I woke up to the sound of my cell phone ringing. I was supposed to be at an appointment to get my head screwed on straight ( again ). I remember getting up to go to the bathroom around 8 am and returning to bed. It was now ( "it was now" is either an impossible idea or incredibly profound -your choice) 1 pm. I was dreaming, I was still dreaming walking around looking for the phone.
I felt run over, like I had lived a lifetime in five hours. Here's what happened to me between 8 am and 1 pm this morning:
1- I was dispensing medications at a pharmacy and some vice presidents from my company came to have a big meeting. They dismantled the pharmacy before I had finished the prescriptions. I couldn't find the stickers to put on the inhalers and had a shit-fit at the vice president. I told him to fuck himself, that I quit, and then proceeded to worry that I had given out the wrong puffers. I phoned George Bush, who was one of the last patients and asked him to read off the Drug identification number on his Atrovent to me so I could be sure it was correct. I don't like George Bush but I don't judge my patients . I don't think he would have emphysema either.
2- the scene shifts to a big banquet. think it starts as a company thing and I'm worrying about running into the VP . Another company guy and I get in a conversation in a room and he explains I shouldn't worry. He tells me about the time he was at the beach and got taken out to sea by a large right whale (13 km out), and that worked out okay. He chuckles, fondly remembering the episode. The Banquet turns into a wedding dance where a faceless friend gets married to a really young clever boy. Her mother is some sort of gypsy lady who sort of controls all of us. I pick up some European kind of man and we go to a hotel, where nothing happens that I recall.
2-The hotel room morphs into an apartment which I am renting with a girl from elementary school. We have to do a research project and choose senior sexuality. We go shopping first and the mall becomes a library where I run into a guy I had a crush on in my first degree. He says his wife died two days ago and we cry together. Then we waltz in the stacks. It was very intimate.
3- the next section starts with my cousin dying. I go to her house and she is in an open casket with hundreds of yellow roses around her. I go look at her and she wakes up. This little mechanical whatzit falls out of her ear and I understand that that's all dying is-somebody has decided that she be deactivated, and then they undecided. None of this seems unusual to either of us/ The same process happens to my mother, to my ex Matthew's father. My ex-sister-in-law Cate decides to kill me, because she thinks it's my fault. We get in a fight where whoever gets the most green beans thrown at them dies. I don't die. Take that you little psycho.
4- the next section is comprised of me trying to add up hundreds of cheques, and being constantly interrupted. At the end of this it seems I have millions of dollars, from inheritances, rebates, royalties and grocery coupons. No wonder I woke up fucking exhausted.
5- the last part before I came to this afternoon has me and my brother Kevin trying to decide what to do with the millions of dollars. We are living in a house that looks like my Uncle John's but is located where the McNally's lived in Scotchfort PEI. We argue over building new houses, or renovating. I start rearranging furniture while he watchesTV. I decide to decorate my new home like the understory of a rain forest. I insist that he give me the receipts for all his alcohol so I can write them off as a business expense on my income tax.
THEN I WAKE UP.
No wonder I sometimes feel like I've lived forever.
