A recent dream:

It is night. I am in a basement. Two men and a woman are seated at a nearby table and seem to be making a plan of some sort. I approach the table and recognize them: it’s Donna Hayward, James Hurley, and FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. I’m in an episode of Twin Peaks.

Recalling all the horrific things that happen to various people in the show and Lynch’s penchant for the occasional bit of random violence, I try to figure out when I am in the series. Based on the discussion Coop, Donna and James are having, it seems early in the first season. That means there’s still time to avoid being jailed, getting drawn into a love triangle or paternity battle, having my hair turn white overnight, being drugged with heroin, being imprisoned in a Canadian brothel, hanging myself in my shut-in trailer, getting shot, getting my eye shot out on my honeymoon, losing the last twenty years of my memory, disappearing into thin air, getting an arm cut off, dying of fright, watching the love of my life die of fright, having my soul trapped in a dresser drawer knob, having my soul trapped in a log, being burned alive in a sawmill, being blown up by my archrival who faked his own death, having my head smashed into a picture frame, having my head smashed into the door of a jail cell, having my head smashed onto the corner of a coffee table, being shot with a crossbow while dressed as a giant papier-mâché chess piece, being rendered invalid/tortured by a criminal mastermind/left to die under a cage of poisonous spiders, and being abducted by demons or aliens or whatever.

As they get up to leave, I pull Cooper aside– he’s willing to believe in the supernatural, the irrational, the magical– if anyone will listen to me, it’s him. I ask him if he ever watches TV, and when he does, if he ever imagines how he’d react to situations in the show. Would he act differently than the characters did, knowing how the show turns out? He says he does and would.

I say, what if I told you that that is happening to me right now– that all this is a TV show and I’ve seen it. What if I told you that I know who the killer is, and I can stop all kinds of horrors from happening?

He looks at me quizzically and turns away to take his trench coat off a coatrack.

And then I hit him with the clincher: what if I told you that Windom Earle is coming to town and I know exactly what he’s going to do? How would you react?

Cooper turns back to me. His eyes are glazed completely white.

My jaw drops.

He smiles and says, “Good question.”

He walks up the stairs. James and Donna follow him up. I follow them. Cooper and James walk through the door at the top of the stairs, but I grab Donna and hold her back for a second. I can’t tell in the poor lighting whether her eyes are white.

I ask Donna if she noticed anything strange about Coop. She says no. I ask her if he notices anything strange about me. She asks me what I mean. I ask her if my eyes are white.

She leans in. She looks into my eyes for what seems like forever. She pulls back and says it’s too dark to tell. She turns and walks through the door.

Mike was the second-best behaved dog in the world and once graced the masthead of this august journal. He was a good boy.

The quotations may not be totally accurate but the tone and spirit are:

Yesterday I was yelling at one of my classes for being inattentive, and broke out one of the old standards: “If you guys get bad grades, that’s fine by me because I already passed APUSH.” Granted, it wasn’t called APUSH back then, it was APAH, but that’s not the point.

One of the little angels made the mistake of saying what he was thinking: “Yeah, but did you get an IB diploma?” If you know IB kids, you already know the tone he used. He probably didn’t mean to use that tone, but it got away from him too fast.

The good news is I managed to respond without vaporizing his face with my heat vision. It was something along these lines:

“No, I didn’t get an IB diploma. But my diploma– the one I earned from Stanton at age 16 after getting fives on all my AP exams except Portfolio– got me into an out-of-state school absolutely free of charge and helped me graduate with honors at 20 with zero debt. So I’m not too broken up about not doing IB.”

Some of the kids applauded, probably sarcastically. I wasn’t in the mood and told them to shut up. I am very proud of my high school record but I really don’t like to flaunt it, unless some brat shoots his mouth off and desperately needs correction.

Maybe I misinterpreted the whole thing and the kid was genuinely curious. If so, he had horrible, horrible timing.

My day off included…

• arriving at work at seven to write instructions for the sub, print class rosters, and make enough copies of the classwork; and
• creating replacement ballots for nominations for the homecoming court; and
• making appointments to discuss extended essays with the IB seniors; and
• attending an eight o’clock meeting about the soccer team; and
• going to the dentist for a deep cleaning (there wasn’t that much blood); and
• returning to work by eleven thirty so I could tell the GOPO class that I moved the test date; and
• giving six makeup tests; and
• looking all over campus for the sixteen faculty and staff members who hadn’t cast a vote for this year’s Teacher of the Year; and
• tabulating said ballots and passing the results to the administrators; and
• emptying and moving a filing cabinet to another classroom; and
• rearranging the closet in my classroom; and
• grading homework, scanning scantrons, entering grades into the computer; and
• holding a Chess Club meeting until 4:15.

But I did not spend even one second worrying about proper punctuation in lists. No way– not on my day off.

I also ate an 18-ounce ribeye, medium rare.

Yesterday, while doing extensive research on napping, I read about the “one-second nap.” It has been attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Alva Edison, and Salvador Wilberforce Dalí, among others. I figured that since they were famous, I should listen to them.

I found a loose key and a dinner plate. I put the plate on the floor next to my armchair and sat down. The chair is, if I’m not mistaken, something like 70 years old, but it’s still just comfy enough to fall asleep in. I held the key in my hand– not too tightly– and positioned it above the plate. I flipped on the TV and tried to relax. You don’t have to watch the tube; you could just as easily listen to some music, or watch the clouds drift by, or watch fish do fish things.

After a few minutes, I felt a little bit groggy, my eyelids felt a little bit heavy…

…and I must’ve started to drift off…

…and then my grip on the key relaxed a little and then

CLANG-CLADADDLE-addle! Wide awake.

Now, a key clattering against a plate isn’t that loud, but it is alarming. That’s rather the point. I was refreshed and alert, as much as if I’d awakened from a much longer nap. Apparently, it’s because of all sorts of sciencey stuff having to do with the interruption of the descent into sleep. It was a 30-minute “power nap” crammed into just a few seconds.

A bit more reading revealed that the aforementioned gentlemen found that the process somehow allowed them to tap their “superconscious” and thus become more creative. I cannot report any semblance of heightened consciousness or any increase in creativity, so Lord-only-knows what else they were doing before they nodded off to their split seconds of sleep.

…

Tomorrow is the last day I have my own designated parking spot at work, unless I join the administration or become a designated visitor.