A Thread of Your Dreams in 2023
I was living in a small Catskill town, and we were hosting the winter Olympics. it was a rustic and budget version of the winter Olympics, full of all these made-for-TV storylines. I was rushing around all over the place, running and skating (I had awesome skating skills), acting as a go-between in all this last-minute behind-the-scenes drama. There was an ice hockey star whose rejoining with the national team was really tentative, because he had developed an ugly heroin habit, and just as he had finally seemed to clean up his act and was starting to win back his teammates, his father had resurfaced and — you see — it was his father that had got him hooked in the first place, and in the guise of supporting his son was trying to drive him in back into a relapse, because if he could ruin his son's life, then the weight of his own ruination would somehow be more bearable. Does that kid think he's better than me?!
And then there were the pairs skaters. They were so talented, but they weren't sure they could fit together. Something in her wouldn't allow herself to trust her partner ... not after the the last time. And he ... he couldn't trust himself. I think he also might have had father issues.
Also, the ice arena doubled as a roller skating rink and a dancing school, and the old coot who ran it was scraping by on hard times, but he saw the Olympics as a chance to also reunite all the generations of folks who had learned to skate and dance there. Weird dream in that I was just a bit player in everybody else's melodramas.
All I've Got to Do Is Dream
All I've Got to Do Is Dream
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
Also, I booked the Replacements to play during the Olympics, but the venue was a small clearing in the woods off a dirt road, behind a lot of tall grass, so it was hard for people to find them. It kinda felt like the town dump, which was kind of a dicky place for me to book them.
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
I'm confused, Lake Placid is in The Adirondacks not The Catskills and you
grew up in Brooklyn or maybe on Lawwng Eyeland or both.
You been smokin' blunts with Big Al?
grew up in Brooklyn or maybe on Lawwng Eyeland or both.
You been smokin' blunts with Big Al?
#lgm #ygb #ymdyf
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
Yeah, but my dream Olympics weren't held in Lake Placid. It was more like Windham or Tannersville or Elka Park or something.
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
I dreamt last night that Puerto Rico beat The Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, and Edwin Diaz got hurt in the celebration.
Whew, glad that was only a dream.
Whew, glad that was only a dream.
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.
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The Hot Corner
- Posts: 980
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Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
That was more of a nightmare.
When did the choices get so hard
With so much more at stake
Life gets mighty precious
When there's less of it to waste
With so much more at stake
Life gets mighty precious
When there's less of it to waste
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
Texted this to a run club friend of mine this morning...
Ok I may or may not have had a dream where you and I were in the roles of Reese and Sarah Connor from the Terminator only he was chasing us around the NYS Fairgrounds
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
I dreamt that X was on tour, and after noticing that they had an off day locally, I reached out and asked if they wanted to come by my house and visit with me and my friends. "I know you're a big rock stars, but do you want to hang with some people looking to have a good time?"
So, X comes by, and I'm so geeked out that I introduce them to my friends one at a time, and each makes a grand entrance. But my friends are dorky and boring, and even though X is the latter-day, older version of themselves, they quickly grow bored and start wondering what they showed up for.
I'm trying to get my friends in gear, like, "Come on! Let's show these LA rock stars how we party!" I'm kidding myself, of course. I'm dorky too, but I'm totally cooler than my friends.
Folks throw ideas back and forth, but the dorkiest ones just hijack the whole affair and insist that the way to make a night of it is that we all watch a movie together. Stream something from Amazon. And we waste about an hour of X's time discussing what to watch. And my best friend's wife starts dominating things, pushing for a film that checks multiple boxes of themes of social concern, with no regard for whether it's, you know, a good film.
We start watching something mindful but terrible. And the whole room is bored, but nobody really wants to admit it, because that would make you a bad person, but I can feel X is more bored than anybody else and looking to make a polite exit, so I say, "This isn't bad, but maybe we can try something else," knowing my friend's wife will hate me forever, but trying to save the evening.
We try a few successive films, each progressively more in tune with compassionate, progressive social concerns, and each progressively worse. Finally, X drummer D.J. Bonebrake looks at his watch, and declares, "Wow! Look at the time! We've gotta get going!" and singer Excene Cervenka isn't even trying to pretend any more and is all "Thank GOD!"
X leaves, and my friends and I are all mad at each other, some of us because others were too cool to watch a bad movie with rock stars, and others because the former group ruined a cool hang with X. But we're all too nice or confrontation-averse to fight with each other, so we all just sit there simmering. Like dorks.
So, X comes by, and I'm so geeked out that I introduce them to my friends one at a time, and each makes a grand entrance. But my friends are dorky and boring, and even though X is the latter-day, older version of themselves, they quickly grow bored and start wondering what they showed up for.
I'm trying to get my friends in gear, like, "Come on! Let's show these LA rock stars how we party!" I'm kidding myself, of course. I'm dorky too, but I'm totally cooler than my friends.
Folks throw ideas back and forth, but the dorkiest ones just hijack the whole affair and insist that the way to make a night of it is that we all watch a movie together. Stream something from Amazon. And we waste about an hour of X's time discussing what to watch. And my best friend's wife starts dominating things, pushing for a film that checks multiple boxes of themes of social concern, with no regard for whether it's, you know, a good film.
We start watching something mindful but terrible. And the whole room is bored, but nobody really wants to admit it, because that would make you a bad person, but I can feel X is more bored than anybody else and looking to make a polite exit, so I say, "This isn't bad, but maybe we can try something else," knowing my friend's wife will hate me forever, but trying to save the evening.
We try a few successive films, each progressively more in tune with compassionate, progressive social concerns, and each progressively worse. Finally, X drummer D.J. Bonebrake looks at his watch, and declares, "Wow! Look at the time! We've gotta get going!" and singer Excene Cervenka isn't even trying to pretend any more and is all "Thank GOD!"
X leaves, and my friends and I are all mad at each other, some of us because others were too cool to watch a bad movie with rock stars, and others because the former group ruined a cool hang with X. But we're all too nice or confrontation-averse to fight with each other, so we all just sit there simmering. Like dorks.
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
Any new dreams?
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
No recent ones that I recall but I'll share one from many years ago.
My wife and I had a cat named Homer (after Simpson, natch). He was a big white and orange fluffy cat, very friendly and mostly peaceful (we ultimately let my mother in law take him to live on a farm near her house because he was peeing on our floors, much more so after we brought Fgirl home from the hospital).
In my dream, in a very meta fashion, I was taking a nap on the couch. I wake up groggily to see Homer looking up at me. He has a crumpled up piece of paper in his mouth and he drops it on the floor within arm's reach of me.
I pick it up and slowly uncrunkle the paper and I see that in a very childish, scrawl, it says HOMER.
And I know that somehow he wrote his name.
And I look down at him and he looks up at me, in a way so as to suggest that he has more to say.
Then I wake up.
My wife and I had a cat named Homer (after Simpson, natch). He was a big white and orange fluffy cat, very friendly and mostly peaceful (we ultimately let my mother in law take him to live on a farm near her house because he was peeing on our floors, much more so after we brought Fgirl home from the hospital).
In my dream, in a very meta fashion, I was taking a nap on the couch. I wake up groggily to see Homer looking up at me. He has a crumpled up piece of paper in his mouth and he drops it on the floor within arm's reach of me.
I pick it up and slowly uncrunkle the paper and I see that in a very childish, scrawl, it says HOMER.
And I know that somehow he wrote his name.
And I look down at him and he looks up at me, in a way so as to suggest that he has more to say.
Then I wake up.
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
That's good stuff.
I had a dream about getting fired, for a really stupid reason. And none of my friends — including folks from here — were particularly supportive.
Then after two hours awake, I had a second dream in which I was fired. The firing wasn't the main theme of this dream, but damned if it didn't happen again.
I lay awake once more, but his time for only 15 or 30 minutes, as the second dream firing wasn't as disturbing as the first. I'm not giving details on those dreams, because it's the third dream I want to talk about.
I'm in some sort of bar, and there's a coin-operated video game there. NBA Jam. Around 1992, I played a lot of NBA Jam. I'd take the Mavs, who were the worst team in the league at the time, and with Mike Izzulino and Derek Harper, I'd progressively go two-on-two, beating every team in the league.
So I'm attracted to this newer, updated version of the game. I approach it at the same time some other guy does. He and I simultaneously reach to put our change in. He tells me to go ahead in front of him. I suggest that we play head-to-head, but he says no, he'll play after me.
The original game allowed you to play with two players — presumably the best, but not always (Izzulino?) — from each team, but I think subsequent versions allowed you to pick from a couple of players on your team. I kind of wanted this guy to play against me, because I was intimidated about how sophisticated the game may have grown over the passing years. And sure enough, after depositing my change, the game is taking me through menu after menu that I'm having a hell of a hard time navigating, and despite my best efforts to figure things out, I accidentally select the Celtics.
I'm then taken to a menu of Celtic players I can play as. I'm trying to control the buttons and the levers to sort through them and find a player I recognize, but some of the faces that appear on screen aren't in uniform. I pause at a photo of a blonde white guy in a collared, button-down blue shirt, and I turn to the guy behind me to ask, "Who is he?"
The guy answers that the face on my screen belongs to a Celtics assistant coach. I certainly don't want to play as an assistant coach, so I turn back to my screen to continue sorting through faces, but either I hit the wrong button or my selection opportunity has timed out, because here I am playing as an assistant coach. The game starts quickly, and I have no idea how joysticks and buttons are going to make me perform "assistant coaching" at an effective level, but whatever I'm doing is disastrous. My avatar on screen, now in a jacket and tie, is hitting his players on the sideline, throwing his rolled up papers down on the floor, screaming at the hapless Celtics NPCs that they are the worst team he's ever seen, and jumping up and down.
This is all in the first minute of the game, I can't manipulate the joystick to navigate him out of a small area near the bench (which makes sense) but I can't seem to coax him to do anything positive. What exactly should I be even trying to make an assistant coach do? I lightly tap the joystick trying to make my guy turn around to simply sit, and my avatar slugs a player at the end of the bench in the jaw, and the game seems to end with me being summoned to the owner's office, where he (again) fires me, telling me, "In all my years in sports, I've never seen a coach do more horrendous job in motivating his players."
This assessment is spot-on, of course. I'm the anti-Ted Lasso.
But now I'm not playing a video game any longer. I'm actually a fired coach. And I am wandering around the ballroom/conference room level of the swanky hotel where my former Celtics team is staying on the road. I know my life as an assistant coach and all the perks included end at checkout time tomorrow morning, so I don't want to go to bed, but I don't want to go out out and spend any of my now-limited money. So I kick around the hotel, think about ordering some food in my room while the team is still covering my stay, and I try to figure out how I'm going to explain to my wife how I got fired, because I couldn't figure out my joystick controls quickly enough.
I should have just asked the guy at the bar who wanted to play after me to walk me through the controls before I put my coins in, but I didn't, because of pride or embarrassment or something. And because of that, I'm a violent ex-Celtics assistant coach, wandering around the ballroom level when I should be brushing up my résumé.
I had a dream about getting fired, for a really stupid reason. And none of my friends — including folks from here — were particularly supportive.
Then after two hours awake, I had a second dream in which I was fired. The firing wasn't the main theme of this dream, but damned if it didn't happen again.
I lay awake once more, but his time for only 15 or 30 minutes, as the second dream firing wasn't as disturbing as the first. I'm not giving details on those dreams, because it's the third dream I want to talk about.
I'm in some sort of bar, and there's a coin-operated video game there. NBA Jam. Around 1992, I played a lot of NBA Jam. I'd take the Mavs, who were the worst team in the league at the time, and with Mike Izzulino and Derek Harper, I'd progressively go two-on-two, beating every team in the league.
So I'm attracted to this newer, updated version of the game. I approach it at the same time some other guy does. He and I simultaneously reach to put our change in. He tells me to go ahead in front of him. I suggest that we play head-to-head, but he says no, he'll play after me.
The original game allowed you to play with two players — presumably the best, but not always (Izzulino?) — from each team, but I think subsequent versions allowed you to pick from a couple of players on your team. I kind of wanted this guy to play against me, because I was intimidated about how sophisticated the game may have grown over the passing years. And sure enough, after depositing my change, the game is taking me through menu after menu that I'm having a hell of a hard time navigating, and despite my best efforts to figure things out, I accidentally select the Celtics.
I'm then taken to a menu of Celtic players I can play as. I'm trying to control the buttons and the levers to sort through them and find a player I recognize, but some of the faces that appear on screen aren't in uniform. I pause at a photo of a blonde white guy in a collared, button-down blue shirt, and I turn to the guy behind me to ask, "Who is he?"
The guy answers that the face on my screen belongs to a Celtics assistant coach. I certainly don't want to play as an assistant coach, so I turn back to my screen to continue sorting through faces, but either I hit the wrong button or my selection opportunity has timed out, because here I am playing as an assistant coach. The game starts quickly, and I have no idea how joysticks and buttons are going to make me perform "assistant coaching" at an effective level, but whatever I'm doing is disastrous. My avatar on screen, now in a jacket and tie, is hitting his players on the sideline, throwing his rolled up papers down on the floor, screaming at the hapless Celtics NPCs that they are the worst team he's ever seen, and jumping up and down.
This is all in the first minute of the game, I can't manipulate the joystick to navigate him out of a small area near the bench (which makes sense) but I can't seem to coax him to do anything positive. What exactly should I be even trying to make an assistant coach do? I lightly tap the joystick trying to make my guy turn around to simply sit, and my avatar slugs a player at the end of the bench in the jaw, and the game seems to end with me being summoned to the owner's office, where he (again) fires me, telling me, "In all my years in sports, I've never seen a coach do more horrendous job in motivating his players."
This assessment is spot-on, of course. I'm the anti-Ted Lasso.
But now I'm not playing a video game any longer. I'm actually a fired coach. And I am wandering around the ballroom/conference room level of the swanky hotel where my former Celtics team is staying on the road. I know my life as an assistant coach and all the perks included end at checkout time tomorrow morning, so I don't want to go to bed, but I don't want to go out out and spend any of my now-limited money. So I kick around the hotel, think about ordering some food in my room while the team is still covering my stay, and I try to figure out how I'm going to explain to my wife how I got fired, because I couldn't figure out my joystick controls quickly enough.
I should have just asked the guy at the bar who wanted to play after me to walk me through the controls before I put my coins in, but I didn't, because of pride or embarrassment or something. And because of that, I'm a violent ex-Celtics assistant coach, wandering around the ballroom level when I should be brushing up my résumé.
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
Very nice
Re: All I've Got to Do Is Dream
I think so. I'm not remembering well now, but I think so. I seem to recall the coach's golden hair an the Celtics' green tops.
A Shaolin monk does not sell himself for a handful of rice.