My dream
Attention armchair psychologists:
I didn’t use to be this way, but, for whatever reason, I am this way now.
I have only one dream. Over and over again, every night. The details are always different, but the scenario is always the same.
It’s a variation on The Actor’s Nightmare. The Actor’s Nightmare is that you go out onstage and you don’t know your lines.
This is the dream: I am who I am, Todd Alcott, and my life (or at least my personality) is that of my waking hours. I dress how I dress, I talk to people as I talk to people, I think as I think.
As the dream begins, I have, every night, contracted, somehow, to engage in some sort of a performance — a speech, a monologue show, a TV interview, a play, a symposium. Endless permutations, I don’t know how my brain comes up with them all. Some elements seem pulled from my past, some don’t.
I have contracted to engage in this performance and I am unprepared. Or, actually, it’s not that I’m unprepared, exactly, it’s that, every night, things have been scheduled in such a way so that there is no time for me to prepare. Instead, there is always some kind of complicated hassle about lodging, transportation, costume, location, directions. These complications can become baroque in the extreme.
don’t tell me you don’t want to know how the rest of this goes
Sam hits the nub
Conversation in the car this afternoon with Sam (5):
SAM. Dad?
DAD. Yeah?
S. You know what my favorite food is?
D. What.
S. Lox.
D. I was going to say burritos.
S. I like burritos.
D. How about burritos with lox in them?
S. Eugh! That would be awful!
D. In New York, there used to be a restaurant near our house, they served crabmeat enchiladas. That was my favorite food for a long time.
S. Crabmeat?
D. Yeah, they —
S. Meat? From a crab?
D. Sure, and —
S. How is that fair?
D. What do you mean?
S. You mean they would kill a crab? Just to get it’s meat?
D. Well —
S. That’s not fair! The crab wasn’t hurting anybody!
D. But —
S. I don’t think it’s fair to kill animals just to eat them!
D. O-okay, then —
S. How can people do that, destroy nature, I —
D. But Sam —
S. I don’t like killing animals! It’s not fair and it’s not what nature wants!
D. Okay, sure. Okay. So you think it’s okay to eat fish but not, like, chickens and cows and pigs?
S. No! I don’t think it’s okay to kill animals at all! Nature wants animals to be out in it, to live, and have fun, and make more animals! Nature doesn’t want people to kill all the animals!
D. Um, okay. Okay. (pause) Do you know what lox is?
S. Yeah, it’s salmon.
D. Well, salmon is a fish.
S. Yeah, but those fish are already dead, there’s nothing I can do about that. And, and chicken nuggets, and hamburgers, and bacon, those animals are already dead. What I’m talking about is killing animals.
