Clunky Kluge-riddled Dreams

I had a dream last night that I had a contest of supremacy with a group of pirates. We battled on a hockey rink, with household objects as weapons. I prevailed with a pair of scissors. Others did not do so well with less dangerous objects, like measuring tape and ironing boards and coat hangers.

We were all on ice skates, and the hockey rink was surrounded by fog, so maybe this was all a race memory of good times on the North Sea a thousand years ago. Although I was never much of a skater. I have to concentrate to skate backwards.

So, when I won the top dog position, the prize was to confront an even bigger crowd of pirates of Tripoli on the Mediterranean Sea. I made a speech. I said "I go now as your chosen wolf. I have no doubt that I will die. I am not afraid to die, but I would more gladly die if you choose to join me, and together we win the Mediterranean!" I was greeted with a manly roar, and then I woke up.

Not exactly Henry V, but I felt pretty good about it. The idea of challenging the pirates of Tripoli with household items and prevailing made me feel pretty good about myself. Not sure why. Why the Tripoli pirates? Why a fog enshrouded hockey arena? Well, that, I think is a distant childhood memory of skating in the fog, which is just so fucking cool.

Really don't know what the heck goes on with dreams. For sure the brain processes events from the prior day, but what a weird and metaphorical way to do it. There are some who believe that dream realms are actually other realms. If the universe is infinite and unbounded, then I would say the existence of dream realms is a certainty. Because, you know, infinity.

Regardless, I had a friend who was checking out the waxes for the Smoketaker. He said my work was Thomas Hart Benton meets HR Giger. I think I got Hart's rubbery figures down, but not so much Giger's bodily transgressions and oral sexuality. I suppose he meant biomechanoid aspects, but even then, I don't really pursue that to any serious degree. My stuff is more about ordinary folks forced through circumstance or profession to awkwardly or clumsily deal with biomechanical prostheses.

Interesting, despite at least a solid million years of tool use, how maladroit we are sometimes with technology. You'd figure it would be seamless, and I suppose it is once you just quit thinking and start doing, but I'm amazed how even the most accomplished technologist can occasionally come across as if he or she has never seen a tool in their life.

You know, the all thumbs, the ham-handed, the butterfingered, the graceless and inept performances that we beach apes are occasionally prone to. And it happens not just with objects, but with ideas. We apprehend ideas that same as we do objects after all, with the exact same sensory and mental processes.

It's how we are equipped. We grasp a concept, we get a handle on things, we get a taste for meaning, we don't like the smell of it, we feel it's right, we see where you are going with it, we have a good ear for things.

So, I suppose, manipulating ideas, even though we've had at least a good solid million years doing it, can still display the same inept gracelessness that we occasionally display with objects.

Which, I suppose could explain these clunky dreams.