MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS

Let me come out and say right now that I'm not much for writing pithy or creative entries today. It's Monday. I'm tired. I have a life too, you know. I don't exist just to fill up your workdays with furtive laughs. Wait a minute. I quite like the idea of secret humour. These laughs have been occluded by government order. INTERPOL expressed its concern in a meeting last week in Stockholm over possibly illicit laughter. They will be working closely with the FBI to expose secret sources of humour, which hitherto may have festered. "It's in the best of interests of employers and employees both," claimed one official. "This unchecked secrecy will only lead to further festering, which is detrimental to workers' health".

I don't know if Americans share this experience, but our videos usually carry two copyright warnings, one from the FBI and the other from INTERPOL. I would think that nothing explains being Canadian better than sitting down to watch a movie and receiving veiled threats from both Europe and the States. I remember stand-up comedians joking about FBI agents perched in the trees and nestled in the hedges, but nothing compares with knowing that INTERPOL got together in 1977 and expressed their concern over illegal video copying and distribution. 1977! I was a tyke in a movie theatre in the bad section of Halifax, waiting for Star Wars to start, and meanwhile the moustachioed gentleman of European law enforcement were sitting in a boardroom and fretting about the future. The FBI may send in a SWAT team to nick your illegal copies of I Love Trouble and The Preacher's Wife, but INTERPOL will dispatch the gendarmerie to show up at your door and make disappointed noises.

IT EXPLAINS ITS DREAMS. IT DOES THIS OR IT GETS THE HOSE.

There is a space of time between 5:30 and 8:00 AM in which I have my most memorable and disturbing dreams. I usually wake up briefly around 5:30 when The Lotus gets up for work, sometimes enough to achieve a kind of irritable consciousness, sometimes only enough to integrate the sight of The Lotus in her deshabill� into my jagged dreams. Anyway, I think that my brief wakefulness jolts me into a kind of strangely light sleep for the next two and a half hours, in which my plans for the day and the screaming beast of my unconscious get together and make movies. Most of them are highly entertaining and polymorphously stupid. However, whenever I say, "Last night I dreamed that X," I immediately feel like a liar, because in truth I dreamed it that morning, not the night before. And I'm reluctant to say "This morning I dreamed that X". It's akin to complaining about a hangover on Tuesday morning, or bitching that the women on those party lines probably aren't the ones in the bikinis on the infomercials, and that those bikini models are all stuck up anyhow. Anyway. This morning I dreamed a different credit sequence for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Why? I don't know. It looked like the credits for a soap opera, with all these vertical panels of deep red and blue intersecting, the stylized faces of the cast members discreetingly appearing and disappearing with the movement of the panels, and a theme song that sounded a bit like an asphyxiating Vonda Sheppard with lyrics about 'flying high because I know I can'. The only cast member listed was Alyson Hannigan, but in my dream her name was Faith Hill. I couldn't figure out why they weren't listing the rest of the cast.

parode - exode