Paging Dr. Sandman

Hi, guys. Whatcha been up to? I've been dreaming my ass off. Usually, I leave that to Simon. I generally wake up with only the vaguest notion that my brain was doing something off in the corner while I slept the sleep of the dead. But not lately. Lately I have full technicolor dream recall.

I think it might be because I'm writing something about dreams for my job. I've been ruminating on the twisty logic of dream images, reading about the unconscious mind and its weirdnesses. Perhaps it's unsurprising that I've remembered a disproportionate number of dreams lately. And so I've found myself doing the thing that I do when I recall my dreams: trying to figure out what the high holy fuck they mean. What can I say - I took Psych 101 in college, but I was kind of hung over that semester.

I've had a good dose of "the usual": trying to dial a phone, but I just can't get the numbers right; going someplace else but inexplicably ending up at my therapist's house; getting a tattoo I instantly, vehemently regret; discovering that a dead loved one has been alive all this time; and, of course, the one where I wander down to the ocean and everyone's taking their clothes off and jumping in. (Yes, I know that one's about sex; even I got the memo on water imagery.)

Dream of this tattoo, wake up screaming.

I've had dreams lately that have proved fantastically useful. I've plagarized them for work, for one thing.

And I had a dream where I ran into a writer who's in the middle of a ginormous and daunting project - a guy who'd slipped my mind for months. (In my defense, he lives in New York, which is really, really - check a map - really far away.) I woke up doing the "I shoulda had a V-8" head slap and emailed him copious good wishes. Because God knows that when I'm the one gnawing a hole through the outer limits of my brain (did that metaphor work? I'm thinking no) trying to write something hard, I like to be reminded that someone out there assumes my work is going passably well. So, file that one under Dreams Leading To Mildly Menschy Behavior.

And I had this other dream, about this other person, and in the dream I was beating the shit out of her. I didn't check the credits, but my guess is - directed by Tarantino. It goes without saying (I hope) that in life I rarely punch people so hard my hand goes all the way through their sternum. But in the dream, I was a total cartoon ninja supreme. I was scary. I was She Whom You Shouldn't Have Fucked With. It felt awesome and queasy, like a roller coaster ride at an amusement park known to occasionally kill a customer or two. And I woke up not angry but the opposite: in this zenlike state of blissful calm, fully aware for the first time that I really. Don't. Like. That person. At all. And therefore have a great excuse to use that new word I've been hearing tossed around, "frenemy." How awesome is that word? Wish I'd had it in high school. Coulda applied it to everyone!

And then. Oh, and then. I had this dream.

In the dream, I run into a male acquaintance. Someone I know casually. You know, a friendofafriend. (Quick, someone coin a shorter word for that.)

We're on some mazelike studio lot, don't know which - kind of like in waking life, where I've gotten lost on every lot in Los Angeles. I once walked around the Paramount lot for a fricking hour trying to find my car. And no, it's not that big. Anywho. He walks me to my car. We give each other a friendly hug. And then, out of nowhere, incredible, movie-caliber kissing ensues. If that kiss has really happened? Top five of my lifetime so far. No joke.

It bears mentioning that this gentleman has been entirely off my radar in real life. You know, the Radar Of Bangability. Never once thought about it.

So, naturally, I wake up feeling all tingly, and, well, slightly obsessed with that particular man. But more important to you, oh faithful Blog Reader, I woke up asking myself the appropriate question, which is, "What the fuck was THAT? What did it MEAN?!"

I've decided to stop at nothing to answer that question. But let me tell you, it's not simple. There are just so many rows to hoe when it comes to interpreting the Unconscious As Auteur. I asked a lot of people, and I got a lot of contradictory opinions. Then, I remembered this is a tangentially Jewy blog, and I emailed a real life rabbi. Posed the question to him: what's the proper Jewish way to interpret dreams?

I have so much to share. I'll tell you all about it... in our next installment. Unless there's an installment in between, which could happen. But point is, I'll be getting back to you, with rabbinical fruits of wisdom. In the meantime, enjoy your nap.

Sifting For Diamonds In A Mountain Of Ass.

Do you hate it when writers write about writing? If so, um, stop reading.

The Very Hot Jews are also Very Hot Writers For Hire, so sometimes we write about stuff that's more writery than Jewy. But our Hebeness, as you know, permeates all aspects of our lives; so we think it counts sufficiently to run posts about the creative process. Call it Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Jew. Or, Portrait of the Jew As A Young Writer. Or, point out that we're not very young, which: shut up.

Actual, bona fide young writers email me (me meaning Sera; going solo on this post riiiiiight... now) a lot. Sometimes, what they ask me boils down to "how do I become a better writer?" Yes, good writing is subjective, blah blah; let's cut the crap, because we all know what these youngsters are aiming at. And we all want to know how to do it. Is there a certain class to take? Book to amazon? Pill to chop up and mainline, because we will if it makes the swamp of donkey dung we just composed miraculously transform itself into sparkly genius.

Despite my general joie de vivre, while working I am haunted by this nagging feeling I call The Wrongness. As in, something is very wrong with this thing I just wrote. I dunno what. But I know it could suck a lot less than it does.

I don't know the secret answer to shaking that ickity feeling. I don't know how you force your creative mind to take it to the next level already. Sorry. If someone reading this knows the answer, email it to me. Please. Be your best friend.

In the absence of solutions, I've developed strategies. Most, like the Eating More Peanut Butter strategy, have failed miserably. The only thing I've done that helps significantly is Write More. It ups the statistical odds of writing something unsucky.

I know, so unglamorous. So unrelated to playing with your dog or kissing in the park or watching movies or eating more peanut butter.

Also, who wants to write more, raise your hand? Anyone? Bueller? Thought not. We all know the fun part isn't Writing, it's Having Written. So what I do is trick myself into writing as much as possible as quickly as possible, with the understanding that most of it is going to suck ginormous monkey balls. I then sift through the mountain of ass without judging myself for it. Not that I'm a non-judgmental person. Nuh uh. It's just that even I can't really get it up to feel bad that something I typed up in 5 minutes while surfing Dlisted isn't gonna win me the Nobel Prize. And I get that 10% of the shit will turn out to be gold. Or at least pyrite. At any rate, good enough to use in some capacity.

I've got lots of systems for the prolific generation of hellaciously overwritten crapola. Allow me to share one such system here. Let's begin with a long, digressive story, because you would totally rather read it than, like, write.

Breakfast At Denny's.

When I was in high school, my social life was made possible by the architecture of my parents’ house. Specifically, the location of my bedroom. Our two-story home was built into the side of a hill, the better to enjoy our expansive view of grey smog behind which, we were repeatedly assured by our real estate agent, lay the gorgeous San Bernardino mountains. My bedroom? Lower level, with a sliding door to the backyard. Wasn’t it nice of my parents to see to it that I never had to actually crawl out a window to sneak out at night?

I encouraged as early a curfew as possible. Because the sooner we all “went to bed”, the sooner I could walk right back out of the house again.

That was the easy part. Once I’d slipped away, down the street to the Jehovah’s Witness church parking lot where my friends were waiting, we faced our true obstacle: There was absofuckinglutely nothing to do in Redlands.

More often than not, we ended up at Denny’s, nursing stale coffee and ingesting toxic quantities of mozzarella sticks. None of us had enough money for a more ambitious meal. But the coffee refills were free. We had a system, which I will describe to you with the disclaimer that my adult self is embarrassed by our treatment of the harried Denny’s waitstaff.

Our system was to ball up a bunch of paper napkins to form a little “ghost." We’d draw a mean ghost face on it. And when our cups ran dry, we’d perch the Coffee Ghost atop the napkin dispenser. If it took more than a minute or two for the waitress to spot us, we’d toss the Coffee Ghost up and down, making loud “woooooo-woooo” ghost noises. The waitress had long ago gathered the intel that we weren’t exactly gonna leave the best tip in history, and tossing the Coffee Ghost invited some of the most subtle yet pointed sarcasm I’ve ever heard from a member of the service provider industry. And I’ve shopped at Fred Segal. After between-the-lines-ing that she fully expected us to die horror-movie drug overdose deaths which on a karmic level we completely deserved, she’d fill 'er up and quickly get back to her preferred occupation, shunning us.

We had time to kill and caffeine to burn off. So, somebody invented “Breakfast.” I have no idea how it got that name. Here is how to do Breakfast. One of you pulls out your journal. (You better believe we all had journals with us at all times.) Someone writes the first word. Say, “I.” The other chap writes the next: “never”. Back and forth, lightning-quick. Sentences, stanzas, strange stories composed word by word. The finished page, checkered in alternating handwriting, yielded surreal, vaguely English-As-A-Second-Language poetry: I never only waited forever when cars parked on heads of state past river rocks of milk carton trash at sunset on Mars.

We found this wildly entertaining. And we marvelled at the occasional profundity discovered by just letting go with no thought of making it "good." Amid the knots of quasi-gibberish were genuine diamond lines. Plus, it was fun to show poetry who's boss.

Aaaaaallll of this to say, I haven’t changed a bit. Well, I’m almost twice as old. And I don’t dress quite so adventurously. But my social life still involves Breakfast in many forms. Like this blog thing Sime and I amuse ourselves with. And I still treasure that which takes some of the teeth out of the big bad monster, writing. Like my current fave—The 30 Day Experiment.

The 30-Day Experiment.

The 30 Day Experiment has generated some of the best stuff I ever done wrote. I dig the hell out of it, and I wanted to share. Invite the emo writer types among you to try it. (I know you’re out there. Put down the Damien Rice CD and listen up.)

The experiment was born when a friend and I were chatting about how “generating inventory,” i.e. writing actual viable stuff, is an erratic and slow process and totally blows. We decided to shortcut the mad search for the spark by simply providing it for one another. That way, we could get a taller pile of written guano in a shorter amount of time. No more standing at the corner of Writer's Block and I'd Rather Be Drinking, waiting for the Inspiration Bus that never comes.

Each day, one of us would write a poem or short piece of prose and email it to the other, who would read it and then immediately write one of their own. None of that stopping to think business. Just fingers and computer keyboard. Sometimes the pieces dialogued, sometimes not. But it worked. We wrote a thingy a day for 30 days. It was like going to the writer-brain gym every morning. And what a marvelous bucket brimming with vomitously bad writing I accrued. Priceless. And I mean that unironically.

I just started a new 30 Day Experiment with this Hot Latina Novelist I have a writer-crush on. Sime's gonna start his own. We think you should maybe start one too. Why the fuck not? At the end of it you’ll have a big-ass pile of... something.... that wasn't there before. Which totally beats having no pile at all. Challenging as getting a piece of writing from heinous to decent may be, it doesn't get easier by doing it less. You don't get to skip the heinousness by staring at a blank screen. To keep with the fitness metaphor: to my knowledge, going to the gym never stops being annoying. But it's less of a drag when you're in shape.



Plus, if you do this consistently for 30 days, somewhere in your hillock of feces you will find rough bits here and there which, once cleaned up, will reveal themselves to be startlingly valuable and genuinely good.

Let us know how it goes. We'll be here. Typing.

A Letter to My Unconscious Mind

Simon here. Sera's in Esalen, getting her aura massaged or whatever they do up there, so I'm posting this bizarre entry behind her back. No doubt many of our readers will be puzzled by the following; I freely admit that I share your confusion. But to those of you who ask "What does this have to do with being hot and/or Jewish?" I can only wearily reply that ... um ... did I mention that Sera's out of town?

To Whom It May Concern,

I write to express my supreme disgust and overwhelming disappointment at the quality of last night's dream.

I refer, of course, to the meandering tale of a man — evidently supposed to me, but someone I can only characterize as a repulsive boor lacking the faintest shred of the social graces — who urinates in the middle of a car-audio store and then adds insult to injury by telling a dismayed salesman, "You guys wouldn't have this problem if you had a bathroom."

Were this a mere "blackout" sketch it would be shoddy enough. But your decision to make such instances of public self-relief the basis of an epic dream, a sleep-narrative of Tolstoyan length, Rabelaisian vulgarity and Warholian tediousness, is unfathomable.

For shame, sirs and/or madams. For shame.

Why, I must ask, does the character known only as "me" have to pee constantly throughout this interminable story, informing all who will listen that "I have the bladder of a camel"? Why must he unburden himself on a series of in-dash stereo consoles before the stricken eyes of floor managers and audiophiles alike?

Perhaps some toxic mixture of boredom, malice and homosexual panic prompted this golden shower of the sandman — I can scarcely be expected to divine what goes on in the drunken halls of the id. But I hasten to remind you that while some people might enjoy a feature-length snooze-story about pissing endlessly and repeatedly on the linoleum floor of a downmarket retail establishment, "some people" don't dream my dreams. I do. And this one both offended my sensibilities and tasked my patience.

Have you given no thought to what it is like to wake suddenly from such a dream and realize, to one's horror, that one must pee? And then to stand drowsily and barefootedly on the frigid bathroom floor in the dawning light and relive the whole sodden fantasia while emptying oneself, ever so boringly, into the porcelain abyss?

This will not be tolerated. In point of fact, the quality of my dreams has been distressingly poor of late, giving rise to the nagging suspicion that you imps who populate the far shores of my psyche are, well, phoning it in.

I refer in particular to the obsessive recycling of the shopworn "I have a Spanish final but I forgot to study all semester" dream, with its predictably mortifying third-act nudity; last week's protracted and deeply annoying "driving around my neighborhood but I'm lost" dream (in which your creative bankruptcy revealed itself in the cheap shock tactics of me crashing into another car driven by ... me); and your arguable nadir, a scene-for-scene recapitulation of the movie Zardoz with Carrot Top in the Sean Connery role.

I would caution you to put more effort into the scenarios that flicker on my inner eyelids, or you will force me to send you packing. Opening up a new can of imps, I assure you, will be no big thing.

Sincerely,
Me