Better days

This car has seen 'em...

Two flat tires and no license plates, this car was at the end of its road. The doors were unlocked so I got in to take some pictures and... oh WOW. What is that smell?! I'm pretty sure there's a dead body somewhere in there. Face-melting stench aside, this car would be cool if someone restored it.

Palisades-Kepler

Yesterday we went to Palisades-Kepler park. Really cool park that almost makes you forget you're still in Iowa...

We saw a gigantic spider. Alright, it wasn't that big, but if I zoom in close enough it looks scary...

Who killed Laura Palmer?

It has been way too long since I lasted posted on here, but I have been so busy. Too busy. I sort of feel like I'm drowning, I can't keep up with it all. It's not a good feeling.

A montage of dreams:

• I went to a wedding shower (which traditionally exclude dudes) and it turned out to really be a shower. We went into a large room with water spouts on the ceiling and everyone started taking their clothes off. I've always been sort of curious about wedding showers and now I am not.
• I posed as a realtor and tried selling homes to people without the owner's consent. All I did was walk the streets until I saw a house that looked nice and then I would wait for someone to come along so that I could give them my impromptu sales pitch. It was pointless, but it worked surprisingly well.
• There was the dream where I couldn't close my eyes no matter how hard I tried. That was disturbing. A 20s or 30s cartoony guy smoking a cigar would show up and start laughing each time I tried to close my eyes. He looked a lot like some old drawings I've seen of the man in the moon.
• In the most recent dream, I stood with a group of people at the top of a long wooden stairway looking down. None of us wanted to walk down the stairs for some reason, and we all stood around trying to convince each other to go first because we were all too chicken to take the first step. It was a dark stairway with a red carpet runner and we couldn't see the bottom. I finally realized that if I didn't go, no one would, so I took one step. Once I took that step, I discovered that I wouldn't be able to stop or go back, so I had to keep going. That's all I can remember from that one.

Also, I got out the guitar and played for a while last night. Ah... guitar. It's been so long since I actually played it, aside from Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings. It felt great to play whatever popped into my head. No one was home, so I cranked the amp and played it like it's meant to be played.

So there's my post for now. Don't that beat all? (another great old timey phrase)

Another dream

It was winter and I was the only snowplow mechanic in town. I was also apparently the only English-speaking person in town, which was weird. The family I lived with spoke German and Polish(?) and did all the talking for me. Whenever anyone came over, they would talk and gesture toward me, but I had no idea what was going on.

In my dream, it kept snowing and snowing and the snowplows were what kept the roads open and the town functioning. Apparently being a snowplow driver was a big deal and the drivers had sort of a celebrity status in the small town. Being a snowplow mechanic was also a big deal and everyone seemed to think I was somebody. It was kinda weird, but I didn't mind all the friendly waves and nods every time I went somewhere. It was a bit like being the roadie for a rock band, except better.

Each day I went out into the cold and walked through the snow to the plow barn. I remember coming home at lunch a few times, until I finally realized that the only thing the family that I lived with ate each day was sauerkraut. JUST sauerkraut. I brought my own lunches after that. Strange all the miniscule details this dream had.

Also, I had no clue how to fix snowplows, I just wore overalls and carried a greasy toolbox.

Unplugged

On April 18th, a very close friend of mine passed away. My Mac Pro tower went to be with Steve Jobs after a short battle with memory loss. I don't think it was in any pain; it just froze up and then displayed a blank white screen. On the plus side, an Apple tech was able to fix it and bring it back. Two weeks and $683 later it is working fine as if nothing ever happened. My life has been changed forever, though.

The first 24 hours after it died, I went through withdrawal wondering about all the emails I was getting that I couldn't read and agonizing over the senior portraits that I had just shot that I couldn't finish until it was fixed. I'm a news junkie, too, so the sudden disconnect from the outside world really hurt. Plus, there were so many other time-waster things that I had grown accustomed to doing on the computer and then I was left with nothing to do but use my brain (which I am not accustomed to).

I was left with lots of time to read books, sit on the front porch, stare at the neighbors (in a really creepy, unhealthy sort of way), and daydream about what the world would be like if some bands didn't exist. Like, what if I could travel back in time and assassinate a bunch of bands to prevent them from ever recording crappy, formulaic, middle-of-the-road rock? I would start by taking out the obvious bands like Creed, Nickelback, and Puddle of Mudd. And I couldn't just stop there, I mean, that leaves Pearl Jam, Limp Bizkit, and many others. Er, maybe not everyone in Pearl Jam, just Eddie Vedder.

This brings up a question: by altering the past this way, how would that affect the present? I would assume that after preventing these awful bands from unleashing their horrible music on society, we would all find ourselves here in 2012 as incredibly smart supermodel millionaires. How? I dunno, but I imagine that's how it would pan out.

Anyway, the things mentioned above are a small sampling of what my brain does when it is not silenced by a computer. It's been a rough couple of weeks and I'm so glad to be back online.

Dreaming of a white Christmas

It was Christmas Eve and we were driving to Chicago to visit a friend who I hadn't seen in years. There was a lot of snow and the roads were a mess, so we had to drive slowly. The trip took all day and when we arrived in my friend's neighborhood, it was very late and most of the houses were dark. Right about then I realized that I probably should have told him that we were going to drop in, but I figured it probably didn't matter. Christmas Eve was the perfect time to pay a surprise visit to someone I hadn't talked to in almost 10 years. We pulled into their drive and it was so cold that everything had a bluish hue to it, including the snow. A Christmas tree was lit in the window, but the rest of the house was dark.

We knocked on the door, but no one answered. Figuring they must be asleep and couldn't hear us, all four of us began pounding loudly on the door. Rose had the great idea to ring the doorbell repeatedly, too. Finally a light came on and he opened the door. I could tell he was really surprised to see us! We came in and sat down and asked for something to eat. I remember one of us telling him that we didn't bring any presents, so we didn't expect him to give us any, either. After an hour or so of trying to make conversation, things just got too awkward and we decided not to stay the night after all. We asked him to watch the kids, then Cynthia and I went to stay at a hotel in... New York City(?!).

Once we got to the hotel and got the key card to our room, we then spent the whole night wandering the hotel trying to find the room. Early in the morning we gave up and decided to go pick up the kids and head back home. The trip just hadn't panned out the way we expected.

This morning that's about all I can remember from that dream. Also, my dream was letterboxed.

Guess I showed them...

I woke up early to the door-knocking sound my cell phone makes when I receive a text. Sometimes my carpool people will text me first thing in the morning, but this message had a much more sinister tone. The anonymous text read: "Good morning. Someone at your location is spying on your cell phone." What?! (cue Mission Impossible theme) As I was getting ready to throw my phone through the window and make a run for it, my sleepy brain woke up enough to suggest to me that: 1) this was probably just a spam text and 2) nobody cares what I do. There aren't any messages from Al Qaeda on my phone, and I don't store the secret plans to the Death Star on there either, so in all likelihood no one cares about spying on it. It's probably just the deposed king of Nigeria trying to get me to part with my money again. He can be persistent like that.

So, along that theme, I thought I'd write about the time in second grade when I ran away from home and thought the army came looking for me. OK, I guess that doesn't really tie in at all, but it's my blog and I'll do whatever I feel like.

One day after school, I had an argument with my parents about having to clean my room or do my homework or something completely unreasonable like that. They wouldn't let me watch TV until I had done what they told me to do, but I really wanted to watch Transformers (my favorite cartoon) first before I did whatever tedious task they wanted. My parents didn't budge and instead changed the channel to watch something else. That made me mad. I stomped off to my room to sit and feel sorry for myself and to reflect on what horrible parents they were.

My backpack was still sitting on the floor where I left it when I came home and my boots and plastic airsoft rifle sat nearby. That's when it hit me: I should run away. In that moment, I knew that I was wise beyond my years and only by running away could I really teach them a lesson. I snuck into the kitchen, made a couple sandwiches, filled a thermos with water, and peeked into the living room to see if they noticed. They hadn't looked away from the TV, so I was in the clear.

Back in my room, I gathered up a blanket, a flashlight, and a Captain Crunch Mount Crunchmore map (?!). I stuffed it all into the backpack and gathered up the rifle and boots. It was September, but I knew that after hiking for a day or two I would eventually reach some sort of mountains and it would be cold there. There's always snow on top of mountains.

I quietly exited through the back door and stood on the porch. The sun was low in the sky and in a couple hours it would be dark, so I had to hurry. As I walked away from the house, I expected to hear the door fly open and my mom yell at me, but by the time I reached the end of the yard, I figured I had a chance to get away without notice. The further I got from the house, the faster I walked until I realized that they weren't going to come after me. They were probably still sitting there watching TV, like the terrible parents they were.

My map wasn't as useful as I had expected it to be, but after half running, half walking for a long time, I guessed that I was almost to Alaska or Colorado and should be seeing the mountains any minute.

The mountains turned out to be a little further away than I thought they'd be, so I decided to find a tree to camp under for the night. It occurred to me that I didn't have a tent, a pillow, or a sleeping bag, but I didn't care.

I wondered if mom and dad were panicking yet. They had probably been calling for me and maybe they were looking around the yard for me. Maybe they had started driving around the neighborhood trying to find me. I didn't know how much time had gone by, but it was probably getting late. Maybe they had given up looking and called the police. Were the police looking for me? I kept an eye out as traffic rushed by. I didn't know how I felt about the police looking for me and I would probably hide if I saw them coming.

The sun was setting, my feet hurt, and I was sweating from running so much, so I sat down and rested. A helicopter flew over and I watched as a soldier wearing camouflage sat in an open side door looking down at everyone. It disappeared over the rooftops, then turned and came back. The helicopter was dark green and the word ARMY was painted on the tail. Wait... had the police given up looking for me and now they called in the army? Had the helicopter crew spotted me? Maybe there were tanks on the ground rumbling towards me right now. I was in serious trouble. I had underestimated how upset my parents would be about me running away.

The best thing to do would be to run all the way back home and hope that the police and the army wouldn't find me first. I ran the whole way and almost collapsed when I finally reached the back porch. The car was there, so they must have returned from searching for me. I opened the back door and expected my parents to be right there with a look of surprise on their faces when I walked in. They weren't by the back door, so I stepped inside anticipating their excited reactions when they saw me. No sign of the parents. I walked into the living room. They were still watching TV.