2002-07-16 - 12:14 p.m.

I'm at home-again, home-again, jiggity-jig.

Filthy liars, all of them! Of COURSE you can go home again! I didn't even need to buy a bus ticket this time!

So it's nothing but Cherry Cokes and dusty jokes for this squeaky Wheel, at least until Friday. Then it's back to the other coast for the Move-In Mambo and the Get-a-Job Jerk.

But one thing I forgot to pack was my dream journal, which you might remember from such entries as this one. As such, I had nowhere to write down the shockingly vivid dream I had this morning, between the hours of 5:00 AM and 11:30 AM. I told my mom, so now I'll transcribe it here, for your amusement.

Now comes the part where you flee screaming in terror.

So:

I and my family (this home life is getting to me already) had decided to go to visit my grandmother (my mom's mom, who we call "Memom"). We set out and found this small town, which was not so much the small town where Memom actually lives as a Twilight Zone-esque "strange small town", with lots of odd features. My whole family, aunts and uncles and imaginary relatives like an ex-general named Thunderhead and a Bosnian freedom fighter named Nia Liara, had come to this town for a family reunion and to plan an expedition across the country.

We were going to sell time rifles, which my uncles Ed and Mike had invented. Time rifles were these guns which looked a whole lot like those cheap "Space Adventure" plastic rifles with the blinking light tips that made the same range of noises as a thousand other noisemaking toys (You know the ones: the machine gun noise, the phone ringing noise, the "eeeee-BOOM" noise, the weird warbling hypno-ray noise, usually all played in the same order ... you KNOW, right?). Except our time rifles could fire bolts of this aquamarine gooey energy that was called unTime that could freeze someone a minute in the past, slow someone to a crawl, speed them up so they had no control, (so a person running towards you would smash uncontrollably into whatever was between you and him at hundreds of miles an hour) or even affect particular parts of the body, like a blinding shot to the head (slowing down the eyes), or a shot to the gut that accelerated the digestive system and caused uncontrollable vomiting.

They were neat rifles.

So first we went to my Memom's house, which had become a two-story gingerbread cottage. We stored our belongings in an access safe, and then went to Nia Liara's, which was a tall spired castle by the sea. Nia Liara looked a whole lot like the Black Widow from the Avengers, but she wore glasses. We started loading people and crates of rifles into this huge caterpillar-wheeled caravan. I was sent with a single time rifle down a hill into town on an errand.

Along the way, unable to help myself, I cracked off a few of the time shots at various people who seemed like they were engaged in criminal activity. Then I found a tiny military base which was staffed by a bunch of actors. I collared a general who looked a lot like Robbie Coltrane and dragged him out to show him a demonstration of the time rifle's power, figuring that he could be of some help to us. I shot a bunch of people with it in a shopping center (which I'm reasonably sure was the Bayshore shopping center in Sarasota, where part of Cocoon was filmed, as well) and accidentally broke the rifle. I fixed it by bashing it against a wall, which is how I fix all electrical appliances of any sort. I then offered my services. The general nodded and smiled and ran away.

I trudged back up to the castle to find the caravan gone and everyone missing, even my family. I went into the castel and found only a pair of men, one very tall and one very short, walking around in circles on the second floor discussing movies. One liked comedies and one liked dramas. I ran back out, and down the bluffs to the beach near the castle, where I heard weird warbling music.

Then I saw something really interesting, which I'll have to write a thank-you note to my brain for providing.

Written out in shells in Atlantean (Of COURSE I read Atlantean) was a message to the effect that the sea understood the perils of using time rifles, and was setting out to stop us the only way it could.

Thousands and thousands of creatures were crawling up onto the sands from the sea. Mostly tiny baitfish, and little fairy shrimps, with huge silvery bonefish and sailed fishes thrashing along, sharks rolling through the grit, stingrays skating gracefully in clouds of sand, crabs and octopi and squid all earnestly dragging their bodies ... and most beautiful and strange, dolphins pulling themselves along with their fins, whistling that strange song. I tried to help drag a couple of animals back to the ocean, but the others lunged at me, trying to protect their march. I backed up, mad-eyed, and ran to the house, looking for someone to tell.

I found a crumpled letter written on a page of The Hulk #151 from the general I had seen to Nia Liara, warning that I was a dangerous lunatic and a menace to all the plans, and I should be abandoned to be taken care of at a later date. I wandered through the town back to Memom's house, which I remembered was locked with my belongings in a safe outside, and I was alone in a hostile small town which I was just beginning to realize was full of people with mirrored eyes. And I was getting hungry and thirsty.

So I woke up and had some orange juice.

Now you know.

- Wheel-Eye Joe

*****

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