Thursday, January 1, 2009

Last Dream of 2008

Siouxsie and Sarah

I know it's 2009 already and we should have already completely forgotten the past and begun steamrolling ahead into the future without any further thoughtful analysis about the year we've just finished, but I just can't do that yet. This dream was wack. I'm not sure if it's due to the pain killers I was on for my poor, poor injured arm (gym mishap! apparently!), but whatever the source, my subconscious has apparently just been brimming with awkward adult situations it needs to convey in dream form, and boy did it toss me a doozy this past Tuesday.

I was dressed all in black and standing in line at some sort of red carpet event, like I normally do on a Tuesday night. I was a contest winner or something. Yes, a winner of a contest; a contest for emotional masochists. You see, my fairy godmother, Siouxsie Sioux, was in town doing some kind of dumb promotional meet-and-greet thing that she obviously didn't want to be doing, so of course I was first in line to meet her.

It turns out that the prize I had won was to have my clothing ensemble mercilessly picked apart by Siouxsie in front of a bunch of people and cameras. Great. I only win the shitty contests.

I'm confident, though, as Siouxsie puts out her cigarette on the red carpet, exhales a plume of smoke in Bristol Palin's face (what is she doing here?!), and walks toward me with her critical panda eyes. Because I'm dressed in all black, which is slimming. Or it would have been if the black pants I was wearing hadn't been billowy, flared, and my mother's.

Siouxsie stretches out her hand and points down to my feet and up to my head and says, "How attached are you to this.... look?"

"Um," I stammer. "Not very. You know, these are my mom's pants, I wouldn't normally be caught dead in..."

"Hmm. Yeah, this is a disaster. Horrific. Absolutely ghastly." Then, to her handlers: "Are we done here?"

And with that, she disappeared into the crowd, leaving me on the red carpet by myself, my mom's pants billowing and swaying, the paparazzi clicking and flashing, Bristol Palin and her mother Sarah, among others in the crowd of gawkers, pointing and laughing.

Then the scene changes and I'm hanging out with some friends on that traffic island/sitting area near the Apple Store at 14th and 9th. I've changed out of the billowy pants thank God, but I apparently didn't have anything to change into, because from the waste down I'm stark raving naked. Still got the black shirt on, though, so at least I'm not indecent. As we sit talking about how awful those pants were, we hear shouts about the election. The shouts build and build, and the message they are carrying finally dawns on us: Obama didn't actually win the election. Because of a technicality (that thankfully remains unexplained, because this is a dream), he lost the election to Jerry Stiller. A crowd forms in the street and begins to get larger and larger, as people hop up and down, defiantly proclaiming that Jerry Stiller will not be their president.

I stand up, still naked from the waste down, and start walking up 9th Avenue looking for a place where I can buy some pants. The crowd gets larger and larger and harder to navigate through. The shouts reach a crescendo and just as I see Siouxsie and Sarah Palin talking on the sidewalk I wake up.

Such a powerful dream, full of symbolism and some such. What does it all mean? Well, I'll leave that kind of analysis to the experts, like Cindy Adams and Dr. Phil. Personally, I think the dream sums up the anxieties of an entire generation that is fed up with stupid fashion and losing elections. How great it was to wake up and realize that Obama is our president-elect and that Siouxsie doesn't know that I sometimes wear my mother's slacks.

I sat down at my computer, still half asleep, and checked my email. Then I checked my blog stats and saw that some person from Queretaro, Mexico had arrived at my blog by typing in the words "sextape with my grandma" into Google; another from Hubei, China found me by Googling "damn moms tube."

2009, you will be mine.

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