Juniorbird.com

Humans had gone to the stars, filled with hope, and colonized one planet, many light-years away from Earth. But, as we entered the universe, we made enemies, and one of these enemies attacked earth and rendered it uninhabitable.
Now, over a hundred years later, we’ve returned to the stars, determined to colonize yet another planet and give our civilization a chance to grow. I brought my family with me, on one of the gray, bulbous colony ships; my blonde wife was excited about the planet the fleet was headed for. But, when we arrived, three alien races had all begun to develop the planet for themselves. We had to turn around.
So I went to the council meeting with my crazy idea — I have always been good at crazy ideas. We met on the bridge of one of the transports, a wide-open, plexiglass-enclosed space, with a control panel, covered with blinking lights, standing on a pillar in the middle of the large, black room. Standing around the control panel with the few council members, I made my proposal. This many years after the attack on Earth we know that life on the planet has grown back; it’s a green planet, without animals, just waiting for civilization to return. And wouldn’t it be a triumph for us to return to our home planet?
The council bought it, and we turned the ships on a course for Earth. But boy was my pretty blonde wife angry! She had her heart set on the planet we were headed for, and she was quite irate to think of us heading nowhere. But where else could we go? The fleet headed for Earth.

While on the campaign trail, I thought I would take a break and see an “old friend”:http://http://www.tayshaurquhart.com/Blog/ for dinner. My car drove me and my chief of staff along the 1, up the curves of the coast, to a restaurant on the top of a small rise overlooking the Pacific. Inside, we ate a grand gourmet repast.
Sadly, at the end of the meal my stomach was a bit upset. On the last of a few trips to the bathroom, three beautiful college girls asked me if I was ok. I admitted that I was experencing some stomach distress, and, after some flirtatious banter, one of the women offered me three pills from her handbag. Somewhat sheepish, I took them and, back at the table, added them to a pocket of my backpack that was filled with Advil.
Later, chatting with the three women and having a cocktail on the large lawn of the restaurant, I saw a police officer approaching. I looked over and saw my chief of staff; “I needed to do this now,” he said, “to stop the problem before it got too late.” The cop cuffed my hands in front of me, and grabbed my backpack to search it. “I can’t believe you did this to me,” I screamed, as I shoved my Chief Of Staff against a portico’s pillar and battered him with my cuffed hands.
After a few blows, and with my Chief of Staff mostly unharmed, my anger subsided. It was replaced by tremendous regret, regret that I had accepted those three pills. I had only accepted them out of politeness, and hadd never planned to take them, but those pills were in my bag. What were they — were they prescription medication, over-the-counter medication, or illegal drugs? Would the cop find them? Would my campaign end, and my downfall be assured, by my Chief Of Staff’s betrayal and my own overly-friendly acceptance of the pills?
Of course, I will never know, because then I woke up.

I am on the starship Enterprise, from the Next Generation TV show (a fine show, even if “certain people”:http://brenditabonita.blogspot.com/ think it’s boring). We find a spaceship (is it an alternative Enterprise? I’m not sure) stuck in between two dimensions, partially in ours and partially in another. This ship moves close to us to transfer its crew over; “it must be so horrible to be trapped between dimensions, they’ll try anything,” says Captain Picard.
Their ship touches ours, at the bottom of our saucer section, then winks out of existence. Picard and I ride the turbolift down to see who we’ve taken on board. At the bottom of the turbolift shaft, the door doesn’t open; I am about to force it when Picard pushes on the door; it flexes in and out like the safety button in the middle of a juice bottle’s cap. The area outside is depressurized; the bottom two levels of the saucer section were opened to space when the other ship disappeared. If I had opened the turbolift door, Picard and I would have been killed.
After a few anxious moments, the turbolift takes us back up to the bottom “living” level. I comment how awful it would have been to get stuck down at the bottom floor; Picard agrees.
Now the day is over, so I leave the turbolift and go to sleep on my bunk, a hospital gurney in the middle of the deck, which is open from one end of the ship to the other. Nobody is there. I turn out the lights. In the middle of the night I wake up with the feeling somebody is watching me. Nobody is there, but there’s a tricorder on the floor, its screen glowing in the darkness.
Are the people from the other ship really gone? Am I really alone?

Four rustlers shot my brother, so I had to track them through the dusty southwest to exact my revenge; in parallel, a posse rode after the rustlers to catch and hang them. Several times, I came close to finding the rustlers; each time, I ran into their beautiful sister, and we drank whisky together in the dry heat. Finally, we fell in love.
I chased the rustlers into an underground cave, where we shot it out; I killed some of them but they shot me as well as they fled from the cave. I rolled into the cave entrance to hide and bleed; the sister was there, and she began to treat my wounds. Then the posse caught up behind us. They thought, since I was in the cave, I must be in with the rustlers, and rushed the cave and captured me and the sister. They didn’t give me the chance to explain; instead, they fixed explosive collars to me and the sister, planning to execute us by blowing our heads off. Then they poured battery acid on our heads; the sister’s face melted, but mine was somehow unharmed. Fearing that the explosive collar wouldn’t actually blow my head off but just wound me grievously, I begged the posse to understand that I was also chasing down the rustlers. They let me go, and the now-wounded sister treated the bullet holes her brothers put in me.

The dream started out in the hardware store. I don’t remember anything about what I shopped for, because the important part came after I left the store and went to my car in the parking lot. I put my Lexus in drive but went nowhere. More gas, still nothing. Again, and I started rolling. I pulled out of my parking spot, and started to break, but, again, nothing — I kept rolling, into a little hatchback, pushing that car through the front of the hardware store. After offering my apologies to the Latino driving the hatchback, I got into my car to back it out of the mess I’d just made. But I couldn’t see past the water truck parked next to my accident site; I decided to back up slowly. As I pulled out, a black Toyota pickup suddenly appeared from behind the Sparkletts truck; I lay on my brakes but, of course, they didn’t work, and I hit the Toyota. I rolled forward and, somehow, stopped, then got to look at the damage to the back of my car. You could see sunlight poking through the holes in my smashed trunk lid (a lid that, incidentally, looked like the lid of my old real-life Taurus. What a mess!
Of course, it was hard to drive today, and I expected disaster at every moment.

Somehow, I’ve managed to miss everybody’s favorite new movie, _The Passion of the Christ_. I actually considered seeing it over the weekend, but, instead, I ended up seeing “Goodbye Lenin”. My brain apparently decided that I should have seen _The Passion_ instead, because I had a dream I was watching the movie.
Actually, I think the dream was about a dream sequence in the movie, a scene which I’m sure doesn’t exist but which I, clearly, would have included in the movie.
In this scene, Christ is dreaming about getting crucified, or perhaps He’s imagining it. He’s first tied to the cross, then His head and arms are draped with red silk, then He’s nailed to the cross. As I watched the scene, I thought to myself, “this isn’t going to be the gory crucifixion scene, that comes when He’s really nailed to the cross.” And I was right! The nails were clearly not driven into Jesus’s hands, but instead into the cross between His arms and the red silk. As all this happens, passers-by talk about what’s going on in English.
Then, of course, I realized that the movie was supposed to be in Aramaic, so the language of the actors changes. Two people mock Jesus in what is probably actually German but heck I don’t speak German anyway so it might as well be Aramaic.
Then I woke up. This dream, I really don’t know what it means.

I had to make a visit to the doctor’s office, so I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the building. I’d been to this office before, and I hated going — at the top of the stairs was a railing, and I had to climb over this railing and walk along a thin ledge jutting out next to a four-story drop in order to get to the hallway the doctor’s office was on. When I got to the top several people were climbing over the rail to go to the doctor, but I suddenly became very scared as I approched the railing. A nice blonde technician in scrubs said that many people become scared climbing over this railing and helped me get to the office.
After I left the office, I ran into my mother — who also saw the same doctor — in the waiting room, and we left together. She planned to take the elevator down, so we walked to the elevator which was just down the hall. There was a small hatch in the wall leading to a small shaft in which an elevator barely large enough for two must have traveled. I was apprehensive about taking this elevator and proposed using the stairs, but my mother assured me that the elevator was OK. The man in line ahead of us opened the door to the elevator shaft and reached in — I told him to watch his hand because the car might be coming. He shot me an odd look with his head cocked to the side, then pushed a button inside the shaft. A large platform rose through a hole in the floor and my mother and the man stepped on. I joined them, and the platform began to descend. It turned out that my mother had worked with the man, who was a lawyer, in the past; they talked about stories of the case they had collaborated on.
Suddenly, the elevator gave a lurch and the platform tipped sideways. The man was undisturbed, but I had to grab the floor to keep from falling. I yelled to my mother to hold on, but she fell into the shaft. We were only about a story down, so I feared she’d died in the three-story plunge. The man was totally unperturbed. I frantically asked him if he thought my mother would be ok, and he said yes; then, up the shaft came her voice: “I’m ok!”.
Then we reached the first floor.

My family was out of the house, and, as a young teenager, I wanted to be a bad boy. So I peed in the tub. In dreams, peeing in the tub is apparently surprisingly enjoyable. Later, my little brother, who’s just such a goody-two-shoes, was taking a bath in the tub and I decided to pee in there again. I straddled the tub and peed against the top wall of the tub, near my brother’s head. So he wouldn’t get directly peed upon, my brother took a deep breath and went underwater, while my pee ran down the wall of the tub and into the water my brother was in, coloring it light yellow. My brother’s eyes were squeezed shut very tightly.
When I stopped peeing, my brother broke the surface. His skin was covered with a light green scum, like a tarnish. He dunked himself back under water to clean it off, and I reached in and started to rub his face to clean it. But I just opened a big tear in his cheek! It didn’t bleed, but was just a deep black. He broke the surface again, told me not to help him, and dunked himself again. The tarnish lifted off and his cheek healed. As he came above water again, I asked him: “Am I good like you and dad, or evil like mom?” He just smiled.

For the past week or so, I’ve been waking up — regardless of what time I go to sleep — at sometime between 5 and 6 am. I’m tired, but I’ve slept enough off that I’m wired and can’t get back to sleep. If I do stuff for about an hour, maybe two, I work off some of that nervous energy and can go back to sleep (thus this post).
See, I’m big on sleep. I love it, and it loves me back. I’m an 8 hours guy, every night, maybe 10 or 12 once on the weekend. Sure, I can do less and feel fine if there’s a reason — but for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer, our ancestors have been sleeping more than 8 hours a day, with the exception of a few days around harvest time. It’s what my body’s evolved for, why should I deny it?
So not getting sleep — and particularly, waking up when I’m specifically planning to be sleeping — is annoying. And then I need to sleep in later, because otherwise I’ll be tired all day long and fall asleep while I’m driving to my wonderful girlfriend’s, crashing my car into a tree or, if it’s a Friday night or Saturday, one of the many Hasidic Jews walking to and fro.
This morning I woke up at 6 am, after a dream about a hot new comedy variety show on Fox. You know you’ve been living in LA way too long when you dream up TV show concepts. But this one, see, it involved funny comics, customized matching New Beetles, and said comics jumping said Beetles through a ring of fire. I really think this is a can’t-miss concept.
Okay, it’s 7:30, I’ve got to find a way to get back to sleep so I can get up and go out with my friends and do important things like paying my bills.
Although, if I could turn this dream into a TV show, well, that should pay the bills pretty well, eh?

It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon and I’m walking through a public park. On one side of me is a golf course; on both sides, the grass is green in that way it only gets on the east coast when it’s summer and the light is diffracted by the humidity. But it’s not hot and humid, it’s pleasant. I’m walking along a two-lane paved road passing through the park, I’m wearing my comfy hiking boots and I’m happily tooling down one hill and up the next, for it is a rather hilly park. I’m waiting for my parents to come along and pick me up.
Soon they drive by, in the maroon ’92 Ford Taurus that was once theirs and is now mine. I get in the back seat, on the passenger’s side; the back seat on the driver’s side is filled with boxes. I ask them if they’ve picked up my girlfriend (my current one); they say they did, they took her for a while, but now it’s my turn to ride. I say, no way, let’s get my girlfriend, we can fit her in the center seat in the back. She shouldn’t have to walk!
So we turn around and drive back to get my girlfriend. On the way there, my father comments, “It’s lovely out here, you’d have a lovely place if you just cleaned up out front!” I flash on the place I live, seeing a tangle of gray brush through a sunny window looking out from the entrance foyer. The house I rent is a simple place from the ’70s, somewhere in West Virginia.
About a one minute drive behind me, there’s my girlfriend, walking up a big, grassy hill. We meet her at the top, she’s wearing a black turtleneck and a plaid skirt, with brown boots. She looks lovely! I ask her, do you want to squeeze yourself in the middle, or should we walk to my parents’ place together, it’ll only take a couple hours, but it’s only a five minute drive there.
As I begin to wake up from the dream, I realize it would’ve been most efficient if my parents took one of us at a time, since it only was a five minute drive.