Groggy quote of the morning:

“I’m not sacrificing myself for a cause! I have principles!”
Says James, who is tolerant of my early-morning groggies, “I think you mean you don’t have principles…”
“No, damnit, I mean..um…it’s the principle…thing. Is there coffee yet?”

My allergies got me up in the middle of the night. It’s this damn apartment–the water damage in one wall of the bedroom has rotted out the plaster and insulation behind the panelling, making the equivalent of a theme park for fungus, which, given my mold allergies, is an unhappy thing. I got up at 4 AM, took some Sudafed Nighttime, and plunged into some seriously bizarre and incoherent dreams, which I remember involved rummaging through an abandoned house with an elderly monk, looking for something, but we could only look when the carnival wasn’t passing on the street outside. (I know, killer carnivals, how trite, but my subconcious loves the classics.) Having driven the carnival off with a plague of young boys dressed in black and carrying bunches of tulips (as everyone knows, this is the only way to defuse a killer carnival without explosives) I found a book with mirrored covers, which was written entirely in phonetic Cockney, and started out with helpful instructions on how to carve the book’s contents into a prison wall. Then it degenerated into a complex morass alternating shades of Stephen King and “Back to the Future” with nothing remotely resembling an internal logic; I bounced around in time long enough to A) remember that I really hate time travel, B) screw up my perfectly good Darkly Brooding Tower by accidentally transporting a giant tree to the top of it, rendering the space rather cramped and lacking in guard rails and C) yell “It’s 1893?! But I should be…84 then!” (Why my dreams think I was born in 1809 is anyone’s guess); then attempted some kind of ritual thingy which I screwed up badly, but which seemed to involve filling the mouth of a corpse with honey (possibly it would have gone better had I used a corpse instead of a comatose bystander, who started choking, but damnit, sometimes you don’t have a corpse on hand); took time out of my busy schedule to beat up a girl who was trying to flush a kitten down a toilet (I mean, really!); and eventually fell into the church basement long enough to have my fall broken by a stack of TV trays with paintings of pheasants on them, whereupon I was stabbed by a married couple of Japanese ghosts in front of a number of funhouse mirrors, AND the obligatory spinning buzzsaw, forcing me to limp through the streets of this small town, avoiding the carnival, dripping blood everywhere. It’s perhaps an indication of my personality, or the cavalier nature of dreams that I was mostly just pissed off by this.

Even for me, this was cryptic and complicated and generally nonsensical, and I’m blaming the Sudafed, and maybe the crab linguini I had for dinner. Now to take the car in and find out what the threshhold of pain is today…

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