Road Apples by Tim Sanders

Road Apples
Jan. 25, 2010

Discount dream merchants

Dreams are both fascinating and aggravating. They’re fascinating because they keep us entertained while we’re sleeping, and they’re aggravating because more often than not they make us worry about our mental state. On more than one occasion (try maybe 5,000) I’ve awakened in the middle of the night and said to myself, “Now just what in the name of common sense was that all about, and why didn’t my Clydesdale have tennis shoes like everybody else’s?”

In Biblical times there were always just loads of certified dream interpreters lounging around on street corners, waiting to listen to ancient Babylonian dreams for a very small fee and translate them into King James English. Their interpretations always started out something like this:

“Thou, O King, sawest seven coconuts that were empty of milk, withal, and tookest up thine sword against them; and thine armies they didst bring unto thee seven cupfuls of cream, and seven eggs from young Egyptian pullets, and seven cups of sugar and seven cups of flour; and also seven teaspoons of salt and seven teaspoons of vanilla extract. And in thine dream wast also a seven foot pie shell and seven times seven yards of whipped topping as far as the eye could see.”

Then the king would agree that the astrologers and magicians had the basic dream elements in the correct order, so the dream merchants would congratulate themselves and present the king with a couple of possible meanings, such as either:

a) Thou, O King, art fixated upon the number seven, or

b) All the King’s horses and all the King’s men had better leave coconut cream pies to all the King’s cooks.

And when the king offered to remove all their heads or set them all on fire if they couldn’t come up with a better translation, they’d plead insanity and somebody would send for a prophet, like old Leviticus or Deuteronomy, who really knew his stuff. He’d offer a very dramatic interpretation which involved pie baking as a metaphor for seven years of famine and seven years of pestilence followed by seven years of plenty and seven years of sub-prime mortgage rates and so on and so forth, which sounded reasonable, and encouraged the king. And when the king added the part of his dream about the big statue with legs of iron and feet of clay, the prophet was ready for him, and explained how the statue part was a very symbolic reference to either the long range future of the Middle East as it pertained to world history, or at the very least a serious ballroom dancing accident. So all the Biblical dreams were deep, meaningful dreams, and their interpretations were satisfactory only when those interpretations were deep and meaningful, too.

But nowadays, unless you count the likes of Pat Robertson and Al Gore, there are no prophets around to interpret our dreams and predict future calamities. And even if there were, I have a sneaking suspicion that my dreams are neither meaningful nor prophetic. Over the years most of my dreams have had little or no basis in reality, like dreams about llamas eating fermented grapes in our basement, or Marilyn’s mom mud racing in our front yard on her 300 horsepower, turbocharged Hoveround. And then there’s me trout fishing while floating on Lake Michigan in a bathtub, or showing up late for a high school or college final exam and realizing that either a) I’ve managed to miss every single class session that semester, or b) I’m not wearing pants. I have that one a lot.

A few days ago we received one of those unsolicited catalogs in the mail. It was from the Duluth Trading Company, so named because if it weren’t located in Belleville, Wisconsin, it might have been located in Duluth, Minnesota, which is only 300 miles and an entire state away from Belleville. Go figure. On the cover was a depiction of a plumber crouched on one knee with a pipe wrench in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Behind him stood a typical American housewife with her hands raised in horror and a look of pure disgust on her face. Under the heading “A Modest Proposal,” the reader was told to “turn the page for a new solution for an age-old problem.” At the top of the next page, in bold print, was the line “Longtail T – Solution to Plumber’s Butt!” Extra long T-shirts that hang down to the knees, that’s the ticket! Not a bad idea, I suppose.

My wife and I chuckled at the ad, and at the ad for X-Static Socks with silver filament yarn which “naturally eliminates 99.9% of odor causing bacteria” and thus could “X-terminate the Stink.” She found another ad which said “Don’t be uncouth, groom with Duluth,” and promoted a non-electrical nose hair trimmer with the claim that “3 million men have discovered the ‘nose hair secret.’” She glanced at my nose and said “No secrets there!” I won’t even mention her reaction to the ad on the last page for “Ballroom Jeans with crouchability.” There were other products, including “Fire Hose pants,” “Bigfoot Toenail Nippers,” and the ever popular “Anti Monkey Butt powder” for bikers who develop that debilitating monkey butt condition from too many hours in the saddle.

So that night I dreamed one of those mixed up dreams which made no sense at all, and included random segments about a battalion of portly plumbers with abominably short T-shirts, all scooting around the kitchen backwards, and monkeys with bushy nose hairs and exceptionally long toenails swinging from our curtains. I also remember something or other about a tournament which pitted me and an empty paintball gun against Bigfoot, a fire hose and a pipe wrench.

I’m not sure what it all meant, but the next morning I burned that stupid catalog.