .you’ve experienced the situation you’re in. . .before. Somehow you just know that you’ve done this thing, whatever it is, before.  You feel it while it’s happening; that it’s happened before.

Tune in next time when I describe what an orgasm feels like.

This beautiful little animated short film needs to be shared with the world.  Fans of the accordion and of Hugh Manatee–a.k.a the human spirit–will find it particularly touching.

/>

I’ve been sick for over a week now, and I have to say that my favorite thing about it is that my cold medicine has given me even more vivid dreams than I normally have.

This morning, I dreamed that I had just joined a well-known Portland band, and we were in the process of filming a new video.  Each of us was dressed in black, with matching black leather boots.  They got a shot of me walking across the stage, lip synching to a verse and a chorus of the song, and then I walked off.  I heard someone make a comment about how loud my boots were, so I sat down to take them off.  The director walked over and asked what I was doing, since the boots looked ‘so awesome’, so I put them back on.  While I was doing that, a female journalist came over to interview me, in a very flirtatious way, about what it was like being the newest member of the band.  Very strange.

Yesterday, I dreamed that I was the owner of a company that made titanium chariots (?!), and we were trying to incorporate them back into horse racing.  We decided that in order to prove how fast our chariots were, we could take any random person – especially someone who wasn’t even a jockey – and they would either win the race or come very close to winning.  It was decided that I would race.  I came in second, and our point was proven.  Our team won the overall competition.  I seem to recall that there was blood involved, somehow, but I don’t remember the specifics.

The day before that, I had three vivid dreams, of which I can only remember one.  I was in a city by a bay, that was full of steep hills, in the same way that San Francisco and Seattle are.  I kept waking up and going back into the dream city, with different friends and family members each time.  The first time was with my brother.  The second time was with my dad and stepmom.  The third time was with my friend DoctorLove.  Each time, we started walking down a main thoroughfare of the town, 38th Street, which ran east-west into the sunset, and got progressively steeper as it got closer to the bay.  I would stop to show my dad and stepmom the bookstores that Brother and I had explored, and I would stop to show DoctorLove the restaurant that DadAndStepmom and I had chosen, as well as the bookstores that Brother and I had found.  By the time DoctorLove and I were walking through a neighborhood on the top of the hill, I had become very familiar with the town, and I felt almost like an actual permanent resident.  As we were walking, I noticed a nearby house down the hill that had caught on fire, and I pointed it out to her.

We stopped walking, and overheard a few neighbors with varying theories about the cause of the fire.  “So is that it?”  I asked one of them, a Chinese man in his mid-forties.  “Was it arson?”

“No,” he replied tersely.

DoctorLove and I watched as the house became completely engulfed in flames.  The top story collapsed into the second story, and then both collapsed to the ground.  A different neighbor asked the group of us rubberneckers, “Any idea what caused all this?”

Someone answered, “I think it may have been the fireworks from the hotel next door.”  The dream’s point of view expanded just then, and I could see that there was a huge party happening at the hundred-year-old, six-story brick hotel next door, and there were indeed fireworks involved, the sparks from which were dropping onto the house in question, a fact which everyone in the hotel seemed to be completely unaware of.  We looked down the street, and saw that there were similar fireworks displays happening in other neighboring buildings, including a tall apartment building and a waterfront restaurant.  End of dream.

A few days before that, I had a dream that I was on a road trip in the desolate part of Nevada, and I had pulled over to sleep alongside the highway in my first car, a 1976 Toyota station wagon.  At some point during the night, a guy and his girlfriend had parked their car next to mine in order to get some sleep as well.  In the morning, they started to unload their mountain bikes, and I pulled my blanket up over my head to ignore them.  Or so I thought.  Suddenly a young man appeared with a knife, which he held to the woman’s neck.  They broke into my car, and he made the woman drive because the Toyota was a stick shift, which he was unable to drive.  I asked him why he would even bother stealing that car, and he waved the knife vaguely in my direction, saying, “It’s all about power.”

I laughed and replied, “If you had any real power, you wouldn’t steal this piece of shit.”

He was clearly flustered then, and he raised the knife over his head a little bit in order to try and threaten us, but both the woman and I knew that he was on the metaphorical ropes, and rapidly losing his confidence.  We stopped at a left-turn signal, and when the light turned green, the woman swerved into the path of a large four-wheel-drive pickup, which slammed into us head-on.  I laughed and cheered, and the guy jumped out and ran.

There, you see?  Being sick isn’t ALL bad.