I hate having dreams in which my teeth fall out!
I also hate dreaming about spectacular public failure, such as last night’s feature, in which both my sister and I were publicly called out for mawkish columns for the New York Times. I was watching Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, and the guest host (she has been out all week in real life) started tearing into the NYT columns: “In other, completely embarrassing news, just look at this editorial on the front page of the times today.” The camera zoomed in on a screen displaying the NYT website, and fancy touch screen technology circled my sister’s name, and highlighted the awful headline. The camera panned down to another headline beneath it, with my name attached. I don’t recall the headline of the one attributed to me, but the gist of the article was supposedly about Joe Biden’s warm relationship with his son, and apparently I had used the term-of-endearment “Pop-pop” multiple times, to cloying effect.
My sister was just returning from surgery, and groggy, when I had to break the bad news. She protested angrily, of course, but I didn’t tell her that I kind of agreed with that MSNBC talking head – her article was bad (mine, of course, was just fine, if not necessarily deserving of any Pulitzers). We read some of the comments and they were just downright nasty.
Later in the dream, I was standing around eating a plate of apples at an outdoor fair when I ran into my friend Anna and her girlfriend, sitting at a table with their own plate of apples (at a real life fair, these would be deep fried and coated in cheese). The burning indignity still on my mind, I told her about the incident.
“Oh yeah,” said Anna, laughing. “That was you? We cheered when that guy called out those columns; they were so wretched.”
“But did he have to be so mean about it? Rachel Maddow would never do anything so rude. I wish she were back on the air.”
“That’s cause she’s new. In time, she’ll learn.”
“But,” I protested feebly, “it’s the Times! Their regular correspondents actually write out “Heh-heh” in articles!”
Here Anna gave me a withering glance. “We both know that’s not as bad as ‘Pop-pop,’” she said.
Cowed, I timidly bit into an apple. Out came some teeth.
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