THAT’S THE LAST TIME I EAT YOUR PIE (or A Mad Nightmare With You In It)

(pictured above: Lionel Stander, he’s in this one)

You know the way birds eat worms? And do you know the way birds eat tiny little pebbles and so on as a kind of roughage to help break down and digest those worms? Well, they do. Now, did you know that if you, yourself, eat worms and tiny pebbles and then go to sleep you have bird dreams? It’s true. You have the dreams birds have. It’s all flying about and crapping on car windscreens. The same trick applies to any creature. If you eat a can of Pedigree Chum you dream the dreams of dogs.

I think this phenomenon might explain what happened in the last post when I thought I was dreaming a dream with you in it but it turned out to be you dreaming a dream with me in it. Do you remember that big pie you baked and left to cool on the windowsill and the way it vanished and then you blamed the local foxes? Well, it wasn’t the foxes, it was me. I pinched your pie and ate it and ever since I’ve been having your dreams and, to be honest, I really want them to stop.

I mean, take the one you keep having about the last days of Joseph and Magda Goebbels? Christ on a bike, what’s up with that? You know the one I mean. The one where Joseph and Magda Goebbels are played by giant 12 foot versions of Earnest Borgnine (him-AGAIN!) and Lionel Stander (who is dressed as Magda) and me and you and four friends of yours are their children, but adult sized and all dressed up in white nighties, and Earnest and Lionel are administering us with cyanide/morphine cocktails in mugs of warm milk and telling us to sleep and singing us German lullabies and gently stroking our hair. Fuckin Hell! What kind of person has a dream like that? What kind of person are you? It’s incredibly disturbing, us lying in our little cots and you looking at me and saying ‘don’t worry Hedwig soon we will be in Valhalla’.

What really bothers me about the dream though is where it goes from there. The bit where we die and they lay us in these weird little glass fronted coffins and put us on conveyer belts and we trundle off to some assembly line where blue and pink bows are attached to our caskets and then we’re loaded into the back of a van and delivered to a white supremacist version of Hamley’s where our corpses are sold as ‘Last Days in the Bunker’ commemorative dolls. . . Goodness be to Jaysus in Christ (as my own mother is fond of exclaiming) what can you say about that? Your subconscious should be ashamed of itself. I don’t think I’ll be able to look you in the eye next time we run into each other in Aldi or wherever. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch Hart to Hart the same way again either. Whenever Max picks up Freeway I’ll be worried he’s going to give the poor mutt a mercy killing and sell its dead body to a toyshop. You really want to get your head checked out. Or watch what you’re eating before you go bed. Perhaps you’ve been eating someone else’s supper and have been having their dreams and passing them on to me as part of some kind of psychic daisy chain. If that’s the case, I’d keep an eye on whoever it is whose supper you ate. They’re not right in the head. I hope it’s not someone you’re living with. Lock the doors if it is. Lock the doors.

That’s the last time I eat your pie and no mistake. And what is it with the gargoyleish yank character actors??? Holey fuckin’ Moley you’re strange one. OK, OK, we’ll leave it at that. I’ll say no more about it.

A MAD DREAM WITH YOU IN IT

(pictured above: Earnest Borgnine, he was in the dream too)

I had a mad dream last night and you were in it. You. Yes you. We were in a small aircraft and you were the pilot and you were dressed up like a Chinaman for some reason, kind of like Fu Manchu or something with a fake droopy moustache, and you said, ‘it’s time to land’ and put us into a tailspin and we crashed in a forest but we were OK and got out of the aircraft and saw the house you grew up in in the middle of the forest and you said ‘it must be Christmas’ and then your mam came out to meet us but it was Earnest Borgnine dressed up as your mam with an apron on and he was acting weird and freaking me out a bit so I said I wanted to go home and Earnest/your mam said we’d have to use the raft.

Then we were in the raft going down the river Liffy and we saw plastic cider bottles floating by with tiny people inside them like submarine crews or the staff members of a strange hospital or something and they waved at us and then the river led out into an Amazonian expanse and shafts of dim golden sunlight spilled down on us from gaps in the lush vegetation above us and birds swooped silently in the dusky sky above the lush vegetation and there was this music in the air. . .

And you looked quite lovely in the Fu Manchu gear so I placed an arm around your waist but you wriggled out of my embrace and smiled at me and it was a sweet rejection and I thought you were right because the moment was perfect and didn’t need anything else and then we arrived at Bewley’s café and you were old and so was I and you wore a cardigan and a large Celtic broach and you were called Agnes and it was the late seventies and we went into Bewley’s and you had sausages, beans and chips and a pot of tea and when you were finished you sat back and lit up a cigarette because you could smoke in cafes back then and then you said we better get back because The Bionic Woman would be starting soon and I asked you if The Bionic Woman was a euphemism for sex and you just looked away and shook your head slightly and I knew you were right because the moment was perfect and didn’t need anything else and then I realised that I was growing tired of all these perfect moments and then we went and bought a pack of Fox’s Glacier Mints and shared them on the bus home and then I woke up in a stranger’s garden and a dog was barking and it was drizzling rain and a bewildered child was staring at me and I was very hung-over and asked the child for a glass of water and she screamed and then I woke up again and I was lying on a beach and I heard a buzzing and opened my eyes and they went cock-eyed because there was a huge wasp on my nose and I hissed at it to go away but it didn’t and the sun went down and came up again and went down again and came up again loads of times because days were passing and I knew winter would soon be here and the wasp would die and fall off my nose and I’d be free to go looking for you again.

Then I did wake up, I woke up properly, and I wasn’t even me, I was you and it was your dream and I was just in it and, you know, I reckon you’re a bit weird to be honest.