Last Night's Disturbing Dreams

You ever wake up restless and fitful because of a night of strange and disturbing dreams? I did today. And I don’t know why the dream muses picked last night to play ping-pong with my brain, either. I got to bed at a semi-decent hour and didn’t eat any Navajo Tacos in the middle of the night or anything. Strange.

I first dreamed it was No Pants Day at work. I’m not kidding. Apparently, some of the more liberal universities in our country actually hold No Pants Day, and have no intent to judge or condemn those that participate. I just don’t want to be haunted by pantsless images of my coworkers in my sleep.

I then dreamed I was a reluctant participant of a softball tournament at work, and I was assigned to play third base and right field at the same time. To my deep frustration and anguish, all of the hits sailed over my head and I allowed countless runs.

Then a fashion magazine was holding an open house at my office, and I was walking around aimless and bitter because of my poor performance at the tournament. I did, for a precious moment, enjoy looking at the editor’s collection of used video games and CD’s for sale while my boss took my picture.

At least we were all wearing pants by then.

Editor’s note: the following day J.Clark had a dream that one of the teenagers he teaches at church was trying to kill him.

Laps, Their Tops, and You

Have you ever seen someone actually put a laptop on his or her lap? Very uncommon. It’s a bit of a misleading name, really. Laptops are mostly utilized on coffee tables, balanced on the knee of a crossed leg, or infiltrating enemy lines onto the top of an actual desk, which I’m sure infuriates the desktop computers. The thing that surely infuriates them more is the use of docking stations, which invite laptops to use the monitor, printer, and other peripherals desktops used to have a monopoly on. Not good for the desktop computers. Not good at all.

Issues like this are probably why people have tried to assign the term “notebook” to laptops, even though they are neither books and have little to do with notes. This is mostly likely underground guerilla work from the disgruntled desktop computers, determined to defend their already shrinking territory on the tops of desks. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was instigated by the same people that are trying to call desktop computers “towers,” an altogether more commanding and respectable term than the weak and somewhat ambiguous “desktop.”

Strange how these things often pass by our minds unnoticed, isn’t it?

The Eagle of Shame

I didn’t win too many awards as a child. A couple of little league basketball participation trophies, a little ribbon for winning the spelling bee in third grade, and that was about it. Except for, of course, the eagle.

When I was young my grandfather met the oldest living Eagle Scout in the world. Apparently, he was in the business of molding and painting ceramic eagles by hand. My grandfather thought these would make great gifts for some of his grandsons when they earned their eagle scouts, so he had the gentleman make one for my brother, with his name engraved on the bottom and everything.

I never really liked Boy Scouts, and wasn’t very good at it. All the tying knots, making bird feeders, and watching mammals seemed silly and pointless to me. So I would just sneak to the trading post and buy Laffy Taffys and pop rocks with Eric Armstrong while everyone else worked on their merit badges at camp.

Consequently, I never earned my Eagle Scout. Neither did my brother. The age of 18 came and went for each of us, and the ceramic eagle just sat on a shelf in Gramps’s den. Some years later, he sent it to us, with Joel’s name still engraved on the bottom, and a new message scrawled on the under it: “And Clark didn’t too.”

We displayed it proudly in our bedroom. A symbol of our failure. A constant reminder of humility. If we ever got too complacent in our successes or too confident in our abilities, we would look up at its piercing eyes and hear its silent, tormenting cry: “KAW! KAW! YOU FAILED!”

Names for Things

I name things, quite frequently. Stuff I use regularly. Mostly cars and electronic devices. My first car was named Smashy, because that’s what the back bumper looked like after I got rear ended my third day driving it. Lindsay’s car is named Shrinky. (It’s a Suzuki Esteem. Psychologists help people gain self-esteem. Psychologists are also called shrinks. A bit of a stretch, but a very cute name.)

I have also named all my iPods. The firstborn was Kilroy (Kilroy seems to be my default for just about everything – I named a robot in a radio drama I once made Kilroy, and it is also my rap misnomer). He went missing, but in my heart of hearts, I still have an idle hope that we might find him. Following suit, I named my second iPod Kilretta, because she was a feminine electric blue. After she was smashed to bits in the prime of her life by a speeding line of 18-wheelers I adopted Kilbot, who still remains with me even though he is now mute. My current iPod is named Bowen.

My first computer was named Kompyuter, with an exclamation point at the end. There is an involved and uninteresting story why that I won’t go into. I called my second computer Wardin, and my third and current computer remains nameless. I also have a laptop named Slappy. This is because I name my computers posthumously, so I can clearly label the back up discs of information I’ve taken from them before they go to the place where good computers are eternally blessed.

Don’t act like it’s weird. You know you name stuff too.

You Say Fixation, I Say Project

I am always working on some sort of project. I think it runs in my family. Mom is always sewing pajamas for the grandkids or mending costumes for a neighbor. Dad is constantly gulping down the facts from his latest book in the dead of the night in his study. My sister Laurel has the Gardner Gazettes family newsletter, my other sister Care has quilts, and so on. Projects everywhere.

I’ve found that my projects rotate. For some reason I can only work on them one at a time. And I get obsessed. I want to put in as much time as possible. On my latest road trip, I took a laptop with me and typed away a short story while everyone slept around me. When I started my job at Melaleuca, I would take pages of my screenplay with me to the gym and edit them while I bobbed up and down on the treadmill.

My usual projects—or fixations, the term changes depending on how much I let them get in the way of other responsibilities I attend to—currently rotate among screenwriting, cartooning, making music, writing fiction, and ghostwriting for Philip J. Harpman (who has been working on a new and exciting project off and on for the last year or two). A rotation can last anywhere between a few weeks to several months. My latest was my comic strip, “Learning to Fly,” which I recently submitted for syndication. The last few weeks I’ve been working on a couple of short stories starring Murphy “Wheels” Tomlison, a paraplegic private detective, and his hippie homeopathic nurse assistant Nikki.

I thrive on my creative projects. I love being able to create art rather than mindlessly soak in the treacherous tripe that is sloshed across checkout counter magazines and television screens. I hope you all have projects you can turn to as well. If you don’t, or have always thought about doing something but have been afraid to, now is the time. Unless a DVD boxed set of “Charles in Charge” sounds more interesting. Your choice.