Poop My Dad Utters

Today, on a visit to the office to inspect my progress in walling-up a basement door, my dad offered me the tasty option of a lunch at SUBWAY. Being both cheap (like my father, thanks dad) and hard-up for social interaction, I initially forgot about and afterward worked to ignore the fact that I looked like a very muddy, unkempt person, and walked with my dad toward the green and yellow glow.

The room was full of Forest Citizens, and I immediately felt highly self-conscious about my dirty clothes and lack of a smart phone to stare at. The people at Subway in Forest City are a peculiar bunch, and I always think about the politics of lunch here. The Subwayers, as opposed to the Hardeeans, the Sum Hingers and the mad one percent of the town who eat lunch at Shooters or Bills or Pizza Hut or even Taco Jerry's (A&W is still closed for the season), are a mixture of the wannabe health-fashionable consumers of GMO compost and the obedient, fetishist, accountants/mystics of calories and nutrients. While there might be laudable ideas here and there in the mixture, the overall act of eating at Subway pretty much always feels like an act of bad faith on my part.

I was thinking about my Subway angst as I watched one of the women preparing what seemed like a very tiny sandwich. Why was this sandwich so tiny? I looked down and saw the corresponding child dawdling while her mother attempted to interview her with respect to the design of the sandwich in progress. And then it dawned on me: in this bizarro future there was no longer a deli roll sandwich, just a three inch. By the time I'd made it past this heavy paradigm shift, it was time to order. My dad requisitioned a tuna melt, speaking to the robotic, forest-green, assembler women in curt bursts that anticipated the scripted back and forth that would have otherwise played out. This drove me nuts, first, because it made my dad seem like some kind of brusque robot himself and then more-so because the women at Subway were nowhere near tuned-in enough to the process of sandwiching to parse dad's uninterrupted string of commands, and everything had to be repeated, slowly.

We got the sandwiches, paid, sat, chewed for two or three minutes. Somehow we happened onto a fragment of conversation about British squatting laws and the fact that the police in the UK treat such disputes as civil matters, that is to say they ignore them. Then my dad pipes up with "I have this recurring dream..." [nom nom nom tuna nom]. I stopped chewing and began laughing rather uneasily through my most recent hunk of bready, compost with assorted cured meats so homogeneous as to be quite sinister. My dad leaned back from the very end of his sandwich and looked up, scratching his chin, exceedingly obviously preparing some recollection to share with me. I guess I felt ready, but somehow not expecting this sort of lunchtime revelation from my father.

"I have this dream where I realize that I own this building that I totally forgot about... in Mason City"

At this point my eyes are completely bugged out and I have no idea anymore how to deal with what he's explaining. I know that he's brought this up because we were talking about squatters and property, does he dream about having to deal with squatters? Regularly??

"Dad, wait, you're saying that you have a dream about discovering you own additional property that you dream over and over?"

"Yep. I think it started around five or six years ago." I mentally subtract; this date would place the headwaters of this dream right around my father's 50th birthday.

"Have you ever like researched this at all? Googled it?"

"No."

"Dad, this is the whitest guy dream, let alone recurring dream I've ever heard of." He lauged at that. I directed the conversation back at the dream. I wanted to compare it to the sorts of formal similarities that I've noticed in my comparison of my own dreams. I've never really had a dream that I remember repeat more than once, though my dreams often contained warped elements of each other, like a communal bunch of props and sets.

"Woah, okay, so how do you actually perceive this? What're the shots and the stage directions of the dream?"

"Well, I don't really remember that too well..."

"I mean, where does it happen? How does your realization occur?"

"Well, I'm just doing stuff and all of a sudden I remember that I've got this property in Mason Cit-"

"Doing stuff? Doing what stuff? Like anything specific?"

"No, not that I remember. Just anything. But then as soon as I realize that I've got this building, I'm really stressed out, cause how do you forget about a building? And then I go to Mason City and it's always a huge hassle..." He trails off, presumably picturing the squatters or the meth cooks or the stray animals or the neighborhood gang of kids or any manner of interlopers who might upset his building. Now I am doing the laughing.

"Dad, you're telling me this is a nightmare, or like a stress dream, about property about very specific pain of dealing with the bureaucratic hassle of removing people from your fallow property?"

"Yeah, it's always something. The building is usually different, but it's kinda industrial, maybe a warehouse or somethin'."

"Is it always in Mason City?"

"Yeah."

"Like, where in Mason City? Do you have to actually travel there once you've had your epiphany?

He thinks about this for a minute. "I don't know. I think it's usually like I realize and then the dream changes and I'm standing in front of the building, whatever it looks like, and I just know it's Mason City."

"Wow," I say. "That has got to be one of the strangest dream descriptions I have ever heard." Dad seems pleased with this and smiles.

At this point in the conversation I tried to explain the one form of dream that I have experienced occasionally for years that is (usually, with rare exceptions in which it seems downright prophetic) tantamount to his dream's opposite.

First, let's review briefly. In dad's dream, he discovers something he'd forgotten and is overwhelmed by the impenetrable mystery of its omission from his memory. When my dad wakes up, he feels better, though with perhaps a little more paranoia that he might be buying and forgetting giant objects in the world (something that it is just inherently weird for people to be able to do in this crowded a world).

My dream, on the other hand, occurs when I've actually lost something in the real world, something that I seldom do, and therefore obsess about when it occurs. Again the issue is memory error, but this time I go through the triumphant experience of seeking out and actually finding the object that I've lost, only to awake disappointed, frustrated, enraged at still having a lost whatever.

I wish I could say that I had looked up this dream and had a snappy wrap-up to this anecdote. I do not. However, I can say that I really like chatting with my dad when things go well. His banter is WEIRD, no doubt, and not just because I'm talking to the previous version of my brain.