So the other day, I had this dream that I was flying back to Columbus, Ohio, to perform some sort of musical drama. The performance was, like, going to be in two weeks and it was like, not going to be performed in Columbus, but rather in Philadelphia, and the script was still incomplete, and we hadn’t, like, finished writing the music or practiced at all or anything.
So, when I arrived at Steve’s condo, Ashley and Ryan were, like, building some animal out of plastic and, like, filming it. Or something. This went on for a couple of days, except they were always filming different things, like Cheerios and Floam creatures and sea-urchins-that-look-nothing-like-sea-urchins. Made out of pipe cleaners.
So. We were going along, filming weird things and writing weird things – oh, and I think we might have been, like, keeping a blog of all this or something – when the guy who was going to play keyboard said he wasn’t coming, and we had to rewrite everything for four people instead of five – which we might have had to do anyway, cause, like, we were trying to maintain correspondence with the number of tines on a typical dinner fork.
Then we started having these rehearsals. And I think one night during one of these rehearsals, I was going to, like, chant some lyrics or something, and then Steve started waving his hands above his head, which I recognized as the universal signal for “dance like a robot,” so I started, you know, dancing like a robot. And then the music stopped and Steve was like, “What are you doing?! That was your cue to come in!!”
Anyway, one day Steve and I went to the airport, where Beth was, and it was weird because I knew immediately who she was even though I had never met her in person before. Then we picked up Aaron at his house in Newark, and he started driving and then we realized that we were going west, and for some reason, we, like, didn’t want to be going in that direction, so we turned around.
So we were, like, driving somewhere at night and it was dark, you know, because it was night, and all of a sudden, we were in, like, this dark tunnel and Ace of Base started playing really loudly and the car windows rolled down. Then the sun came up and we like found this hotel in Philadelphia, and it had a toaster that didn’t really toast things, so I brought the untoasted bread to our room and fell asleep on the floor for two hours.
Then we were, like, at this old house that was called an “arts center” and this guy who called himself Dr. T was, like, projecting some really crazy fractals and Hindu gods on this screen, and I almost became hypnotized and, like, had to go out and get some fresh air.
And then, we, like, did the show, you know, and there were people watching and clapping once in a while, and afterward, someone came up and told us that it was “fun.”
Well, you know, even though that was over, we were still kind of trapped in Philadelphia, so we wandered around in Chinatown and bought some fake fruit to keep the projectors company, took a trip to New Jersey, and ate at the Great American Diner Pub.
The next day, we were back at the arts center and had to do some visuals for some other musicians who were there, so we were, like, putting some postmodern evil flashing teapots up on the screen, and after that, we went outside. While we were standing there, I was suddenly having a panic attack from all the mind torture, so I bummed a cigarette off of this guy, and you know, it was just like being in Germany, because I was standing there smoking with other people who were smoking.
We were almost ready to get out of there, but then the van started clicking, and it turned out that, like, besides trying to communicate with us from the Twilight Zone, the van’s battery was dead. So we had to jump it, which was difficult because it was dark, you know, and we couldn’t see. But Michael Victor lent us a flashlight and we got things working, and we left to go to Perkins. Except that it wasn’t Perkins, it was just an overly-airconditioned diner where old men go to talk about killing their wives.
Well, finally, we escaped and were driving back to Columbus, stopping along the way to pick up a Christian selfhelp book about how eugenics is good and how identifying your complicated, unpredictable, genetically-inherited temperament will help you find your vocation and marry a beautiful wife.
Then in the end, the whole thing turned out to be some sort of moralstory about why you should never leave your whale in the desert because, you know, it’s kinda useless there.