I had a dream last that Mike Edrington had moved into a dormitory somewhere and I was visiting him at wherever the hell it was he had moved to. I came to his room to find him and he told me to open the door. When I walked into his room he was hanging by his ankles from his loft and hanging out an open window.

“I’m going to reach maximum overdrive by using up all my potential energy,” he said. “This will all be kinetic.”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about but went along with it. Until he dropped from the loft like a bowling ball and crashed into the ground three stories down. I ran down a flight of stairs to find him at the bottom standing up but standing on a broken leg.

He called me a dick for not stopping him.

Then I woke up.

On the way home from work last night I stopped off at the liquor store and picked up a bottle of Teacher’s Highland Cream Scotch Whiskey. I like Scotch quite a bit. It’s my favorite whiskey to sip. I like to pack a bunch of ice in a good tumbler and pour in a couple shots and let it sit in the melting ice while I sip away. Towards the end it’s more like a scotch and water but without the immediate drowning on the scotch and added loss of flavor.

Teacher’s was a smooth scotch. I didn’t have to have that much of it to be satisfied. I relaxed on the couch and took swigs of it here and there all night.

Then I got a phone call from a Telemarketer. I get a lot of phone calls from Telemarketers because I have a landline and landlines are as overrun with Telemarketers as e-mail is spam. I’ve forgotten the businessname- it was some travel company- they call me once a week, I usually miss the call- but they wanted to offer me a trip to Cancun, Miami, or Las Vegas- none of which interest me that much.

“How are you today Mr. Latham?” the woman on the phone line asked me.

I’d had enough of the Teacher’s Scotch that I was in a silly mood.

“Terrible!” I said. “Just terrible.”

This caught her off guard. She’d just asked me how I was and I didn’t play the game the right way. Now when she made her sales pitch she came across as an unfeeling, robot sales person.

“Life is just so….what’s the word I’m looking for?- HARD! Yes, that’s it!” I said.

That was understandably not the response she was looking for to the question “would you like to win an all expenses paid trip to Cancun, Miami, or Las Vegas?”

I kept on and on like that for a couple minutes until the telemarketer stopped talking altogether and the only sound from her was frantic typing over the telephone.

Teacher’s Scotch! 2 thumbs up.

I kept waking up with weird dreams last night.  I’ve got a little bit of a cold and I’ve been kind of out of it since last night.  I considered getting up to write these down in better detail, but I couldn’t get out of bed long enough to do so.  These are the details I can recall:

In the first dream I got stabbed at work in my stomach and all my guts spilled out on the floor.  My supervisor had to help me cram them back into my belly and then had a nurse give me stitches so I could get back to work.  For some reason I was especially concerned about my kidneys.

In the second dream I was riding the bus.  I was hauling a snare drum and chop sticks around and every now and then would play the snare drum with the chop sticks.  I got off the bus with my snare drum and got on another bus and ended up sitting down next to Doug Roberson from Gabe’s in Iowa City and we talked about how I shouldn’t play the snare drum with chopsticks.

In my last dream that I remember I was standing in line at HEB and this guy kept trying to steal coins out of my pocket, but I didn’t have any coins.  Finally he started throwing gold dollars at me.  I don’t know why.

I saw the Supersuckers and Edgar Winter play sets on the South 1st Street Bridge’s annual Bat Fest on Saturday night.  There were 2 stages- one featured bloated classic rock acts & the other, which was on the South side of the bridge featured smaller touring acts.  The south stage was also right next to a cluster of portajohns and gave off an incredibly rank scent every time the wind blew from the west.  I went with my friends Dan, Melanie, and Chris.

The Supersuckers played a fairly short set, but it was long enough that the five dollars we spent getting into Bat Fest was not wasted.  They gave a pretty funny introduction to the song “Pretty Fucked Up” wondering if it was appropriate for a family event.  There were small children all over the place.  There were two little kids wailing away on their toy light sabers as though they were guitars.

The Supersuckers were pretty cool, even though I spent their entire set gagging & plugging my nose every minute or two.  I couldn’t drink enough Miller High Life to forget that everything around me smelled like shit.

Here’s how bad the shit smell was:  when the Supersuckers finished their set, my friends and I went to the petting zoo in the middle of the bridge & found that the feces of goats, ponies, kangaroos, and deer smelled like potpourri by comparison.  Also, while at the petting zoo, we saw a kangaroo’s dick.  I’m only mentioning this for posterity’s sake.  Quick recap of the petting zoo: it smelled like potpourri, there was a kangaroo, we saw it’s penis.

Finally we saw Edgar Winter take the stage.  I told everybody about how <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Hex#Lawsuit”>the Winter Brothers sued DC comics</a> over their likenesses being used as the characters The Autumn Brothers in a Jonah Hex miniseries that Timothy Truman & Joe Lansdale did in the mid 90’s.  I couldn’t remember who won.  Thanks to Wikipedia I know it was DC comics. I’m ok with that.  It was a pretty good miniseries.  We stuck around long enough to hear “Frankenstein” & breath air that was not caked in the rancid scent of baked portajohn feces.