I was asleep at the wheel, as usual. I was asleep at the wheel, sleeping soundly. Snoozing my head off, in fact. Snoozing like a good ‘un. Who knows where I was going in my little car, or why? I knew only my dreams – my funny little dreams. In my dreams I was this and I was that. In my dreams I was doing various things, but not particularly important things. Just aimless, stupid things. I was doing things just for the sake of doing them. I was just puttering around.
In my dreams I was a person, along with all that this entails. What does ‘being a person’ entail? Do you have to know that, or can you just pretend? I was pretending anyway; I don’t know what about anyone else, I was pretending for all I was worth! ‘Hey guess what, you guys,’ I said excitedly, to no one in particular, ‘I’m a person.’ Now that I was a person, it was important for me to do some people stuff, I realised. That was rather essential – I shouldn’t leave that out. I needed a hobby, I needed a pastime, I needed an interest. I needed some sort of focus. Maybe I would take up gambling, I said to myself. Maybe I would gamble everything I had on some fairly improbable event occurring.
The only problem with this plan was that I didn’t have anything to gamble! Some gambler I would make! I didn’t have anything to gamble because I was only a dreamer in a dream. All I had were my projections and they weren’t really real. There were fantasies. They were make-believe. ‘Welcome to my fantasy’, I said, in a hollow, sepulchral voice. ‘Welcome to my hallucinated reality.’ Welcome to the arid life-denying desert which is my world. If you turn over a stone maybe you will find a scorpion there, and maybe it will sting you.
‘Welcome to the arid inhospitable desert of my dreams,’ I said. ‘Make sure you have some antidote to scorpion stings with you because you’ll be in serious trouble if you don’t.’ I had to find a hobby, I realised. I had to find an interest. I had to find a focus. I was sleeping at the wheel. In my dreams lots of things happened but really nothing ever happened. Everything was always the same. ‘What’ll I do today?’ I wondered. ‘What’s my game-plan? What’s my agenda? What are my goals?’ Perhaps my goal should be to have some goals, I thought bleakly. Perhaps my agenda should be to get an agenda. Maybe I’ll tell a few jokes and see if anyone laughs! There was once this stone in the desert, I said, ‘it lay there for 10,000 years and nothing at all happened. Then it lay there for another 10,000 years and still nothing happened…’
That’s the punch-line. It’s important to have a punch-line. For a long time I told jokes without any punch-lines and then I wondered why no one ever laughed. I always wondered why no one ever laughs at my jokes. Maybe my whole life is a joke without a punch-line, I thought to myself. I’m missing a punch-line. The all-important punch-line that would throw a whole new perspective on everything that had happened leading up to that point. You’d then have to see everything anew, in the most incongruously unexpected way. It’ll surprise you. It’ll blow you away. ‘You didn’t see that coming now, did you?’ your friends will laugh. No indeed, you didn’t…
The only problem with evaluating everything that had so-far happened in the light of some new perspective that had just been brought into play in the most unexpected way was that nothing had happened. Chew away on that one, buddy. Make of it what you will. Read into it any meaning you like. Feel free to get as creative with it as you like. Nothing ever happens in my dream – I only think that it does. ‘Oh look, there’s something happening,’ I say excitedly, and then I look again – ‘Oh hang on, I was mistaken. Nothing happened. It was a false alarm. Sorry about that folks…’
I was asleep at the wheel, as usual. I was in a deep, deep, sleep. Id hit the snooze button a little too hard! I had hit it with a big ten kilogram sledgehammer. I had given it one hell of a whack – the teeth were rattling in my mouth afterwards. My whole skeleton was reverberating within the fleshly envelope of my body. It was reverberating like a tuning fork! Some people came up to me afterwards. ‘Hey buddy,’ one of them said, ‘you hit that snooze buddy button pretty damn hard there, didn’t you? What’s your problem?’ I became instantly enraged. I flipped out. I swelled up instantly like an ocean puffer-fish with all my sharp spiny scales sticking out from me in all directions. I was a ball of sharp spikes. I was incandescent with rage. ‘Fuck off out of my dream!’ I screamed out at the top of my voice.
