Butt birth: it’s the new hot rage.

I can’t believe I’m about to post this dream. A few advance apologies are in order: If you’re a girl who once found me attractive but will never be able to get this image out of your head, I’m sorry in advance. If you’re the pastor or another one of my coworkers from church who I just added on Facebook and you thought you’d check out what my blog is all about, I’m sorry in advance. I would even recommend reading some of my older stories first; I usually write about much more wholesome things, like here or here or here. If you're one of my normal readers, or my one Canadian reader, no apologies. We're tight now; I can tell you anything. 

I’ve found that the weirdness of the dreams I have is directly correlated to the unhealthiness of the food I ate the day before. I once tested this with an evil concoction of Doritos and some spicy glop that resulted in a dream I never want to redream. 

For the following strange and semi-inappropriate beauty of a dream, I had eaten Big Mac Pizza (yes, pizza with all the fixings of a Big Mac), cheesy popcorn, and five or six fun size Twix bars. I don’t usually eat this way, and apparently not only my body but my mind freaked out about it. 

[At least my brain is watching out for me this time, as opposed to THAT OTHER TIME.]

The dream began with me laying on my side on a hospital bed. I wasn’t sure at the time why I was there, but the fact that a doctor and my best friend were in the room with me made me feel a bit better.

DOCTOR: How are you feeling, Brian?

ME: Oh, I’m doing fine. I kind of feel like I have to go to the bathroom tho–WHOAA!!

Suddenly something humongous shot out of my butt. It didn’t hurt, but I knew it was huge. What is going on? I wondered, still not sure why I was there in the first place. And then I heard it: a baby crying. Of course. I was the surrogate father of one of my best friend’s twins, and his girlfriend was in the other room going through excruciating normal birth with the other one. I was happy that birthing a baby through my butt didn’t hurt as much. 

DOCTOR: So, do you want to cut the cord?

ME: Oh...no, that’s too weird. I don’t even want to think about it.

DOCTOR: Are you sure? A lot of new fathers find it to be a special moment. 

ME: Gross. That’s just not going to happen. I’m not going to cut my butt cord.

DOCTOR: Really? It won’t hurt...

ME: Couldn’t you just do it? You’re the doctor, so you should be okay with this kind of thing.

DOCTOR: No, you should do it. It’s your butt.

ME: But I don’t want to. Seriously, the baby’s not even really mine. Just cut the butt cord so I can stop thinking about it existing down there. It makes me all twitchy.

DOCTOR: Trust me, I wish it didn’t exist either. Here’s the scissors. Cut your butt cord and we can all go home. 

ME: My GOD why do you have to be such a baby about this? You could get a better angle anyway. You’re getting paid to cut my butt cord; guess how much I’m getting paid to poop out a baby? NOTHING. I’m doing it out of the kindness of my butt heart. JUST CUT THE DAMN BUTT CORD SO I CAN PUT SOME PANTS ON. 

And so he did. I didn’t appreciate the grimace on his face or the way he only used two of his fingers to use the scissors, and stretched out the other fingers as if they themselves were avoiding the task as well. 

At this point the dream fast-forwarded a few months and I was carrying the baby in my arms, the one I had birthed, and it was talking to me in full sentences. It would only do this to me, because he and I had a special bond that can only come from a butt birth. 

And then I woke up. 

Now on to less disgusting things.

Dreambomb, or 50 Word Dreams, or Expectations smashed all up in my face/grill.

Here and there I'll have a dream that is too complicated to tweet and not vivid enough to dedicate a whole blog post to. I know what you’re thinking: “BRIAN THAT SUCKS I’M SO SORRY.”  It’s okay, reader, it’s okay. I’ve created an innovative solution. It’s called The 50-Word Dream and I’ve done like four of them, so they're a pretty big deal. Here’s the latest installment, with each dream written in exactly fifty words, entitled “Expectations smashed all up in my face/grill.” 

Dream #1

As one of the judges on American Idol (they’re just letting anyone do it now), I was pretty sure that Snooki was going to completely embarrass herself. But when she belted out “Oh Happy Day,” I found myself euphorically sobbing with Paula and the rest of the viewers at home.

[No lie, folks: I spent a half hour drawing Snooki as an orange bell pepper with a leopard-skin dress, but decided against it.]

Dream #2

The Humane Society salesperson promised that Gus, an orange kitten with six toes on each foot, was actually an angel sent by God to release a prophesy bathed in heavenly light on Christmas Eve. I adopted him because it seemed like a win-win situation. He ran away before Thanksgiving. 

Dream #3

As Harry Potter AGAIN, my friends and I hid from a monster. When I peeked through the blinds, I caught a glimpse of its hideous form: Priceline’s Big Deal. Only a magical chocolate milkshake could destroy him,  but the only friend who was predestined to drink it was lactose intolerant.

Dream #4

I was N64‘s Banjo-Kazooie and I was very busy. Leaping between tree stumps, I tossed pizza slices at a gargantuan blue bull to keep it from murdering me. The bull was increasingly satisfied, but the college theatre company that were using the tree stumps for their play weren’t. 

And that's what I've been dreaming. Seriously, this Harry Potter Unconscious Fetish needs to stop. I don't know why it keeps happening. However, I think if I started dreaming that I was Banjo-Kazooie all the time, we would have a bigger problem

This post is a fair warning to anyone who shares a living space with me

Remember when I wrote this post boasting about how I can, with the help of a few health supplements and some good old-fashioned chutzpa, reduce the duration of the common cold to only about two days? I still believe that if everyone took my anti-cold artillery list to heart, they would feel the same results. 

But here’s the deal, friends. Sometimes the common cold is tricky and will disguise its little bastard self as a really bad hangover. You’ll think that you’re merely hurting, and with some water and starchy foods, you’ll be fine in a matter of hours. But then you aren’t fine. The headache’s gone, but you find yourself one full day into the nasty arms of a gargantuan cold–and of course that means one full day behind in your usual battle plans and it’s virtually impossible to get back on the offensive. It’s kind of like, in Calvin & Hobbes, when Spaceman Spiff thinks he had parked his spacecraft on a strange planet but it’s...well here:

[Calvin & Hobbes is ALWAYS relevant.]

This happened to me and I’m now in my fourth day. The very reason I take such an aggressive stance against colds in the first place is because I’m so horribly pathetic when I’m ill. Like unnecessarily and inconsolably depressed. My social skills vanish entirely, and I just become insecure and mope around until it’s gone. 

One thing that may interest you, however, is that I occasionally sleepwalk when I’m sick. I think it has to do with the fact that I’m not sleeping well in the first place, and I forget whether I’m conscious or not. Last night my uncle (who I’m living with for the time being)  got to see this in full colors.  It was one in the morning and he was heading to bed, in the dark.

ME: [Throwing open the door] Chris!

CHRIS: Oh, hi Brian. I thought you were asleep.

ME: I finished my game! 

CHRIS: What game?

ME: Das sarros. 

CHRIS: Hang on. [turns on the hall light to see his crazy-eyed nephew beaming at him] 

CHRIS: You’re doing what now?

ME: Das. Das sarros.

CHRIS: Is that Spanish or German?

ME: It’s with my computer and ... It’s like... [mumble]

CHRIS: Okay...

ME: Here, I’ll do it again. [I run over in the darkness of my room, smack the top my old computer that’s sitting on a bookshelf, and turn back to him, smiling triumphantly.] I did it! 

CHRIS: Good job, Brian. Go back to bed.

ME: ‘kay. 

And I went back to bed. The strange thing is, I don’t think this qualifies as sleepwalking because I remember the whole thing. It’s just that I was talking about my dream world and the more I woke up, the more that world disappeared. 

You guys, this is such a freaking weird and hilarious aspect of my life that it simultaneously amuses and concerns me. And I’m totally okay with that. 

I would give this dream a title, but I really don't even know where to start.

Sometimes I wake up from a dream and think, “Good job, brain!” and congratulate it for dreaming in a way that maximizes the comedy for good old Popcorn Day. Like this one, or this one, and of course this bad boy, who started this whole crazy blog in the first place.

This is also one of those moments.

The dream started with pizazz: I was parachuting down to my friend’s lakeside cabin. I landed on the lake, and decided to do some walking on top of the water for awhile before I came in. It wasn’t too hard. Really, it’s all in the way use your feet. I’ll show you sometime. 

After I wandered to shore, I had to take a wee, and my friend directed me to go in the door and to the right. “The bathroom is being renovated right now so it looks kind of crappy, but it still works.” So I went inside to the right only to find an empty space in their kitchen where it appeared as if a dishwasher had just been. 

“This can’t be the bathroom,” I said to myself, “but there’s nothing else around, so what the heck.” I squeezed myself into the little cranny and tried to get in a safe and satisfactory peeing position. 

[This is a normal position for me, usually seen when I'm on an airplane, or getting into a car, or going spelunking. I'm just really tall, okay?]

Then my friend came in.

FRIEND: Brian! Brian NO!

ME: What...

FRIEND: That’s where our dishwasher used to be! Don’t pee there!

ME: You TOLD me to pee here! I was just following directions.

FRIEND: Why would we put a crawl-in bathroom in the kitchen?

ME: Okay, listen. You told me to go the right, I went to the right. You told me to look for a crappy half-renovated room, and what the eff am I in right now. You told me that  if I found that place I could pee there. Thus, here I am, about to pee. 

FRIEND: But it’s not a bathroom. It’s just not. 

ME: But it’s a torn-up place to the right when you walk in the door.

FRIEND: Still not a bathroom. 

ME: I was just following your directions. All items on the list point directly to this spot. 

FRIEND: You’re dreaming.

[Suddenly all the people in the scene minding their own business looked directly at us.]

ME: That’s beside the point. You directed me here. 

FRIEND: It was my bad. When I said go right, I meant left. The real, actual, non-dishwasher bathroom is to the left. You may pee there. 

ME: Thanks. I really gotta go. 

After I had peed, we decided to tour a nearby college. It was beautiful there: vine-covered brick buildings and flowering trees. There was a pool on campus with a poorly made and barely legible sign stating...

While my friends took some time to figure out how two of those items could possibly relate to pool rules, I said goodbye because I had to take off in my MILLENNIUM FALCON. 

Good job, brain!

But hold that thought. My copilot and I had just pulled out of lightspeed when he received a prophesy–yes, a prophesy–that we were going to be shot down. I wondered for a while if it was going to be a dramatic and heartfelt death, but then we got hit and my copilot put his hands frustratingly in the air.  

And as we spun through space in a sparking, smoky fireball, I realized it wasn’t going to be a very meaningful death at all. Well, that sucks. 

After I died, however, I found myself at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (yes, Harry Potter being the subject of my dreams again) and they were trying to teach me the school anthem, but I kept singing it to the tune of The Angry Beavers’ theme song, which coincidentally is also my morning alarm, which was going off. 

So I woke up. It’s not often that you parachute, walk on water, almost pee in a kitchen, fly the Millennium Falcon, and go to Hogwarts all in one night.  It’s probably because I had my annual Taco Bell visit that day. 

The day I learned the consequences of holding hands with my girlfriend

Sixth grade. 

[My hair and my complexion haven't changed much. Really, the only thing different about me in this picture is that I'm holding a trapper keeper.]

Regardless of puberty taking its full gangly effect on my mind and body, I had somehow scored a girlfriend. Katie was sweet and cute and we started dating the day we met, the day before Thanksgiving break. By Christmas break a month later we were already fully committed and entranced in each other, meeting each other between classes and walking each other to the next one, standing by each other at recess, and hugging before we got on our separate buses at the end of the day.  Our love for each other was apparent to our classmates as well, who would ask us whenever we were apart, “Hey Brian, how’s Katie? :) :) :)”  Good, I would say bashfully. “Aw! You two are so cute together!” Thanks. 

A majority of the conversations I had with my fellow classmates consisted of those very words and usually nothing more. Everyone loved us. I loved us. By the time our relationship ended nine months later, we had kissed nine times. That’s a kiss a month, people!

There was only one person who didn’t support our relationship. Her name was Ms. Trotz, and she ruled PhyEd with an iron fist. I met her in sixth grade too, after hearing a series of the worst rumors middle schoolers could possibly conjure up in their heads about her. Seriously, they were hurtful and offensive rumors, mostly based on the assumption that she was gay, and she would not be working at the middle school if any of them were true. Being assumed gay in 2001 by middle schoolers is a death sentence with a punishment of three-straight years of name-calling and harassment, trust me.  Looking back, I see her as a person who would walk in to her first class every year with all of the kids already hating her. What can someone do in that situation? My answer would be “just get those hateful kids to throw foam balls at each other for forty-five minutes, and keep verbal interaction brief and cold,” which she did. I guess middle school is tough for grown-ups too.

Ms. Trotz, if you’re out there, I feel for you and I’m sorry I contributed in the collective hatred of you from my class. 

But I’m still going to tell the story about how you scared me and my girlfriend shitless. This is the day I learned the consequences of holding hands with my girlfriend.

Ms. Trotz had already sent me to the Intervention Room once, (Intervention Room = Detention, by the way, which I think is hilarious.), for “jumping” over the foot-high tennis nets…

TROTZ: Brian! I specifically told you to walk around the nets.

ME: But I was trying to get the ball, I lost my balance and I was going to fall into it...

TROTZ: No, I saw you jump over it. 

ME: Well I did, but in the interest of not falli—

TROTZ: See? Go to the I.V.

ME: The Intervention Room?! This is injustice!

TROTZ: You don’t know the first thing about injustice. 

ME: YOU don’t know the first thing about my jumping intentions! 

TROTZ: [pause]

ME: [eyes narrowed in accusation]

TROTZ: [raises a considering eyebrow]

ME: [hopeful eyebrows, thinking I won her over]

TROTZ: Go to the I.V. 

ME: Bullocks. 

[Acne is nonverbal angst.]

So our relationship didn’t start well. 

I suppose I should mention now that Holmen Middle School had a strict “No Public Displays of Affection” policy. It was preached to us so many times that, when sighted, even the students would take a break from their LOL-ing trapper-keeper conversations to gleefully point and yell, “PDA! PDA!” Only they mostly did it out of fear so they wouldn’t be seen as co-conspirators to such unlawful action.

Katie and I were hand-holders. However, with the privilege of having a hand-holding girlfriend comes great responsibility. Because of the rigid No PDA laws in place, we had to always be on the lookout for teachers roaming the halls. We became really good at it, as if each handhold was a prolonged drug exchange and we had to make sure there were no pigs or canaries around. 

[I only half-know what I mean by “pigs and canaries.”]

One afternoon Katie and I were walking hand-in-hand, away from our friends,  in the solitude of one of the Middle School’s halls. We were strolling happily along when Ms. Trotz suddenly turned the corner and looked right at us. There was nowhere to hide, no one to blame, and not enough time to release our hold. It was the perfect storm. A cold, evil smile ran across Ms. Trotz face. I still get the chills when I picture it.

TROTZ: My office. Now.

US: [gasp!]

TROTZ: I’m not even going to send you to the Intervention Room yet. I want you to call your parents first.

US: [gasp!]

TROTZ: You know our rules about PDA. I caught you red-handed. 

US: [gasp! A pun!]

We walked to Ms. Trotz’s office, shivering in our Sketchers. I could already tell that this would not be a good acne week.  Katie went first. She came out with blotchy red eyes.  “Brian, you can come in now,” said Ms. Trotz. I sauntered over and dialed my mom’s work phone. 

MOM: Hello? 

ME: [shakily] Hi Mom. 

MOM: What’s the matter? Are you alright? Are you sick?

ME: No I’m fine. I’m just getting sent to the I.V. today. 

MOM: What’s the I.V.? 

ME: It’s where you go if you get in trouble. 

MOM: Oh, like detention. 

ME: No, it’s the Intervention Room. 

MOM: That’s funny. 

ME: I know. Listen, they’re making me call you before I go down there.

MOM: Oh God, what did you do now? 

ME: What did I do “now”? What’s that supposed to mean?

MOM: I don’t know, were you playing High Five Spin the Bottle again?

ME: THAT WAS THREE YEARS AGO, MOM! 

MOM: Still. Are you SongBombing people?

ME: I won't invent that for another ten years. And it won't even really take off (...YET).

MOM: What did you do, Brian?

ME: The real reason I’m going to the I.V. is…well…I was holding hands with Katie. 

MOM: [pause]

ME: Mom? You there?

MOM: Is that really what you did? 

ME: Yes.

MOM: Don’t lie to me, young man. 

ME: MOM I’M NOT LYING. I HELD HANDS WITH KATIE AND MS. TROTZ SENDING ME TO THE INTERVENTION ROOM. 

MOM: Oh. Okay. [Clearly suppressing a smirk--I could hear it over the phone] I guess you need to go to the Intervention Room then. 

And so, Katie and I spent an hour in the Intervention Room, filling out a half piece of yellow paper stating what we did, why it was wrong, and promising never to do it again. When we got out, the conversations with our classmates changed. They went from a joyful and coy, “Hey Brian, how’s Katie? :) :) :)”  to a more somber:

FRIEND: Hey Brian, how’s Katie doing?

ME: She’s doing alright. 

FRIEND: Yeah, the Intervention Room had to have been quite the strain on your relationship. 

ME: It’s been tough, but we’re pushing through.

FRIEND: Stay strong. 

ME: Thanks.