IN THE DREAMHOUSE : Gummi Bear Cell Phone

     I dreamed my friend Laura picked me up on my lunch hour and drove us to the beach, where we went our separate ways, planning to meet up later. We were supposed to stay in contact with our cells, but I had this weird new cell phone that was rubbery, nubbly, and shaped like a big Gummi Bear. The keyboard was sort of virtual, in that there were no real keys, or markings to tell you where each letter was, you just had to imagine a keyboard wrapped around the body of the Gummi Bear and "type" across the surface of it. Obviously, that's very difficult and inexact, and I kept ending up with these totally garbled messages. I had to keep deleting and starting over.

Imagine this about the size of a chihuahua, and nubbly.

     The Gummi phone had a lens in its chest that would project images as holograms in mid-air, but the problem was everyone else could see them, too, and for some reason Laura kept texting me dirty pictures. I was horrified and embarrassed, and kept trying to turn the Gummi device OFF.
     Then I dreamed about a woman with an elephant-themed zine. There wasn't much to that part.
     The best part of the night was a dream in which I was perusing the aisles of a toy store. I have lots of toy store dreams. This one was very Lego-centric, with plastic facades for Lego playsets, such as a castle, and a dinosaur rock mountain complete with rubber dinosaurs and giant insects.

This isn't exactly what the playset in my dream looked like, but it's close.
I would have pooped my pants over this playset when I was a kid!

     Anthony was with me, and for some reason he had these boxes with him that were filled with his own vintage toys, which were fragile and valuable. Some dumb toddler boys kept trying to get into the boxes, and Anthony kept having to very politely remove their hands and get their attention away from the boxes. Their mother wasn't paying any attention to that. Even in my dreams, parents let their stupid kids run rampant.

POSSUM-GO-ROUND

     Last night around 9:30 or so, little Esther the chihuahua started barking all bat-shit crazy in the back yard. And it was her high-pitched "I'm gonna kick your ass!" bark. She was racing back and forth all along the wall between us and our neighbors. Their dog was barking, too, so at first I thought it was just the dogs being bitchy with each other.
     But she wouldn't stop. I went to the door and tried to call her in, but she was in a frenzy. She began concentrating her ferocious efforts in the far corner, underneath an overhang of honeysuckle, where there's a maze of branches by the back fence. Great place for something to hide. I was pretty sure I heard something hissing loudly.
     After calling her repeatedly to no effect, I was annoyed by the sound of my own voice, and imagining our neighbors saying, "Why doesn't that idiot just go OUT there and GET that stupid little dog?!"
     So I grabbed a flashlight and took off toward the far corner of the back yard. I expected to see a cat, but  when I got close I could see it was a gross baby POSSUM Esther had cornered back there. All pale and red-eyed, frozen in silent terror on the lowest crossbar of the wooden fence.

Not the actual possum, but pretty much like it. Imagine this at night,
with an excited chihuahua and a scared homosexual.

     I HATE possums. Not in theory, but in practice. In theory they're just these poor little animals that we've displaced from their natural habitat. In practice they're freaky and alarming-looking, and prone to hissing and scratching and biting. Naked tails, pointy snouts, razor teeth... YUCK.
     I crept carefully into the corner, underneath the twisting honeysuckle branches, trying to hold onto the flashlight and grabbing at the dog, but trying not to spook the dog so much that it chomped the baby possum, and trying not to spook the possum so much that it chomped the dog. God knows what viruses & germs that possum was carrying.
     Most of the time it was so awkward that I couldn't really see the possum as I was grabbing for Esther, the light bouncing around off of snarled branches and foliage. I was terrified that at any minute I would accidentally grab the possum, or that it would leap at my face, or that its MOTHER was maybe hiding in the bush and was about to attack my face or my dog.
     I really hope none of our neighbors were listening to me hyperventilating and saying something like, "Goddammit goddammit goddammit gross-gross-gross godDAMMIT!!!" over and over again.
     I was finally able to snatch Esther up and dash back to the house. She did NOT want to leave her possum post, so it was a struggle. When I got her into the house I quickly closed the back door. So Esther raced straight around into the laundry room and back out her doggy door, and we had to go through the whole thing AGAIN. (Hence the title, "POSSUM-GO-ROUND.")
     Dog barking, possum hissing, me grabbing Esther's hind-quarters and dragging her out of the honeysuckle, lugging her kicking and yapping back into the house, yelling at Anthony to put the cover down over her doggy door...

Imagine this, but with chihuahuas and possums...

     An ideal version of myself would have gone back out and tried to rescue the possum, maybe kept it in a shoebox with a little blanky and some water and food until the next day. But the poor little thing creeped me out, and I was scared of its claws and teeth and nakedness.
     I sat there on the couch getting my breath back, and feeling bad that over the course of the night a cat would probably eat that baby possum, because I am NOT the ideal version of myself that would have rescued it.
     Eventually Fox's "Animation Domination" numbed my brain, and I fell asleep.
   

LEMON THORNS

     Did you know some lemon trees have giant wicked thorns? I didn't, until I was rooting around under our lemon tree yesterday, picking up the fallen fruit so our dog wouldn't eat it and barf everywhere. I leaned close to the tree and felt something sharp scrape roughly up my forehead and into my hairline. Got myself a big ol' red bloody scratch. Lucky I didn't gouge my eye out.
     I yelped, recoiled, and peered at the offending branch, noticing for the first time since we moved in 5 months ago the giant obvious thorns. Some of them about 2 inches long. Seriously.
     Anthony hadn't noticed the thorns, either, which made me feel a little less stupid. Usually he notices every detail of everything.

This isn't our actual tree, but this is what they look like. I found this pic online.
I don't want to give our tree the satisfaction of taking pictures of it, since it might like the attention. Stupid tree.

THE DEVIL

     So this morning I was reading THE EXORCIST in the bathtub, in particular this really scary part where the demon is revealing itself to Father Karras, and all of a sudden TWO SHOWER CURTAIN HOOKS CAME UNDONE AND DROOPED DOWN!!!
     They're the S-hook kind, not the ring kind, so the effect was of two curved DEVIL HORNS suddenly gazing down toward me where I lay vulnerable in the tub with my Kindle. And I probably shouldn't even have that near water, but I did. I do.
     Why did those two hooks suddenly disengage and droop down? Was it... THE DEVIL?! Revealing itself to me, the way it was revealing itself to Karras in the book?

     I was like, "Oh my god, what should I do? Should I do something?" But it seemed like it would have taken an awful lot of energy to stand up and fix the curtain, so I opted to just continue lying there with the devil staring at me.
     I soon forgot all about it.