Themanfromnantucket - There Once Was A Man From Nantucket...

I think my unconscious got insulted by my description of yesterday’s dream as hacky because I just woke up from a really unmarketable one.

I was a French detective, maybe private, maybe municipal, some kind of investigatory agent. I had been hired to solve a growing problem that had something to do with a new advertising campaign.

I think it was the future, this was never explicitly established but I’m saying it while remembering the dream, because in this world, TV, movies and video games had become the same thing, and all entertainment had fused with reality, and advertisement had taken the form of real-life events designed to capture our attention. One such advertisement had gotten out of control, there were extreme “flavor storms” happening (nobody called them that but I’m calling them that), in which basketball-sized globules of a new snack flavor were raining down on public places, destroying property and killing people because they were like acid, eating through metal and flesh. I was certain it was a new Dorito flavor but my job was to prove it.

The noirish complication was, the more I watched myself walking around asking bystanders if they’d heard about this new extreme flavor causing so much havoc, the more I began to wonder if my investigation wasn’t actually just another layer of the promotion. I’d been set up.

I had this young female partner and protege that looked kind of Aeon Fluxy, and she was asking me a lot of questions about the discipline of detaching oneself from reality..I kept telling her, just watch what I do, I can’t explain it, you have to observe. I have to observe. And I remember having her call up every old TV show she could find in which the protagonist had become detached enough to investigate his own investigation.

In this future-ish world, you could play any pre-existing entertainment in your head; you could watch five old TV shows at once while having a conversation and it would all be in your head…this is why I had become so suspicious about my case - new entertainment had become reality and old entertainment had become something we watched without watching, so who was to say my reality wasn’t something someone else was watching? I knew there had been countless movies and TV shows in the past that had played with this concept, so why not pull those up. I continued my investigation while watching an episode of Diff’rent Strokes in which Arnold and Dudley go to Los Angeles and visit NBC (dreamer’s note: I think there is an episode of Diff’rent Strokes where the Drunmonds visit the set of Knightrider but this episode wthin my dream was different). I found some kind of geographic/psychological connection between the places Arnold visited and the places where Extreme Dorito Storms were killing people, so I kept retracing his steps, and the storms kept getting worse.

There was a lot of cool business I can’t remember but toward the end of the dream, I leapt from the roof of my hotel onto a platform halfway up the Eiffel Tower, which was splashed by Dorito acid, and there were holes in the structure and I became siezed with vertigo as I looked down at a city of tiny houses through the assailed iron mesh. I couldn’t move. And at the same time, in my playback of Diff’rent Strokes, Arnold and Dudley had ended up on the Warner Brothers water tower, and were peering out over Los Angeles at a skyscraper with the NBC logo on it. The audience laughed and applauded, and the Eiffel tower started creaking. I ran and jumped off the platform and was able to grab a nearby curtain on the way down, because, luckily, as it turned out, the Eiffel Tower was inside a giant shopping mall.

I rode the curtain down to the floor level. I realized I had lost my cigarette and shook it out of the curtain before it caught fire.

My Aeon Fluxy protege was waiting for me and asked what she should do if I ever really fell.

I told her that if I ever really did fall, it would be a “cataclysmic event for her.” Why for her, she asked. “Because I’m dreaming,” I said.

And then I woke up, which is a bummer, because I was a French Detective in the future chasing Dorito storms for fuck’s sake. Put me back!

Semper in excretia sumus solim profundum variat.

“We’re always in the manure; only the depth varies.” (via ieatedthepurpleone)

Actually, I own a copy of "101 Uses for a Dead Cat" (and I might have 101 More Uses for a Dead Cat somewhere in my parent's basement). It's one part disturbing to two parts amusing. I can only hope that they release a third edition that includes the hovercat.

Full article on the hovercat can be found here.

Just a few gems from the treasure trove that is the “Weird Books” section of abebooks.com

Are all of you managing to stay dry and safe?

I'm not sure what I could do to help, but I can certainly try if you're out of options.