This just in!

I’m under mild time pressure tonight, so this entry might be a tad more stream of consciousness than usual.

So I made the call to this Daniel guy at VFS at around 3 pm. Got his voice mail, left a message.

Tried again at 3:30 pm. Got his voice mail, left another message.

One more try at 4:15. Got his voice mail, left a third message, and that was it. Don’t want to seem desperate.

Even though I am. I totally am. I want into the VFS Writing for TV and Movies course so bad, I feel like a dog in heat at the end of its leash. It can smell the thing it wants, but it can’t GET THERE.

I will try again Monday. On the one hand, I don’t want to seem desperate, on the other hand, I don’t want to give him the impression that I am the sort of problem that will go away if he ignores it for long enough.

You always have to make it so that the path of least resistance is to do what you want.

In retrospect, I am not surprised that he was not answering his phone between 3 and 5 on a Friday. Patrick, who’s thinking about life insurance and is also my “guy who helps people through the applying process”, told me to call this Daniel guy today, mid-afternoonish, but I don’t think he took the Friday Effect into account.

I assume this guy is not answering his phone because he’s kind of already checked out and answering the phone is work, as is dealing with whatever the person on the other end wants.

Monday it is, then.

Therapy today. Told my shrink about all the stuff that came up regarding that Internet addiction documentary that I wrote about last Wednesday. He didn’t have a whole lot useful to say about it, but therapy is a nonlinear process and sometimes it’s enough just to have someone listen to you for an hour.

I am still pondering the lack of controlling influences in my life. I remember that there was one time, one time only, that I tested my parents. I was hanging out with Jason Heisler and some other of the heavy metal/bad seed crowd, and I decided I would just stay out till 2 am and see what happened.

They did eventually notice I was missing and get worried I was dead in a ditch somewhere. They called the cops, asked around, and generally fretted until I showed up.

And while I got quite the “Thank God you’re alive NEVER DO THIS TO ME AGAIN lecture when I got home, I found the whole experience really gratifying because it proved that they actually did care whether I lived or died.

So that was my big experiment with “acting out”. I never did it again. I worried my parents a few times after that, but it was not on purpose. I just lost track of time, or ended up someplace where I could not get home on my own, or the like.

Still, how many teenage boys have a curfew of midnight?

Answer : All of them who were raised to be the least amount of work for their parents to parent. They told me that they trusted that I was sensible enough to stay out of trouble and take care of myself, and the thing is, they were right. I never did anything particularly crazy in my teen years because people do that shit to rebel.

And what did I have to rebel against?

Oh, I have to write down this weird dream I had this morning.

I remember I was in a restaurant, talking to a midget who was carried around by a huge man, Quatto style. He was complaining and snarling at people and being aggressively misanthropic.

So I had to ask him, “Why did you open a restaurant?” meaning “If you hate everybody, why the hell did you get into a very service heavy business?”

But he took it as an invitation to tell me the origin story for this business, which I do not remember.

I decided to get some food, seeing as I was in a restaurant, and I decided to get one of my favorite diner dishes, the hot turkey sandwich. Turns out, they didn’t have that, so I said “Well have you got a cheeseburger?”, and they did.

Can’t go wrong asking for a cheeseburger in this culture.

Then the total came to $17.90 (I can definitely read numbers in my sleep) and I was all, “For a cheeseburger and fries? I could get that at McD’s for ten bucks and it would include a drink!”

Then things get weird, because after that, I was in a sort of basement in the large building which housed the restaurant, and there was a bunch of groovy people there smoking pot and dropping acid.

Someone offered me some acid, and I said to myself “I should stop being so timid” and so I took it and got quite high.

You read that right. I got high in a dream. The metaphysical implications are staggering.

Except in the world of my dream, acid didn’t make you see colors or totally trip out. Instead, I experience a highly unstable euphoria and staggered around. I was having motor issues, but I was too high to care.

People in the dream said “Dude, are you okay?” and I cheerily reassured them I was fine, I just had not done acid in a really long time. Like 20 years.

That is more or less where the dream ended.

As always with the dreams I bother to write down here, it’s not just the bizarre nature of the dream that compels me to record it in my blog, it’s how vivid the whole thing was. I can remember the taste of the fries, the smell of the restaurant, the face of the midget (looked like a Chuckie doll sneering in disgust), the sound of plates clattering and people talking, the feel of the plastic tray in my hands.

And while I joked about it earlier, I am pretty interested in knowing what it means when you do drugs in a dream. Was my mind trying to access certain emotions and used the acid as a shortcut?

Well, whatever. Right now, I need to rest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.