The Hound And The Rat
9/10/2

So I�ve got a migraine. I wonder how that happened?

Oh, yeah. I was dumb as a rock and actually ate one of those little, after Mexican dinner, chocolate mints.

Last week, on Wednesday, I had half a Zero bar and did this. The Zero bar�s ingredients say that it has less than 2% cocoa. I guess that was enough. But it was Thursday afternoon before I really started feeling it. It was somewhere in the night that this hit me. I had crazy dreams.

But before I get to talking about my crazy dreams, let me tell you the crazy reality of it all.

The Director can best be described, in as few words as possible, as a chicken version of Eyore from Winnie the Pooh, but rather than being depressed, he�s rather plucky in a totally uninformed way. Well, a few months ago the Director said that he was thinking about getting a new car.

Do you know what a Mercury Sable looks like? Yeah, it�s a Taurus with different lights. Ok, take that and make it Fiji Blue Metallic. That�s a brilliant blue with lots of sparklies in the paint. Cover that massive monstrosity of Detroit metal with that paint. Ok, now find the cheapest looking bling bling chrome wheels you can find. And they gotta be big. Sure, these aren�t 17s but they are 16s. Put those on it.

Yes, the director, a direct male line descendent of Foghorn Leghorn, has bought a car for his ghetto booty.

TC said that the director said to him yesterday, �I was turning around the radio and found one of those psychedelic stations and they were playing Funky Cold [mangle the word medina here] and I rolled down the window and cranked it.� I told TC that I couldn�t take much more and for him not to tell me such disturbing things.

So, Today at around 7 p.m. Aisai and I will have been married exactly eleven years. And they are talking about calling our anniversary Unification day. I was actually pressured into wearing some patriotic garb today. Yes, I have patriotic garb. I bought a shirt that says �America 02� in that sports team script [the kind with the underline coming back from the last letter] for $3. Hey, three dollar shirt.

Aisai and I went out to eat at Pepitos, with me only protesting a little. I ate really good last week, ate medium lousy on Saturday and Sunday, and then ate really good on Monday, until Pepitos. But it was after Pepitos that I had that mint.

I often find that pain while sleeping makes me have vivid and weird dreams. I had some freaky dreams.

I remember that my dream started off as a school type setting. Very Dead Astronaut High School architecture, but the teacher which was showing a video kept hitting on me. Somehow this changed to me and my team pulling off a heist very similar to that seen in Ocean�s 11. We had a difficult time getting into the vault thing, and all we had to do then was slide a card and transfer the money to our offshore account.

We slid card, and there was no money. I called the insurance company that covered the bank and pretended to be the bank. They said they�d heard about the heist on the news and that it was estimated at over a million dollars. I told her it was some amount that was between one and two million, but gave her an exact number, and she said OK.

We slid card again, and there was something like $4,758,365,783,000,000 dollars for us to transfer.

Don�t you just love dream logic?

So, we transfer the money. Somehow at the beginning of the heist we has blown something up, this had now manifested itself as we were in a high-rise that we�d blown the sides off and members of my team were now escaping since the job was done. Marvin, a person I worked with at Hardee�s when I was in college, he killed his twin brother [in real life, not my dream] and since his quick removal from my life has made him a memorable character [well, that and he killed his twin brother], was suiting up to rappel down the blasted skyscraper, dressed as a laborer who would be cleaning up the rubble.

Nat King Cole was there, not on my team, but performing on a stage there with the rubble on our floor. Yeah, makes no sense, it�s a dream. He was performing �Oh Christmas Tree� or �Oh Tannenbaum� but the people around me said he was singing �The Hound and the Rat�. I listened, it was �Oh Tannenbaum� but they said it was �The Hound and the Rat�.

The alarm went off and I got ready for work, slowly since my head hurt like crazy. After my shower, when I was lying on the bed [which I don�t normally do while getting ready, but I needed a break] I figured out where the headache was from.

The drive into work was chillier than usual. I put the passenger window of the Miata up and the heat was on three while I was zipping at 70 mph on 565.

While my boss was venting to me about how he�s not sure he even wants a masters degree, I searched Google for �hound and the rat� [grouped by quotes] and there were exactly zero pages. I guess now there is one.

This will be the second night that I�ve dreamed Hardee�s dreams. BTW, for those living in the parallel dimension, Hardee�s is Carl Jr�s. Sunday night, I dreamed that I was working backline and making stuff.

In one hour, I will be in the insultingly cheery meeting at ITS where we celebrate the death of thousands at the hands of murderers. I know, I can feel it, that there will be a door prize.

Vultures.