So, I was wandering down the road today, and I saw a car crash. It wasn’t big and horrible, just a minor crash. I went over to the window and looked in.
“AL!”
He was sprawled in the driver's seat, unconscious. Going against every scrap of knowledge I’ve learned about car crash victims, (NEVER move them unless the car’s gonna blow up) I dragged him out, flopped him over my shoulder, and carted him home. (And Al’s no featherweight to a gal who’s about five inches shorter than him…)
I got in the door (walking a distance that normally takes me ten minutes to drive in about two seconds) and drag him down the hallway to my bedroom, where I set him down on the bed and tuck my teddy bear that Ben gave me under one of his arms.
I turned to go call someone helpful, like a paramedic, when I see in the corner of my room Al’s red accordion. (The one from The Night Santa Went Crazy.) I picked it up and, checking to make sure Al was still asleep, put it on. I then squeezed it a few times and pressed some buttons. The sound that came out was one of the intros to the Dr. Demento show. It was the really slow, mechanical type sounding one.“Doc…tor…De…men…toooo…”
At the sound of his beloved accordion being played, Al woke up. “Hey!” I set the accordion down carefully and quickly and gave Al a guilty look.
“Oh, that’s okay.” Then he looked around. “Why am I here?” I told him he’d been in a car crash, but I was sure he was okay now. “Oh. I’m hungry.”
“Let’s go to the cafeteria.” So I took Al to my high school, led him to the café, and sat him down in the C lunch spot I inhabit. We didn’t eat anything (as the high school’s veggies taste more like meat than the meat does) but we did chat with all the other members of C lunch. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary lunch. (Well, ordinary for us...psychotically weird to the rest of the world.) Al even got yelled at by the Lunch Nazis for acting goofy. And he was sitting where Jodi normally sits, so every five minutes he’d get the door to the gym slammed open into his back. “Hey!”“Sorry…”
Then we got to talking about Suzanne. “So what’s she up to, since you’re in Iowa?” He leaned over and started whispering confidential information to me. Apparently Suzanne was going to star in her very own radio variety show! It sounded like a big hit.
Then Al looked around, and noticed all the people that normally come in mid-lunch and sit with us, as they did in the dream.
“Who are all of them?”
“Well, that’s Future-Ruben, and that’s Future-Steve, and over there is Future-Bermuda.” These were all people that looked nothing like the people mentioned.
“Okay…”
“Hey Al, isn’t there a concert tonight?”
“Yeah! I gotta go!”
Remembering why he was with me in the first place (I rescued him from his car wreck) I quickly offered “I’ll drive you.”
I took him to the venue. The stage was set up as Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists (Little Shop of Horrors again) and Audrey II was hidden behind a removable flat. The very top of the pod was showing, though, and the plant was HUGE at this point. (The very beginning of the show!) I was backstage yelling at the puppeteer to “get that plant DOWN and OFF the STAGE! NOW!” He ignored me. I looked out in the audience-and there, front and center, were Al and the guys, laughing their heads off at the show.

My Take On It

Next Dream
Car Crashes and School Lunches
03/23/01