Get Milked - Blog, Comics, Toons

Once You enter these gates
And hob-nob with Saint Pete
You won't remember nothing
You won't ever feel a thing
Once you sit in this fluff of clouds
Once you meet those with the soap
In their teeth the clean bubbles up
You won't remember a thing
Thank God for Heaven
It's a dang real nifty thang
Thank God for Heaven
Now Shake Your Thang

A friend of mine knows someone who used to wake up laughing hysterically every night. Right around 2 am he would burst from sleep and wake up his wife with insane giggling. Unfortunately, he did not know why this happened. Even morose days could not drown these late night hyena fits. Even the day this man's son spewed profanities right in his face (he said "&^%#@!@#!! arrggg $#@@#$##!!!"), an ominous harbinger of fatherhood to come, the laughter wasn't quelled. Nothing about this made sense.

One night this man woke up laughing and quickly ran to the bathroom to keep from stirring his wife. After regaining composure he realized that he had been dreaming, but he could not remember what. Something in the dream was making him laugh. The clock yawned 2:30 AM so he returned to bed. The next morning he remembered waking up but not what he had dreamt. The next two nights repeated these same events. On the third night he swore he remembered the dream. Something amorphous wafted in his consciousness. The following night the dream, now predictably, woke him up in a tizzy of guffaws, he ran to the bathroom and said something out loud to the mirror thinking he would remember it. He didn't.

The elusive dream remained just beyond his memory. Every night he swore his brain put another piece together. Whatever the joke contained, it seemed very elaborate and made up of shards of some vauge subconscious vision. But nothing concrete emerged from his nightly ruminations. Nonetheless, everything pointed to a single image, a single concrete something that recurred in each dream. That vital image triggered his laughter. When he told his wife about his problems, she stated the obvious: "So you wake up every night thinking you know what you're dreaming but can't remember it in the morning. Well, have you thought of putting a pad of paper next to the bed and writing down what you see immediately when you wake up?" He hadn't. Brillance!

The next night arrived and he placed the small pad of paper and pen next on the nightstand right next to his bed. He told himself as he dozed off to sleep: "Write it down... write it down... write it down..." The fateful hour arrived. He woke with a jolly start, calmed down, and heard the words "write it down!" echoing like a mantra in his head. He grasped the pen and scribbled some words that captured the dream image. There. He had it. It is accomplished! His chest lightened and sleep overtook him like a cool breeze.

He woke up the next morning and instantly remembered the paper to his side. There it was. The culmination of two weeks anguish and frustration. He reached for the pad like it was a talisman. Picking it up, he read the following words:

"Parrot falls in the water."

The night time laughter ceased. The man told my friend that he never mentioned the episode to anyone else and that he would appreciate it if he never brought it up ever again.

I think there's a lesson in this for all of us, and it is this: follow your dreams and you follow your brain's poo.

A friend of mine has a voluminous collection of ashtrays. "They'll be worth something someday, thanks to the smoking ban," he tells everyone. Though he has never inhaled a single puff of first-hand smoke into his lungs, almost every weekend he drags his family to rural hotels, who have "flexible" smoking policies ("nearly all of them," he claims), and pockets their ashtrays. While in town, the family visits as many greasy diners, back alley restaurants, and gas stations as possible. "About 30% of the time I leave with more than I came in with, " he chortles. His wife has grown increasingly frustrated with this new fascination. "All our lives," she says, "we've avoided cigarettes. We've avoided dingy and smoky bars. Now we go every weekend, with the children, and inhale and gag on other people's smoke just because he sees future profit in it." When asked if she'll put her foot down, she responds, "It will pass soon. Things always do with him."

He must have accumulated two hundred ashtrays in the past two or three years. They take up countless boxes in a corner of their basement. Last week he hauled out some of his favorites to show a group of friends. Lined up on the mantlepiece were ashtrays from obscure out of the way places such as "Harry's Pit Stop," "Flo's Empty Nest," "The Place To Be," and "Hotel Schmotel." His absolute favorite was a hot pink pentagon ashtray with fancy lettering embossed inside reading "What a Drag!" He gasped with laughter when he picked it up. "Do you know, " he tried to say between guffaws, "where I got this one?" Of course no one knew. "I got it at a cross-dressing bar!" He wailed for a solid minute until coughing replaced his laughing. Catching his breath he added, "It's so great! It has two two two puns in one! What a treasure!" His wife then said, with dripping disdain, "He went to that place when the kids and I were asleep in some dive hotel in the middle of nowhere. He's still in trouble for that." My friend gave me a sardonic "Oh oh!" look behind his wife's back and returned his holy grail to the mantlepiece.

Then a man in the group spoke up, "That's a great collection you have there. You know, I collect matchbooks from various places I've been. It's pretty fun. I guess we have something in common, huh?" My friend turned a wry face in the man's direction. "Matchbooks?" he barked. "Who would want to collect matchbooks? What's the point? They'll never be worth anything." The man shifted his eyes, looking for support, and apparently all he could muster was a nervous giggle. "I mean, who wants matchbooks around, " my friend continued unabated, "they're just cardboard and little swatches of paper. They won't last a week! Ashtrays have staying power! Glass! Plastic! They'll be around a while! Matchbooks can even destroy themselves." He rolled his eyes and went into a soliloquy about the pointlessness of matchbooks that did not cease for at least twenty minutes. During this time many people left, including me. As I exited, the matchbook collector, who I didn't know, was still silently enduring the verbal onslaught against his hobby. I have no idea what happened afterwards.