drvono: there is no intro

Another dream post!

In an uncharacteristically vivid and narrative dream I had last night, I was a boy living in a poor village on the coast of Thailand (I guess it would have to be southern Thailand). The waters were notoriously devoid of fish and the village had no other real source of income, so most barely got by on what they had. However, there was one greedy, rich, and self-obsessed man who lived in a palace. He didn’t share anything he had and I didn’t know where he got his wealth from.

He had two daughters and one son, the latter of whom was my best friend. They all hated their father for not just being selfish with his possessions but also very controlling of them. Being a shameless egomaniac, the rich man had built a theater in his palace right along the coast, and had regular circus/feats-of-strength performances that he forced the family to participate in. The entire point of this was basically to bring more glory to himself. Although the villagers didn’t like him, the circuses were free and their only source of entertainment, so they attended.

As legend had it, the rich man had acquired some kind of power and he could only be killed 1) while performing and 2) by a well-dressed gentleman (yeah, I don’t know). Because this was common knowledge, the man was extremely paranoid and distrusted everyone, including his family, which is probably why he exerted so much control over them. And with good reason - the son was in fact secretly planning to end to his father’s life and restore balance to the village. The two daughters, my friend, and I devised a plan where the son was going to kill him while performing together on the highwire. When the time came, the son decided he couldn’t do it, so I took his place by dressing as him and going out on the highwire. I stabbed the rich man through the heart while he was performing. I actually don’t remember that part very well, except that he didn’t try to stop me.

The plan was share to the wealth with the rest of the village and end these selfish practices. But almost immediately after the killing, my friend started to have a change of heart. As head of the household, he inherited the palace and the power started going to his head. All three of the children descended into decadence and selfishness. In fact, even before I killed the father, the two daughters went off to sleep with their boyfriends (which he had forbade them to do).

My friend and I had a fierce disagreement that night, and it ended with me leaving and telling him, “I’ll be back one day and I’m going to kill you.”

And one day I did come back and infiltrated the palace, but he was ready for me. We had a long fight; me with a double-sided sword and him with tiny needle-like daggers that he would stick in me whenever he found an unprotected spot. I retreated from the fight and went down a staircase to the main level of the palace, where candles lit the entryway. I knew that if I used the candles to set the lush curtains ablaze, the palace would go up and he would have no way out. However, the other innocent people in the house would also burn to death. While I was deliberating, he came back down and stuck me in the wrist with a knife. I pulled it out and used it against him, pinning his two hands together against his body so he couldn’t move them. I did something similar to his guard.

So there I was, holding my double-sided sword against their throats, one on each side of me. My friend seemed to have accepted his fate just as his father did. But just as I was about to slit his throat, there was a commotion outside the palace. Villagers came running in from the streets shouting about an abundance of exotic fish and crabs that had just been caught off the shore. They were overjoyed, and shouting about how they would all be able to live well, and thus my friend’s selfish wealth-hording no longer posed a threat to the well-being of the others. There was so much fish, they were flopping in the streets and even started pouring in through the doors.

I was happy that I didn’t have to kill my friend. And, this seemed to break the control that wealth had over my friend. The dream ended with everyone happily dining together in the palace.

As if TV product pusher Billy Mays‘ forever-shout wasn’t invasive enough, it seems he has taken on a more insidious, albeit subtler, approach:

Dream marketing.

Last night, I had a dream that a water pipe was leaking in my basement. Before I knew it, the leak was getting worse, and as I looked around, I saw streams of water coming elsewhere as well. I went upstairs and saw places where the floor and ceiling were bulging from leaking water. I needed a fast and easy way to fix, fill and seal almost any surface, and make it last. I needed a powerful, bonding epoxy stick that I could apply for an everlasting bond. What I needed was Mighty Putty.

And all I could think of throughout the dream was, I should have bought that Mighty Putty from the infomercial while I had the chance!!!

Get out of my head, Mr. Billy Mays!!

Mays is slowly becoming a cultural icon, his Lego hair and one-click-paint-bucket beard virtually synonymous with quick and easy solutions to problems you didn’t realize you had. Before long, we should see him on T-Shirts at BustedTees.com, stenciled on overpasses, or juxtaposed against a Zen garden by Brandon Bird.

You heard it here first - Billy Mays: maybe not quite the next Chuck Norris, but certainly a More Cowbell.

Oh, and score! Print Von Glitschka’s Billy Mays mask before your next presentation, and your ideas will sell themselves!

About a week ago, a co-worker and I were talking about how when we work out, we pretty much always do cardio or leg workouts and usually neglect the upper body stuff. Shortly after, I became aware of the One Hundred Push Ups site, which provides a 6-week training routine to get you to the point where you can do 100 consecutive push ups. My co-worker and I challenged each other, so now I’m on board!

I did my initial test today and did 22 comfortably… a far cry from what I used to be able to do, but a good starting point for this program. And so, it begins!

So if you’re not reading this through an RSS reader, you may have noticed that drvono.com looks quite a bit different lately. My fault - I mindlessly upgraded WordPress without backing up my customized theme, so now I’m stuck looking like this until I fix it. Maybe it will be a good opportunity to think up a new design? We’ll have to see what happens.

The four-day weekend was great - tasty cinnamon buns on Sunday morning at Isle’s Bun & Coffee in Minneapolis, family time, fireworks, a new landscaping project, homemade pizza with friends, a fire, and s’mores.

PEANUT BUTTER FAIL

Originally uploaded by The Doctor & Missus

This is what my toaster looked like at work today.

This seems an odd topic to be bringing up now since my birthday was over four months ago, but if you know me, you know that I tend to not do anything at all for my birthdays. I enjoy a little dessert with a couple friends or family members, but it’s not really that important to me that I’m one day older than the one before. My hermitistic tendencies (not in the sense that I dislike social contact, but that I don’t naturally seek it out) are also partly to blame for my lack of celebration. Yet by the same token, part of me does crave festivity and fanfare, particularly the theatrical types that follow a strong theme.

So I’m thinking, next year I really should just take advantage of the excuse for a party, and try to really go out. My birthday’s in February, so there is a whole host of cold-weather options, like Birthday In Mongolia, where we go outside, build a fire in the firepit and congregate in some sort of makeshift yurt. And I guess we’d eat meat a lot of meat?

Or maybe we could have a birthday party for somebody else who has the same birthday as me, like that promising-politician-turned-trash-host Jerry Springer. Err, maybe not. But how about Peter Gabriel? Or Chuck Yeager? We could try breaking the sound barrier in his honor!

Well I’ve got quite awhile to think about it. But next year, try not to let me get away with copping out and just accepting gifts. Although that’s one tradition I don’t strongly feel a need to change.

My One Rock The Garden pic
Originally uploaded by The Doctor & Missus

Rock the Garden was awesome! I saw lots of people:

• My wife’s tattoo artist
• A friend of a friend (Sui Generis, looking in your general direction)
• My wife’s cousin
• An actress from Upright Egg
• A guy we’ve seen on Facebook
• Some guy I can’t place but have seen many times before
• A co-worker

Not as awesome were the 30+ minute wait at Chipotle, the people who were there for reasons other than music, and the aging fratboy videotaping staff member who only seemed to get footage of girls sunbathing.

All in all, it was a fun experience and I got all my wishes!

UPDATE: My picture, of course, sucks, but BeeTour’s doesn’t!

Rock The Garden is on Saturday! What a crazy lineup… Andrew Bird, New Pornographers, Cloud Cult, and Bon Iver. My hopes:

• That Martin Dosh is playing with Bird, since I missed his Walker show
• That Cloud Cult paints
• That the weather does actually cooperate

What else? Oh, My Brightest Diamond’s “A Thousand Shark’s Teeth“ is released today, which is exciting. If you haven’t heard of Shara Worden before, she is a trained opera singer who has worked extensively with Sufjan Stevens. Her solo work as My Brightest Diamond is a cinematic mix of classical, folk, opera, and a bit of rock. I’ve been looking forward to this release for almost a couple years.

I wish I could be in NY for the CD release puppet show!

And, did you know? Jesus rode dinosaurs. Probably.

So I’ll just let Flickr finish up my Utah vacation for me, and then we’ll move onto other things. Kthx.