Brackenbeatzzz the Rapping Secular, Anglo-Saxon Male

So as I alluded to yesterday but maybe didn't explain properly - my head is just fuggin' buzzing with ideas for a new project, as well as the monologues and an older idea that has found new life in my head as a potential series of webisodes (and this isn't including a hoard of other, more tangential notions for this and that). Essentially it can feel like someone just dumped a bunch of pop rocks into my brain pan...in a good way, mind!

This kind of glorious thing pretty much always leads to plenty of long, highly detailed dreams that I can remember very easily the next day.

Last night I had the second in what seems to be maybe a series of dreams wherein a friend of mine whose name begins with "R" and is a writer shows up...and hijinks ensue.

This second dream involved me wandering through a webcomic convention that was cobbled together from pieces of the one I went to earlier this year and my high school gym. Quite soon, I found myself at Ryan North's table...which was more like a large desk. He was all excited about something so I came over and asked "What's up?". "Oh man, Oliver, I totally have a new thing that I'm working on and I'm so stoked about it!" he said. I asked if it was a new book or a new web project and he told me it was the former. "Here, you can see this preview copy" he said, then pulled one out from under the desk and plopped it right there in front of me.

The title was "Why Does Anybody Tell Jokes to Italians?" in this really ugly, yellow font. As I pored over the cover, which was the title overlaid on a fuzzy photo of Michelangelo's David, Ryan whispered "Just between you and me, I was only able to get twenty pages out of that idea so the other hundred pages are just filler". I turned to page twenty one and was greeted by another full-page, color photograph. The photograph was of "Grove St." which I knew in the dream to be the most recognizable street in all of Compton. Overlaid upon this picture was a grid of smaller photographs, evenly spaced, of dogs done up like the various members of NWA - though I swear one of them was Heartbeatzzz The Rapping Dog. "So, what do you think?" Ryan asked and thank goodness I woke up at that point because I may have had to tell dream-Ryan that his book was sub-par at best!

The previous night is not as clearly remembered, but I gather I was standing in a field not far from a school I was attending. I had an essay I needed to get done and it was due soon, but I'd only written a single page. Rob Near walked up out of the surrounding mists and offered to help out. I handed him the essay and as he put it behind his back with one hand, he pulled it back out again with the other. "All done!" Rob told me, before starting to walk away. Looking at the cover of the paper I saw that he had written on the cover sheet, in pencil, "This is basically a perfect 'C' grade paper and does not deserve any less". "Well" I thought "a 'C' is better than the fail I was going to get" and turned the cover page. I very quickly saw that Rob hadn't written the rest of the essay for me at all! He'd just inserted his full name, in 72 point font, in-between every other word and thus inflated my one page into five.

But as I looked up to chase after him, he was just stepping into the mist and the next moment he was gone. I had a brief flashback to when he carved his name eighty-two times into my ruler in grade five, then woke up.

Ah well!

Today I'm reviewing a short script by Mark Z, the fellow who was my other half in making the trailer the summer before last. It's nice to have someone to not only put that kind of trust in me as a person, but in my abilities. After that, more brainstorming for the project that came out of yesterdays crazed conversation...