This flu has some kind of mind of its own–or maybe the multi-symptom daytime cold medication that I took does. Which I took several hours before I went to bed last night so probably isn’t responsible for what went through my mind as I lay waiting for sleep that didn’t show up.
Won’t say how I got there but when I became a spider flipping upside down and around in the winds over a tunnel prairie broadly enveloped by great grey thunderclouds pushing me along in the distance, that was one point when I decided to get up as it was a bit overwhelming listening to the Whom-whom-whom bellows of the wind beating the grass. Took me several freaky hours to get there so it was nice that stream of consciousness ended with at least a pretty prairie.
I got up and immediately went back to lie down as it was no use my being up. Well, after I realized the world looked so freaky because I’d accidentally popped on co-adult’s glasses, that’s when I went back to bed. Maybe 30 seconds had transpired, me standing there staring at the room thinking, “Man, this cold is weird…” Oh. Wrong glasses. No wonder.
Didn’t sleep again, but after two hours of the radiator pipes above my head being for too long the spitting, snarling intestines of the world, two hours of my telling the radiator pipes this was too cliché as they drug me through all manner of underwordly muck and mire, and they retaliated finally by coughing up a glowing paper puppet of Alistair Cooke lecturing me on things I already know about Being and Not Being, then I decided–a few minutes after the initial shock–that again this was enough and it was time to get up and shake Alistair Cooke loose from his dark podium.
It was already 7 AM.
Yuck.
Yeah, doesn’t sound so interesting but that’s because I’ve clipped 6 hours of the really freaky parts out.
I went back to bed and this time things were at least not so muddy and wormy and dark. Instead, I watched Gerald Ford beaning people with golf balls for the next couple of hours. He did it in la-z-boy leisure slacks in brilliant hues the color of sunset. Even when they were green they were the color of sunset. Gerald Ford in pink slacks beaning people with golf balls. In yellow and twilight orange slacks. I had no idea he’d clobbered so many people in the head with golfballs. And every time he beaned a person, which is every time he hit the ball, wham, the scene exploded in candy sunburst plastic sparks.
Then I asked my brain what would it now do with Richard Nixon if he happened onto all this. How would it portray him?
Nixon appeared with no problem at all. Except it wasn’t Nixon. It was a man in a Nixon mask charging onto the golf course. A gargantuan Nixon mask. No matter how many times I rerolled I couldn’t get Nixon to appear, only the guy in the Nixon mask, who kept stumbling and falling to his feet because the mask was so heavy.
And that is finally what sent me off to sleep land. Visions of Gerald Ford beaning people with golfballs and a man in a giant Nixon mask running full tilt toward me but always falling to his feet and never reaching me.
P.S. I forget to mention that right before I dropped off, Nixon was finally pulling Chinese people into the scene with desperate determination and ducking behind them.
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