dreams

I only have a few reoccurring dreams, two good ones and two bad ones.

The first bad one I haven't had in years, but is pretty straight forward...all my teeth fall out.

The other one is a shade more complicated. There are variations on the theme, but at some point I figure out that I haven't graduated college. That I missed some class someone along the way and I find out that I haven't graduated...AND that the class I need is only offered once every 10 years or something like that. That spawns a flood of bad thoughts like, " how am I going to get job ?", " my wife is going to be pissed ", " wait...when did I get a wife ?!"...then I wake in a panic and it usually takes me a few minutes to reassure myself as to what date it is, and that I have a job and a wife and kids.....not that that's entirely calming.

Anyway, those two things are offset by two nice dreams.

One takes place in my high school. That's weird in that I have almost no recollection of being in my high school during waking hours. If i think really hard, I can remember some aspects of the building, but by-and-large my long term memory is really really bad anymore ( see kids, don't drink or do drugs). Anyway, I'm back in my high school and the entire school is filled with 4 feet of water. I spend the whole dream swimming around my school. And it's fun ! The really weird thing is that I've had this dream for a long time...even before I knew how to swim. In fact, the dream played a large part in getting me to learn how to swim. I don't have the dream that often, probably because I found out that swimming in real life isn't really all that fun.

The other dream that has replaced the swimming dream is the ice skating dream, and that's the one I had last night. I can't remember any of the details other than I was ice skating and it was fun. So I think it's a cue for me to learn how to ice skate. My only fear is that I'll learn how and it will turn out to be like the swimming thing.

My limited experience with ice skating is that I once played goalie for an ice hockey team. When I was a professional drunk, I used to hang out at this neighborhood bar. I was only 23 years old, but all the other guys in the bar were in their 30s or 40s. The Pittsburgh Penguins had Mario Lemieux and hockey was getting really big in the area and these drunks all decided that they wanted to start playing hockey. They sent a messenger over to the bar across the way and challenged the drunks on the other side of the street to a game and in short order the town and a bar based hockey league.

I don't know much about hockey, or winter sports or Canadian history for that matter, but I'm pretty sure that this league would get a nomination if there was a category for worst hockey league in the history of sports. Almost everyone was fat and out of shape. Most guys hadn't been on skates in years. And at least 30% of the people on the ice at any time were over the legal limit for driving a car. My favorite part of the league was what were referred to as "the Tripods". These were dudes to had to use their stick on the ice in order to not fall down. They'd press their sticks to the ice and the shufffle to get around. Each team seemed to have one guy that could actually play and a slew of drunken tripods. The two guys who could really play would play a game of one-on one by bobbing and weaving and hiding from each other by using the tripods as interference. They'd fly around the rink with tremendous speed and grace while the tripods shuffled around looking like that vibrating football game that you used to have as a kid.

Anyway, the only rule for the league was that all the players had to be over 30 years old...except goalies. Goalies could be any age. Since nobody wanted to play goalie, almost all the goalies in the league were teenage sons of someone on the team. Except our team. I was the goalie for out team. They came to me one day and said, " you wanna play ?". Seeing as we got free wings and beer after each game I was in. The only problem was that I didn't know how to skate. " That's fine", they told me, " you can play in your sneakers." I did that the first game. In that game I spent the entire time on my knees. For the record, you can't play in sneakers without hitting your nads a dozen times. From that point on I wore skates. The first time I played in skates it went well....until I left the goal to go after a puck. I skated over to the puck, hit it, and kept going. I had no idea how to stop. So I fell down, slid for a while, then crawled on my hands and pads back to the goal. Of course the other team scored. After that I took a lesson with some 6 year olds and learned how to skate, stop, and return to the same spot....all provided I don't travel more than 12 feet. Not really the stuff of my dreams.

So anyway, this is rambling a bit, but the point is I think I may take some skating lessons. Skating looks like fun.