Blackmoor Vituperative

Fun fact! It turns out that I can, in fact, read in my dreams, despite what TV and movies have been telling me for years.

Last night I dreamed I went on a trip to China with a group of people, one of whom was [the actor who played “Thirteen” on House and “Quorra ” in Tron 2]. For some reason, Susan didn’t go.

When we got back, I brought several members of the group, including [the actor who played “Thirteen” on House and “Quorra” in Tron 2], back to our house (which was completely unlike any house we have ever lived in) to meet Susan, and vice versa. In that house, we had a huge living room with lots of art — not classical art, but poster art and “pop” art, including a huge impressionist painting of [the actor who played “Thirteen” on House and “Quorra” in Tron 2]. Susan, perhaps wanting to prevent any awkwardness, had covered that painting and another (also of that actor) with other framed pieces of art.

Looking closely at one of them, I saw it was a certificate or award of some kind. An inscription on the frame read “Hochschule Bruderschaft” (roughly translates as “college fraternity”). So not only could I read in my dream, I could read German.

P.S. Why am I referring to Olivia Wilde as [the actor who played “Thirteen” on House and “Quorra” in Tron 2]? Because in the dream, I was going to introduce her to Susan, but then couldn’t remember her name. That’s why I went over to look at the new art to begin with: to buy time while I tried to recall her name. When I woke up, I *still* couldn’t remember her name. I had to Google it to write this paragraph.

Is good news even a thing anymore? Not “making the best of it” news. Not “people staving off doom for one more day” news. Not “here’s some trivia about some stranger’s personal life” news. Not “be thankful things aren’t even worse” news. Actual good news.

That would be nice.

It’s not uncommon for me to have a song in my head. I typically wake up with a song playing in my head. And it’s not terribly uncommon for me to walk around singing a song I haven’t consciously chosen to sing.

What was unusual today was that I was singing a David Bowie song (“Modern Love”, if you really want to know), and about halfway through, I realized that I was singing it in the style of Elton John.

So… huh. Interesting. After that realization, I started singing other David Bowie songs. And it’s funny, but most of the ones I tried worked just fine in the style of Elton John!

Naturally, I tried some other bands’ songs… Journey, Flock Of Seagulls, Queen… and it’s funny how easily that they lend themselves to an Elton John impression. “We Are The Champions” and “Separate Ways” sung by Elton John work particularly well, in my opinion.

So at this point I am almost done with my shower, and I think, I wonder if it works the other way around?

So I try , and you know what? It doesn’t work. I can’t do “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” in the style of Journey or Queen or David Bowie.

So is that a strength of Elton John (or Bernie Taupin), or is that a weakness of my non-Elton John impressions?

Really makes you think.

The wedding of Brandon and Susan Blackmoor, October 31, 1991. There are a few folks in this who aren’t with us anymore, including Susan’s mother and her uncle. The last half is all present-unwrapping the next day: I recommend skipping that.

No one is young and beautiful forever. As Carrie Fisher said, “Youth and beauty are not accomplishments. They’re the temporary happy byproducts of time and/or DNA.”

On the bright side, age has made me a much better person than I was 30 years ago. I wouldn’t trade that for being young and pretty again… but I would think about it.

I realized yesterday that I don’t want to move to somewhere I have already lived. I think of that as moving backward. It occurs to me that this is not how most people think.

Also, I would really like to move somewhere not populated by ignorant bigots and ruled by a death cult.

My death is inevitable, and there is a reasonable chance that someone I know will outlive me and have some interest in my passing. As such, these are my wishes for the treatment of my remains and memory upon my death and for a short time thereafter.

First and most importantly, I won’t be there, so it really doesn’t matter what I want. Take my corpse to Nags Head and parade me around like Terry Kiser, and I won’t know any different. But if you care what I wanted, here you go.

1. No viewing. Don’t bother putting my dead body on display. I wasn’t all that great to look at when I was alive, and I seriously doubt I got better looking afterward. Personally, I think putting dead bodies on display is grotesque.
2. No prayers, no platitudes, no religious balderdash. I’m not in a better place. My death wasn’t part of some divine plan. That’s all bullshit. As far as the universe is concerned, my death matters as much as a light bulb burning out. I was alive. Now I’m not.
3. No obituaries. Don’t waste money announcing my death in the newspaper or anywhere else. Anyone who cares if I’m dead already knows.
4. Keep things cheap. My remains don’t need a fancy headstone, casket, funeral service, or anything else. Dispose of them in the cheapest, simplest way possible. Use my bones, skin, corneas, and various organs if you can, and toss the rest in a landfill, for all I care. Cremation and resomation (alkaline hydrolysis) are probably the most cost-effective means of disposal. And for pete’s sake, don’t keep the leftovers. Throw them away.
5. Throw a party, preferably somewhere you don’t have to clean up afterward. Have an open bar, and invite the handful of people who actually care that I’m dead. I doubt it would be more than a dozen people, plus my family.
6. No eulogy. I’m gone, and it’s too late to assign any meaning to my life. If you feel an uncontrollable desire to hear yourselves talk, here’s an activity for you: each person raises a toast to my memory, says one good thing about me, and one bad thing about me, and then everyone drinks. Both the good thing and the bad thing have to be sincere, and they have to be something no one else has said yet. If the person whose turn it is can’t think of one good thing and one bad thing, then they just say, “To Brandon!”, and everyone drinks.
7. Try to find a place for my various pet projects before my web sites expire. I hereby declare everything I wrote during my life to be given to the public domain after my death, not that I think anyone actually cares about a word of it.
8. If Susan’s dead, find a loving home for our cat. Use as much money as needed.

I just had a conversation with someone who said that President-elect Trump’s intended cabinet appointments so far indicate that he is “reaching out to the opposition”. Initially, I though that was a particularly funny comment, and congratulated them for their sarcastic humour.

Except they weren’t making a joke. They apparently actually believed that. Which left me speechless.

They then went on to explain how they were reasonable, and thoughtful, and in way of example of their reasonableness, gave me a short list of their horrific beliefs. They concluded with, “We all want the same things, just have differing opinions as to how to get there.”

I replied, “I strongly suspect that you and I do not want the same things.”

“What do you want?” they asked.

What do I want? That’s a good question. I want zero-calorie, 80-proof rum. I want a reliable 200 Mbps Internet connection that costs less than $100 per month. I want every movie and TV show ever made to be available on, at most, two or three Roku channels, and for them never to be removed. I want a house where I can look out my window and see nothing but trees, ocean, and sky, and to live in peace with my wife and my cat. But that’s small stuff. When it comes to the world outside my window, what I want is less easy to define, so it took me a few minutes to distill it down. So this is what I said:

I want a world where people who are decent and kind can live their lives in peace without fear of being deported, or having their basic civil rights denied because they love the wrong person, or being hooked up to electrodes to shock them “straight”, or being put into internment camps because they picked the wrong invisible friend, or being harassed and driven away because they have the wrong ancestors.

They replied that they considered themselves a realist, and they considered me an idealist.

I replied, “I consider myself someone who doesn’t want their friends treated like sub-humans by people like you.”

Which was probably not the most constructive thing to say. So it goes.

Last night I dreamed that I had made up a RPG character who was a male Asian-American police detective in Los Angeles, who knew karate and had expertise with motorcycle stunts. Initially, he was going to speak with a TV-stereotype accent, but then I changed my dream-mind and decided that he was from Van Nuys and spoke just like everyone else in southern California. (I’m not sure what that says about me.)

The game system was an adaptation of ZeroSpace to TV action shows (which is certainly feasible, although it’s not something I’d ever considered before now), and I had a printed character sheet that I was taking to the game. The printed character sheet was the size of a bath towel. When I got to the game (which was apparently going to be played in a fast food restaurant — brightly lit, plastic chairs, little tables), everyone else was already there, including Susan: each of them had their own huge character sheets.

Lloyd was going to to be GMing the game. When I handed him my huge character sheet, he started walking to the other side of the room, but my character sheet got stuck on something and tore. The last thing I remember in the dream was being annoyed at that and saying, “Aw, come on, man.”

The image above is Daniel Henney, an actor who resembles how I imagined the character in the dream.

The first one-quarter of my life is over: I am 50. Of al the things running through my mind, the uppermost is… I will never be as cool as Vincent Price.

This is scheduled to appear on my blog a couple of months from now. It’d be pretty creepy if I died before then.

Boo!