dreams, anne, hot

1.

Dreams. So intense. So awesome.

Last night I woke up around 2 am, naked and sweating (per usual), picked a booger, did a couple turns and tosses, and fell back asleep. My subsequent dream was about creatures called "neck thrashers"--neck and gut-eating beings who lurk in shadows waiting to bite you and make you a neck thrasher in their neck thrashing collection of lost souls. So, zombies, totally, but different enough to be yet another distinct breed of scary monster for us to obsess over. The thought of all that perfectly good brain-power going into and movie scripts and television series' round table sessions and poorly-written blogs with ugly fonts is terrifying.

In my dream I live with Ben (which is real), his sister is in town (pretty usual stuff), at one point I go window shopping for medical marijuana at midnight the park near the grocery store (totally normal), and then come the thrashers. Another terrifying thing about them--each has his/her own minion whose sole job is to distract/attract you into being thrashed by the thrasher. It's unclear if the minions too are undead, or where minions come from, but these bitches are CRAY. There's a girl I met through a coworker who I occasionally see around town who DEFINITELY inspired the minion standard. Small, pale, mid-neck-length hair that's always a little too frizzy (brush that shit, girl), looks like she has a lot of sex but is also an elementary school teacher. A disarming person--great prototype for thrasher entourage. 

So per usual of dreams, my mind speeds up the movie plot line so that within minutes the scene goes from "oh man, there are these crazy creatures that exist so I hear! gotta come up with a game plan to never interact with them." to them being EVERYWHERE. 

And then I am bitten, but the transition for me to go from normal to demon creature cruelly happens in slow motion. So I go through the duration of my dream doing regular things like hanging out with Ben and his druggie friends, all the while feeling bad about it because I know I'm about to turn and thrash the shit out of their necks. (Ben will forever be a doper in my dreams ever since I accidentally left his pipe out when my dad came to visit and inspired the joke "Tell Ben to stop smoking doobies and start cleaning his dust bunnies.") Then I thankfully wake up, though I wish it could have played out that Ben becomes a minion because he's really good at acting creepy on command. 

2. 

Anne is moving to Thailand. 

That's right, Anne Byrne is doing it. And she couldn't wait for an era of super-fast/cheap trans-Atlantic travel for those of us who are and will be perpetually broke. Fuck that noise. For those of you readers who don't know Anne (maybe four people? I think >50% of you are field hockey players.) imagine your seventh grade self walking into your first period math class the first day of school. You look to the chalkboard to find a clone of Mila Kunis writing her name as "Ms. Byrne" on the board. Holy shit, you think, mouth agape. This woman talks like Mila Kunis; she's funny like Mila Kunis; she's smoking hot like Mila Kunis. This is going to be the best year of your pea-brained life.

Two nights ago was Anne's going away party, and in true going away party fashion, I put too much alcohol into my body and made bad decisions. The last going away party-mistake (courtesy of Hilary O'Byrne-Byrne) was making out with a wookie on a plastic chair that immediately shattered into five hundred pieces. This one--better for the host's furniture, worse for the pH levels of the backyard plants--was merely continuing to put alcohol into my body. I pulled it together and redeemed myself, though! At 3 AM I successfully warded off a potential invader tongue (strange musician former-bread truck driver from Tennessee) from advancing down my throat. Nice work, formerly-drunk-then-sober-from-puking self!

I could speak more to that tangent, but for the sake of Anne's Denver 2012 memory I will speak to her instead. Anne will be teaching mathematics, econ and a creative writing class at an international school in Bangkok. She will be travelling to some other places that are equally far away from me, like Japan and China and maybe Vietnam (are you going to Vietnam Anne?). I wish she would hire me on to document her adventures for her, but the chances are high she'd have to fire me for continuing to write about unrelated stuff like puking and sweating and boogers and zombies. So I'll respectfully decline your offer, ANNE, and protect my career prospects as a professional bull-shitter. Thanks but NO THANKS.

Seriously, we'll miss the shit out of you.

3. ("Another one??") 

It is fucking hot in Denver right now. 

"Unseasonably hot" according to Denver Parks and Recreation. They're offering one dollar fare to any of the city's public swimming pools on the weekends now through August. Four dollar savings from regular pricing? YES PLEASE. They call it a goddamned BARGAIN people.

Chunks of the state's mountain forests are still burning, and I am still burning down my bedroom on a nightly basis. My sleep has been consistently restless. Anne has offered me the use of her air conditioned apartment in the down time before the lease is up, which I'm considering so I can start have conversations of substance again (not "It's hot." "Oh girl I know, it's soo hot." "Oh girl, you don't even KNOW.")

Like the other night (substance-less anecdote, here goes): I was trying to type an EMAIL. I'm going to give you the numbers and let you do the wpm calculation because I'm embarrassed. So here's me trying to maintain my leg up on people who can't do math...

two hours of typing...127 words

Got it? Are you revolted? You x out the tab yet? HAVE YOU Xed OUT THE TAAaaaaGGGHHHH---*click*

Yeah, if you were smart that's what you would have done. Granted, it WAS an important email in terms of this week of my life, but not THAT important. No parents were informed of their child's untimely death in battle or anything. Such a ballooned brain! Heat so rough on the little thang! 

Now if I wake up in the middle of the night craving a good neck thrash, well, then this will all make sense. In the meantime I'll pretend I'm still me, the world's still fairly normal, and there are still ways to evade those GLOBAL WARMING FIRE CAUSING KILLER DEMON NECK GNAWING ASSHOLES before they completely ruin everything. Like getting on down to the air conditioned apartment. And going back to sleep already.