This might well be a really stupid thing to blog about, but damn it, this page belongs to me; Blogger has my personal(ish) information for the remainder of all earthly life, so I may as well use the shit to my heart's content.
When I get too drunk, I dream hard; this effect is often doubled, even tripled, when a 10 mg melatonin is added to the picture. I'm talking balls-deep, LSD-soaked mental puppet shows, devoid of all substance and meaning, serving no purpose other than ruining the following day's productivity due to my obsessive over-analysis of them. I had a dream like this last night, in case you couldn't already tell where this was going.
Pabst Blue Ribbon + Old Grandad whisky
In dream-world, I approached my boss to ask for a day off of work, and she stared me down as though I were a rapist. In fact, the entire office was eyeballing me like I had just shoved all their grandmothers. "What?" I asked. "Did I do something wrong?" My boss (who, at this point, had shapeshifted and no longer resembled my boss at all, but looked more like a Tina Fey version of some Lilith Fair b-side) proceeded to pull out a scroll from her desk drawer and unroll it, directing my attention to the headline: Infractions Committed by Employee: Mike Jollota (2011-2013). There were literally hundreds, ranging from small things (rolling my eyes; stealing a bag of Fritos) to the terrible and violent (dragging an old woman by her hair; punching a man for asking too many questions). I was being read a list of my sins by a woman I had never met, and boy, was she angry with me. "Am I fired?" I asked, now extremely worries. "No," she replied. "This is just your warning."
"Well, can I still have tomorrow off?"
"Oh sure. Just don't hit anyone today."
Admittedly, this was a mild drunk dream. They often revolve around my workplace, as I'm sure the dreams of many other employable humans do. Of course, my booze-fueled subconscious also playfully grapples with lighter, more digestible scenarios, such as being bludgeoned with a fucking hammer:
5 Gin and Tonics + late-night Red Bull + 2 melatonin pills
This one really fucked with me. I was so freaked out when I finally awoke that I sat catatonic like a PTSD patient for about an hour, not touching my coffee or breakfast, recalling the evening's events, which had played out not unlike a Saw movie: I was being pursued by a man/creature, who had pig-like facial features and moved in a peripheral blur, when not bearing down on me in slow motion. I was running through my old neighborhood in Reseda, seal-rolling over brick walls, cowering in abandoned junkie apartments, always looking over my shoulder and peeking out from behind the blinds. The Pig always found me. It was a game to him, a demented cat-and-mouse, that always ended the same way. I had the sense that I had had this dream before. Early on in the night, the Pig struck my right temple with a massive hammer, shattering the orbital bone and allowing my brain to droop through the jagged hole in my skull. Still, despite the pain and the constant need to clap my hand over my exposed frontal lobe to keep it from spilling onto the sidewalk, I ran. I ran until my thighs burned and my lungs ached. And the Pig always found me. I awoke in the grip of a full-blown panic attack, hyperventilating, grasping at my face and legs to make sure I was all in one piece.
However, not all of my drunk dreams are quite so awful. One, in particular, comes to mind:
Lots of whisky
A storm at sea. Nothing but darkness and the thunderous crash of terrible waves, illuminated briefly by flashes of lightning, just enough visibility to watch the ship being torn apart around me. I stumbled across the deck, reaching out for something to grab onto, but it was no use: the ship groaned and creaked, followed by an awful explosion of splintering wood and snapping ropes. I fell into the black, churning ocean, where I desperately treaded water until the sun rose. I surveyed the devastation: no land in sight, surrounded by the shattered remnants of a formerly proud and unsinkable vessel, sharks hungrily bumping against my kicking legs. I began to resign myself to my fate: here was the place I would surely die, by drowning or exposure or starvation, and my corpse would be reduced to salt-corroded bones. I lay back, prepared myself for the end, when I was startled by the sound of rushing water. On either side of me rose two great humpback whales, and I could see the benevolence in their massive eyes, as if they were encouraging me. I understood immediately, and began lashing the ship's wreckage onto their gigantic shoulders. I built a sort of sled, towed by my two new friends, and climbed aboard, grabbed the reins, and shouted "Forward!" and we were moving toward the rising sun at incredible speeds, off to another adventure.
...to be continued.
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