While I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room this week, a woman approaches the receptionist and demands that she be given her paperwork that she hasn’t received for a procedure she’s having. She essentially accuses the office of having tampered with sending out her forms and says several times in an unnecessarily loud voice, “I know you don’t care, but…” and then launches into a further rant about how the computer must have done it. Unfortunately, the receptionist did not pull out a gun or momentarily transform into an alien and quite literally bite the woman’s head off or push the button for the hidden trap door that would drop the shrew into a pit of vipers. I don’t think anyone in the waiting room would have blinked an eye if any of those alternatives had occurred. So much for random acts of kindness.

Lately, my dreams have been Technicolor-vivid and follow story lines that even David Lynch would find disturbing. In one of the least soul-revealing plots my dog Buster (who was oddly renamed "Liver" in the dream, a name that I now use with him occasionally, at which he cocks his head to the side as if asking "why do you call me by my secret name, human?" was harassing an old woman who was working in her garden. She lived down a steep hill from our house, though her property was not visible from our home. The line of sight was blocked by a large sod-covered hill which had several pewter-colored artifacts partially buried in it. The woman's estate included a burned out shell of a house, probably a reference to the actual burned out shell of a house that my cousin lives next door to (the burning having been of a suspicious nature and the owner, an ex-NFL player, is now on the run and wanted for questioning). In the dream, it seems that Liver had something to do with the fire, although the lack of opposable thumbs would seem a deterrent to the Molotov cocktail approach.

Another dream involved an encounter with the main character in the TV show House. (Not Hugh Laurie the married English actor with four kids who plays the role, but the actual acerbic, bitter, uber-cynical Dr. House character.) If the dream had been an episode of the show, it would have been called "Nothing Comes Between Me and My House".