Meanwhile, back inside the dream inside the frown

The dream ended.

I awoke to find myself lying on the ground outside the hospital where I realized i had been enfrowned. In my gripping lobe I gripped a sleek iPhone 3Gs, the tweet-shank newly bloodied by my frantic attempt to share my meaningless thoughts. I didnt’ feel any different, though my gas bladders were semi deflated. perhaps relinquishing a part of your identity to the meaninglessness of conventional life wasn’t actually bad. perhaps.. yes perhaps smalltalk was even acceptable.

I righted myself on my … legs? I had… these were real legs. I had real legs. The form that the great suit of the future had hidden me under… it had become me. My gas bladders weren’t empty, they were gone. And what’s more, I could see. All around me i could see a city, the city of Toronto, its middling skyscrapers, its sprigs of trees cropping up stridently amid the cityscape, its bland pedestrians with country-folk haircuts and cheap suits. Toronto, i saw it now, as it actually was, no chromo-licks or visionscreams. The sight.. the sight! It was real! And i had it!

I ran through the yard towards a street, dull gray, with metal lanes in the middle, some type of rails perhaps. I ran right up to the first person I met, and opened my…mouth? I had but one mouth, a real mouth. “Excuse me.”

“Yes?” he replied.

“Nice weather we’re having, wouldn’t you say?” It was okay, i wasn’t diminished. I could talk about the weather. Why not?

“Yep. It’ll be like this all week, over the weekend.”

“Oh, i should get out the barbeque.” Where was this coming from? I didnt’ have a barbeque. I didnt’ even know what a barbeque was, unless it was related to the BarbeQueen of the Smokey Grill chain of planets. Delicious brocopian slabs there, by the way. But her majesty’s passions had waned of late, and her slab fires burned low. Alas.

“Yeah. I’ll grill my own meat that i bought on a grill. I’ll serve it to friends, and we will have a beer together by my suburban pool. I have a wife, and she works at a school. Anyway, later.”

This wasn’t so bad. He was relating facts to me. pure facts. None of those terrible ideas cluttering up the conversation. No emotions, nothing contentious, just plain information so i can know that he’s just like me.

I explored this new freedom from having to have a personality for the rest of the day. I encountered some very clever people too. While i was strolling through something that they called “Kensington Market”, i ran into someone with thick rimmed glasses without prescription lenses. He told me that he had a magic watch. I asked him to show me. Apparently it told the future time.

“What time is it now?” he entreated.

“it’s 3:49, by my watch.” I didn’t have a watch, but speaking on autopilot tended to relinquish the correct results to any situation.

“Okay… I’ve set my watch to tell the time one hour from now. So that means right now its… hold on… ” he stared at his watch for a moment, in a seizure of concentration. “4:49.”

I would have verified his results, but i just innately trusted him, and couldn’t be bothered to muster any kind of imaginary clock in my head and watch it go ahead by one hour.

Later, i ran into the cleverest person. He had come up with a novel use for mnemonic devices.

“Most people waste mnemonic devices to remember chemical formulas, the names of kings, and so on. However, no one has applied them to merely learning english words before. Watch. Let’s say you have to remember the word ‘eat’. I use the word “feet”, because it rhymes with eat. So whenever i have to use the word ‘eat’, i think ‘feet’, and then that remindsme of eat.”

“Brilliant.” It seemed brilliant to me.

“It goes further. What if i want to eat, but i can’t remember the word, but i can’t remember the word to remind me of the word. It would be pretty embarrassing if i said i was hungry, and wanted to… uhhh. uhhhh. uhhhh, you know what i mean? So i think of the word hoof, because a hoof is a kind of foot. That reminds me of feet, then eat. BUt it doesn’t stop there, for every english word i have a mnemonic to remind me. Some of the words i actually have whole songs for. For instance, the word “preamble”. I have a song that goes like this.

Ambling around,
shambling around,
peas are green,
spleen, heat, hot, lamb,
delicious greek food,
imbiciles are rude,
route, road, toad,
tight, fight, combat,
contention is the root of all
problems, preblems,
prebpreb, prepre, pre!
Now just add amble to pre and you get
preamble, and that’s the easiest one yet.”

“That’s ingenius. that really is ingenius.”

“I know. If i ever need to say any number of words, i have thousands of songs. i have songs to remind me of the songs. Shall i sing one for you?”

“I’d love to hear one, but barbeque season, you feel me?”

His eyes become empty, and his muscles slackened, as though being hypnotized by some transcranial magnetometer.

“Yes–barbeque season.”

All around me the rastas and hipsters had dropped what they were carrying, and like Pharaohs (which in the timeframe now approximated for my within the great frown, i believe were called zombies. of course in my day, the zombie people had conquored egype and ruled over a race of shirts as pharaohs. Egypt got swindled a lot. The pharaohs were really.. slow witted… There’s no polite way of saying it.) they stumbled forward in unison.

“Yes–” they spoke “barbeque season.”

Though i couldn’t hear it, somewhere out in space, the lips of the great frown of the universe were curling into a vague half-smile. It was barbeque season, and the barbequeen’s fires were smoking up some delicious brocopian slabs, by which i mean our personalities.

To be queentinued…