Wrapped Up in Books

I've had it with this whole dreaming thing. Last night I dreamed I fell in love with a girl with brown hair, an attic bedroom and a Penguin Classics bedspread. Then I woke up and was annoyed that I was awake. I'm aware that talking about your dreams is about as boring as it gets so I'll pass up this opportunity, but this isn't the first one of these. The more interpretations of perfection my dreams are going to screen for me on a nightly basis, the most annoyed I get when I wake up, and the less likely I'm going to compromise. The thing about all of these dreams are that they're too close to reality. Like, in most of these dreams at some point I have the exact discussion I'd probably have in my own kitchen with my housemate.

"No seriously, she had a Penguin Classics bedspread"
"That's ridiculous, that's the sort of thing that's too perfect"
"I know, that's what I said, I mean, that's the sort of thing you dream of when you're dreaming up perfect situations"

So basically, my life has got so consumingly dull that I've started to dream about dreams about dreams. It's not particularly fun either, it's not like a David Lynch movie when you can drink a cup of coffee and eat some shortbread and the most part dissected by Twin Peaks nerds on websites who wrote about Mulholland Drive for their dissertation. Not me, I wrote about Lost Highway, except it wasn't for a dissertation, it was an essay on Non-verbal communication and I got a good mark for it. But my point is, dreams within dreams within dreams don't make good dreams, and definitely don't make good dream anecdotes.

The two saddest things you can see, I think, on a normal walk somewhere are mountains of post on the doormats of closed shops and lost cat signs. One represents lost friends, the other represents lost dreams. There's a couple of shops around here that have changed owners several times over the year. One's a takeaway, which has had different names, different people behind the counter. One time, I forget the name, the owner had pulled out all the stops, had exciting posters and menus, and cooked all the food himself, and talked to you about the events of the day, almost miniature stand-up routines like local radio presenters do when they're going through the daily rags on their morning shows. He was great, but of course I only ever went there once, and now it's gone. Probably, as soon as the new takeaway opens, I'll go to that one once, and never again. I guess once-and-never-again people like me must make life hell for these people, it probably makes them think it's going to be that all the time, and then it's not, and these people never come back, so maybe there's something desperately wrong with their food. It's not my fault I moved house, or that the takeaway was in completely the wrong place, or that during that period of 2005, I wasn't really into the whole buying takeaways things because my disposable income only covered alcohol. But it still gives me twinges of sadness in my heart to see these vacant shops with piles and piles of post building up on the doorstep, post that was probably the first thing they picked up in the morning, or when they were doing their day-to-day routine, the postman would pop his head around the door and they'd have a brief chat. The saddest part is that not only is their business gone forever, but they can't even bring themselves to visit the shop and collect their mail. It's almost like people who can't face their lovers or relatives graves in the cemetery because it's too goddamn much.

Lost cat signs just make me very unhappy. I get significantly more emotionally affected by lost cat signs in plastic wallets stapled to telegraph poles than I do by hearing about the mass slaughter of human beings in any given country or town. This is because cats don't deserve to be lost. All humans in my opinion, have the potential to destroy and manipulate and create untold evil towards another, and the only thing that stops people is the lack of opportunity, and I just can't get excited about them anymore.

What is exciting though, is ten pin bowling on the Nintento Wii. Our house has managed to borrow one of these consoles whilst one of my housemates ladyfriends is kayaking in Iceland or hunting eskimo in Alaska or whatever to fuck people researching Bruce Parry's Tribe do when they're out of the country, so we've ended up with the Wii rather than her take it to a cattery or whatever. I'd safely assumed that like the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360, I was going to take a back seat from this era of videogaming like I did with the last one. I'd only just got excited again by the idea of driving fire engines off bridges on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again but now there's this ridiculous motion-sensitive ten pin bowling thing. It's almost impossibly easy, but takes most of the fun out of ten pin bowling, Namely:

1. Ten pin bowling costs too much, so you have to pretend to be a lot, lot more excited about the game than you would be if it was free
2. In a ten-bowls game, it usually takes until bowl 6 for you to settle on which ball is the 'right number' for you, even though there's not really much difference between them
3. Horrible shoes which have to be sprayed with industrial-strength odour stuff before they're given back. I once asked to have my own shoes sprayed with this.
4. In the olden days when only my mums hairdresser friend Sue had Sky, bowling alleys were the only place to watch MTV
5. You don't get the option to fuck about with the little portable metal 'slope' for people too useless to even hold a bowling ball, playing at home.

Why the Wii is better:
1. You can eat doritos from a saucepan whilst you play
2. The pain in neatly transferred from your finger socket joints to your wrist, which is much less panful when you have to pick things up the next day
3. I don't get fucking spares all the time. The last proper game of bowling I played, I got 9 on the first bowl, and then 1 on the other, for the entire game. I actually texted 8-2-ASK to see if I was the first and maybe only person to ever get this score. No reply.
4. You can talk on the house phone to your parents about how you had a dream about a girl with a Penguin Classics bedspread whilst simultaneously scoring two successive strikes, and this somehow makes you look better than if you weren't on the phone, even though you only really need one hand.
5. I've managed to make a cartoon Wii character thingy who looks just like me, or me if I'd been drawn by Brian Lee O' Malley. Basically me, if I was good looking, played sports, and was a slacker in Toronto.
6. You can walk three steps into your bedroom and listen to Dance Away by Roxy Music any time you like.
7. You don't have to share your own toilet with patrons of Lazer Quest.

Can you even get Penguin Classics bedspreads?

Anyway, this is a photograph I took of a petrol station in Cardiff on a Friday night. It's very Edward Hopper.