My Unchecked Brain

In my dream, there was a nighttime soap opera/drama about a family who owned a furniture store. But the show was actually an expanded commercial for a real-world furniture store by way of product placement and scenes taking place inside the store while the family members were at work. They made the characters and plots compelling, like The Sopranos but tamer.

The kicker was that you could go to the real-world furniture store and interact with the characters, or rather the actors in character, who worked real shifts at the store. You could be waited on by the characters, or evesdrop and listen to their family meta, which you were already privvy to if you watched the show.

I went, and the store was something like a big dark Ikea, heavy on the dark woods and antiques, less sunny Scandinavianness and more Olde Curiosity Shoppe.

It was the sort of dream that other people's hair-brained business ideas come from. Given enough money, a business that breaks the 4th wall of a fictional TV show could actually be done. Maybe reality TV started in someone's sleeping brain. Luckily I'm not in either the furniture or the TV industries.

Summertime, and the livin' is....

My bedroom window is wide open, admitting the warm breeze. Carried on it is the delicious sizzly aroma of someone's backyard barbeque in the neighborhood.

In January. In Boston.

What I should be experiencing right now is anger and fear for what has been done to the environment. And I am.

But the meaty, smoky, spicy scent of barbeque is bewitching.