Price-gouging chocolate-dealing hippies haunt my boring, boring dreams...
Last night, I dreamed I went to a hippie fair. There were booths with all manner of hippie crafts: dream-catchers, windsocks, and tie-dyed flags with Jerry Garcia’s face on them. I wasn’t interested in any of this stuff, so I just sort of wandered around the stalls and the booths until I ran into my brother. “Oh, you’re here too...” I told him. He nodded and said he was hungry, so together we threaded through the browsing hippies to find something to eat.
Eventually we found a place that claimed to sell cookies. It didn’t sell cookies, though. It sold chocolates. This discrepancy was never resolved. My brother picked out a handful from all the varieties they had and laid them in front of the two hippie ladies who ran the place. While they were slowly totaling up the price, I rooted around their display looking for the ones I wanted. Most of them were normal, chocolate-looking chocolates, but there was also bucket filled with bluish gunk. I reached in, pulled out a handful of it, and put it into the wicker shopping basket that had just magically appeared in my hands.
“Oh, good choice,” one of the ladies cooed, “That’s chocolate from the Ocean of Phish!”
“Huh,” I said. It was too late to put it back and, besides, my attention was quickly diverted to the scene developing between my brother and the other hippie lady. As far as I could tell, my brother had chosen $20.16 worth of chocolates and he only had a $20 bill.
I heard him say, “Why don’t I just put one back?”
“You can’t do that. You touched it already,” the hippie lady countered.
“I’ll loan you a quarter,” I said, in what I thought would be a heroic resolution of the whole problem. They wouldn’t listen to me, though.
My brother went on to explain, “But if I can’t buy any of them, you’ll have to put them all back, and I’ve touched them all...”, but the hippie lady just shook her head with what seemed to me to be completely un-hippieish obstinancy.
“I have a quarter, though,” I said to no one in particular.
“Chocolate from the Ocean of Phish is better for you than whole grain,” the other hippie lady told me, but I wasn’t really listening.
“You can’t touch things you don’t want to buy,” the first hippie lady said and my brother threw up his hands in defeat.
“Fine,” he said and he went off somewhere, chocolateless and forlorn, to wait for me to finish my transaction. I laid my basket, which was only about a third filled, onto the table and glared as my purchases were tabulated. After an extraordinarily long time, the hippie peered over her granny glasses to check her adding machine tape.
“Eighty-nine dollars,” she said and I’m afraid I lost it. The dream me, obviously a lot more volatile than the real me, became a full-on raging profanity monster. I apologize for the dream me. He is a real dick.
“The FUCK I’m going to pay EIGHTY-NINE DOLLARS for a bunch of GODDAMNED HIPPIE chocolates you FUCKING NITWIT!” I thundered, “Why don’t you take your SHITTY CHOCOLATES and your GRATEFUL DEAD and your GREEN PARTY and shove them right up your MOTHERFUCKING HIPPIE ASS! YEAH! YOU HEARD ME, JANIS JOPLIN!”
There was silence following this outburst. I looked from one hippie lady to the other with fearsome bug eyes, drooling and panting like a crazy person, and eventually the one without the adding machine told me, “Chocolate from the Ocean of Phish would probably help with your aggression problem...”
And that’s when I woke up. I laid in bed for awhile, wondering where dream Kevin’s hostility came from, especially since I sort of like hippies and I’ve voted Green once or twice. I do, however, really, really, really dislike Phish. And I don’t even care much for chocolate.
