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Saturday, December 1, 2007

Bathroom Monologue: Close My Eyes, and Think Of

Some people relax by closing their eyes and imagining their dream house, where they want to spend the rest of their days. I'm demented, so I don't have that. I have a dream hamlet. It's Old Teioh, because fewer people live in "Old" Anything as compared to "New" Anything. In this case, almost no one lives there. It's one of a God-like race's old set designs, back when they were still experimenting with life, pre-Adam and Eve. More of a Batman and Robin sort of thing. Except for the three-story school building and clocktower, every house and market is one story tall, made of white sheetrock or white, mache-like brick, with flat, slightly slanted tin roofs. The roofs are slanted in case it case, so that you can see the water sleucing down, and so that it's collected for the use of the house. The air is always fresh as a New England morning, the creek is always warm enough to swim in, and every road is a dirt road. The creek actually backs up into the flooded school house, so you can dive out the windows or off the balcony of the principal's office if you want. There's a drive-in movie theatre, but no cars, and no lot; you have to sit on a rooftop to watch the movies, and every rooftop has a good view. A lot of Jack Nicholson, Hayao Miyazaki and Godzilla movies play there. Unsurprisingly, a lot of houses have been converted into libraries. The irony is that the whole place is really a library, as Old Teioh is a brilliant relic of a time when an alien civilization learned to program data, not to plastic discs or silicon sticks, but into atoms. Every short story, novel, treatise, poem and song from a planet's history can be programmed into a single white brick. We've forgotten how to access the data, though, so we'll just live in the houses made out of art, watching the stars through your blindless window. You can fall asleep watching them, because the sun never rises before you're ready to get up. I don't aspire to build Old Teioh or spend the rest of my life there; I do aspire to spend the rest of my daydreams there, though.

3 comments:

  1. This has always been one of my favorites! I've been looking forward to you reposting it.

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  2. Wow. Can I daydream there too?

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  3. Thanks for the kind words, Max. And Jemma, you can be in my daydream anytime you like, so long as Shelly says it's okay. But it's pants-optional, so don't get offended if you walk in on anything.

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