Whoa,k that was a wacky dream. Real life is usually pretty boring, so let me type up this bizarre dream while it’s fresh:

Someone gave me a Chia kangaroo for Christmas, “just what I always wanted” — not, because Chia pets are stupid and anyway, I already have one, in real life.

In the dream, though, one of the Chia’s legs was missing, so I took it to the store and politely asked the salesman to trade it in on another, or please supply a matching Chia wheelchair. He refused to even talk to me, just spoke in Spanish to another employee and ignored me.

Next I went to the store manager and explained the situation, and he said he had work to do and shooed me away.

Then I went to the Chia factory — a fascinating place, where Chia grass was growing on the walls and phones and furniture — and asked to speak with the plant manager (accidental pun). He listened impatiently for a moment, then interrupted and told me to go away.

Everybody was cold-shouldering me, and I was ready to chalk up another win for the idiots, give up, go home. Then I noticed, it wasn’t only my Chia kangaroo that was missing a leg. Every Chia at the factory was defective, so why was I the only person complaining?Picking up one of the many Chias that was missing its head, I said, “What about this?” Someone in a Chia factory uniform (grass growing on her shirt) shrugged and told me that having no head just adds to the charm of a Chia dog.

I couldn’t walk away with my busted Chia kangaroo and pretend nothing was wrong, so I walked to the end of the Chia assembly line, and one-by-one grabbed all the malformed Chia Pets as they came down the conveyor belt, and threw them, hard, at the Chia wall, and at the salesman, at the store manager, at the plant manager, everyone who’d been ignoring the Chia Problem.

When I’d made a hell of a mess, and it was beautiful, I wanted to throw more Chia Pets at everyone in the world, which would be way better than buying the world a Coke. I wanted to throw and shatter Chia Pets forever, until someone somewhere acknowledged the problem and made it right, not just for me, but for every Chia everywhere.

And that was my dream. As Roy Neary said in Close Encounters, “This is important. This means something.” But I have no idea what, and I bet it would stump Sigmund Freud.

A few weeks ago, Kallie and I went 50/50 and bought a Chia hippo for the office, but it’s kinda cute and not defective.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’ll admit to some trepidation opening it, since the last package that came in the mail was a living cockroach, but today’s package wasn’t disgusting, it was sweet. The people behind Our Two Cents zine sent me a coffee can, painted Christmas colors red and green, and filled with cookies and candies.

Wait a minute, let me doublecheck something … yeah, that was definitely a good review I gave their zine last month, so they’d have no motive to poison me.

I’m chewing on a fine chocolate-chip-in-chocolate cookie as I type this, mmm, but if it’s poison the cops will find my rotund corpse under this typewritten page and know exactly who to arrest. Mmm.

Our Two Cents, I have no soft spot for Christmas, and I’m the living embodiment of bah humbug, but I do like cookies, jawbreakers, and peppermints, so — thank you.

♦ ♦ ♦

OK, duh. I’m sitting here, finishing off this can of cookies and candies and re-reading today’s crappy entry, and now the riddle of this morning’s dream seems obvious.It wasn’t about Chia, really. Chia was just symbolizing everything else that sucks in the world — Christmas, my job, the church, the U S of A, etc. Every aspect of everything around us is either defective, broken, or a lie, and nobody does anything about it except pretend there’s no problem. We need to throw things, hard, against our defective reality.

Well, that was a long reacharound for a boring little sermon, eh?

Pathetic Life
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