From my dream-life last night. A bunch of people I know and I were lining up at one end of a long valley, and someone was handing out baseball bats. I asked her why she was handing me a bat, and she growled, “Cause we ran out of quills.” I glanced behind me and there was an entire pasture of tiny people growing, like a crop. Then I looked ahead and saw a whole bunch of cockroach-like creatures stampeding across the valley before us. And it was midnight, and there were a LOT of the carapaced, hungry things coming our way. They were clearly Zerglings, so I thought, “Okay, good, this is Starcraft, okay, I got this. Zerg. Baseball bat. Tiny people. Got it.” Dropped into a fighting stance. My baseball lights up blue like a Protoss zealot’s blade – or a lightsaber – and I go: “Cool.” Then the Zerglings are close and they all have Donald Trump’s face, thousands and thousands of cockroach things with his head (seriously, you have NO idea how creepy it is to find an entire valley swarming with pony-sized cockroach monsters with Trump’s head), and this huge sonorous voice behind me that reverberates in my bones and brain keeps repeating, again and again, YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS. YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITION PYLONS. And now I’m sweating, “Drat, this isn’t just Starcraft, this is Aiur. Or America. Or something.” But there’s all these people growing behind us so all right, game on, I start swinging my bat, and it gets REALLY REALLY BLOODY. And that’s when I wake startled because Jessica has nudged me and is complaining sleepily, “Can you sleep on your side? You’re snoring and keeping me up.” And I try to explain that I have to fight off the Trumplings with my baseball bat but I’ve already rolled over and I don’t think any of the words got out, and just as I’m feeling profoundly unsettled and desperate, I fall into another dream and this one involves bringing home a basket of eggs for River until it hatches into tiny tyrannosaurs and us raising the miniature pack in the back yard, except one of the neighbors goes missing and I’m TRYING to explain to the cops that the tyrannosaurs DIDN’T eat the neighbor, they’re really quite safe, they’re smaller than my fist, see, it would defy physics and basic probability for them to have actually eaten the neighbor’s entire body. Maybe a finger, or even a limb if they all ganged up, or possibly eyeballs or a nose but not the whole thing surely, but this doesn’t appear to be helping my case, and River is distraught, so we hide one of the tyrannosaurs in her cupped palms and carry it upstairs and hide it in the attic, which is gigantic, because this dream-attic has entire palaces and mazes in it, and the tyrannosaur gets bigger to fill up the dream attic, and River brings the tyrannosaur a bowl of chips to eat every morning and she calls it Mal and because it’s a dream I don’t remember that Mal is actually the dog, though the tyrannosaur does wag its tail a lot. And that was my dream.
Stant Litore
P.S. One thing, however, is clear today. I’m going to construct some additional pylons.
