May 09, 2007 - 7:58 PM

Recipe for Nightmares

Ingredients:
1 Hour of The Shield
2 Hours of Ferris Bueller's Day Off
30 Minutes of Guarding Tess
Not enough sleep
The Internets (not necessary)
A previous viewing history of the first three ingredients (recommended, but not necessary)

Directions:
Watch the first 3 ingredients in a row, late at night. Distract yourself with The Internets as needed. When you find yourself nodding off during first 30 minutes of Guarding Tess, start your sleep cycle. Allow yourself to wake up before you are fully rested, and then doze off again. This should produce one serving of really effed up dreams about cheating in high school, gun running, guilty consciences, and attempting to atone by blowing oneself up with a grenade.

Dude, Monday night/Tuesday morning was weird. A day later, and most of the dream has fizzled from my memory; but I KNOW that there was a lot more to it than the cheating and the guns. Some major bad shadiness was going on, and I was double-dealing and double-crossing and it was scaring the shit out of me. And the entire time, I kept thinking "wow, I'm dreaming...oh, that bit of non-sense is because I just watched Ferris...and damn, now I'm acting like the cops from the Shield." That part with the grenade was TOTALLY lifted from the Shield.

When I woke up, I was quite shaken and haunted. Stupid TV.
************
Yesterday, driving from the Fox TV lot to the animation studio in Burbank around 1:30, I hit the usual traffic slowing at the 110/101 split headed north. In the little triangle where the two highways diverge, there was a little grass fire flicking upwards. There wasn't anywhere that it could really spread to since it was effectively wedged in between two roads, but I thought I should call 911 just to alert them. I couldn't get past the busy tones.

After silently cursing the emergency response centers of Los Angeles (what if it was a REAL emergency, like me being killed by a rogue grenade?), I turned on the newsradio to hear the traffic reports, hoping that they would announce this little fire. Sure enough, they announced a brushfire. In Yorba Linda. And then another one. In the Hollywood Hills. They finally mentioned the little spark on the highway, but by that point, my attention was on the smoking hills of Griffith Park.

I had merged onto the 5 Interstate by that point, and I could see very clearly a patch of the Park was exhaling smoke and orange plumes. This was the same place where Liz and I had been a few months back for our happy little date. There didn't appear to be any police or emergency vehicles visible, no helicopters, no flashing lights. I saw a cop car speed past on the highway, and then pull over to one of the exits that leads to Griffith Park. I think he was helping to close off the exit.

When I was about even with the longitude of the fire, the light around me changed. The sun was being filtered by the smoke. Everything out my windows slowly took on a strange glow; the natural colors bleeding away as amber, then orange, then brown hues tinted everything. Time snailed and I felt like I was entering some post-apocalyptic, Mad-Maxian zone; and then I was rubber-banded out the other side, back into blue-skied freedom.

Later that afternoon, looking out the windows of the office, a HUGE cloud of smoke was rising from the hills. It looked like a volcanic eruption. The air tasted funny.

Now Listening To : Vienna Teng- Harbor
Random Thought : I'm playing cello with Kyler tomorrow night at 8 at the Hotel Cafe. C'mon down!

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