A Violent Haiku

We kick off the warm up with a little mental challenge to create a Haiku. No fair, you say. One must count and make words at the same time. Very true. Now you see why we all cannot be Haiku Millionaires. I can't try to do that for very long it has exactly the same effect on me as chess and Sudoku. Pointless suffering, it is like driving way too fast on the edge of that road in the Himalayas, the one with only a single side (the other side is an escarpment of smoldering cars and truck all the way to sea level, far below).

I had a good night of sleep. Yeah! I had more strange dreams this morning starting about 3:45. Strange repetitive dreams, some had to do with visiting people in a situation I didn't know. Dark rooms, low ceilings. Wonky walls of indeterminate distance and substance. Huge commercial vats of pulled pork made by college guys, the other vat contained a vast quantity of the tomato based sauce to go with the pork. To contribute (it seemed necessary), I dumped a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti into the sauce vat. Then came the social rejection and I beat a hasty (and probably tasty) retreat. I went for the parking lot, it was dark out there too and a little askew (don't askme) and all I knew was the car I was looking for was aquamarine in color. Well, it just so happened that there were a few aquamarine cars in the lot, all diagonally parked.

Have you ever notice that in scenes of true evil, the cars are always parked diagonally. Check out any Fellini movie. I think it's part of the trope. I will check later with my trope guy. Maybe it's not a trope, maybe it's a -- dun, dun, dunnn -- metaphor. (Those are my 2 goto concepts. Yep, my Main Concepts. Those 2 will get you through most anything.) Anyway, there was a large, I'm talking 1963 large, station wagon, blue-green in color with fins parked next to a blue-green van. Looked like one of those older two-tone Dodge vans, about 1965. Can I get an amen?

Other cars of various evil incarnation were parked in an array of malevolence alongside, but those two were the ring-leaders, it was clear. I circled around and walked along the rear, checking out the back ends. I don't know why. Wait, because they were parked evilly, I mean diagonally, and it was night and the scene was lit only with those creepy mercury vapor lamps, you really couldn't see too well along the fronts of the cars. I probably suspected, naturally, because of my training, that there may lie things unseen along the front and I didn't want to fall for that old trick (TOT).

I already told you that the scene was decidedly wonky, there was an element of the surrealism to it, like Dali. The cars weren't straight, in other words. I went to the second car, the station wagon, wishful thinking on my part, and tried a key in the door. The key must have been 3.5 or 4 inches long. I had a handful of keys and they were all about the same length. So I tried a key at random and it didn't fit. Did I try another key? No, I'm way too smart for that. I just went over to the van and tried a different key. You have to be really smart to understand the complexity of dream keys. Unfortunately, I'm not, because that key didn't fit either.

So I can't stand around all dream looking for the key to open one of these cars. The pressure is building and I gotta get moving fast. (Because it's a dream, that's why. What kind of dreams do you have? Really, I'm just ha[ppy they're not worse than this.)

So all this time, I'm aware that it's morning on the other side of my eyelids and either I wrap this whole dream deal up or just call it a night and get up. I look down the row of cars and there are now young people walking around now and I no longer have my shoes on. This is the kind of dream you have when you get to be my age. It's not Zombies, it's young people walking slowly around. EEiiiiii! Eject! Eject! What if they surround me and start dancing? What then? "The horror!" (© 1979 Omni Zoetrope)

So I pull the emergency lever and wake up, boom, problem solved. No more weird keys and zombie dancing kids, no old crooked cars, I sit up on the edge of the bed, Smudge the dog stands up and stretches and walks over to greet me while Scout the dog just groans "good morning" from the floor at the foot of the bed (every morning it's the same). My day of adventure begins again,

By the time I'm in the shower I can barely remember a thing about it, but I try.

The old fingers are moving well and I'm ready to tackle the writing.

More later,

Oh wait--

Godzilla was dead,
people felt safe at last, then
violent Haiku.