On Saturdays, I wake up to the dulcet tones of Click & Clack on Car Talk. Alas, this week I woke up to the cacophony of harpies screeching for money. Man alive, I hate N.P.R. pledge drives.

Perchance to Dream
I awoke Friday morning to the realization that I'd been having a nightmare. It wasn't a nightmare in the televisual sense, wherein the hero encounters something that foreshadows the dramatic peril to come, nor in the sense of being an unrelentingly grim augury of real life peril, a nightmare in only that it was deeply unpleasant and gave me the willies. In the dream, I was doing combat with a giant, metallic purple beetle. It wasn't giant as in the size of a mastodon or a house, that would almost have been preferable, but giant in that it was the length of my fully extended hand. *shudder* The purple horror flew about me with a speed and agility that defied its size. I faced the dread beast armed with a rubber mallet from the garage; yes, in my dream, though I felt myself in the full grip of a mind-killing panic, I retreated to the garage not for safety, but to arm myself and to return to slay the monster. And slay it I did! The beetle flew around me almost too fast to track, and I swung the mallet blindly again and again. In time, purely by chance, I landed a solid blow, leaving the beetle immobile and gravely wounded hanging from the mallet. After some twitches indicated the fell beast was not yet slain, my father took the mallet, lowered it nearly to the ground, slid the beetle off the mallet with his foot, and stepped on the purple terror, crushing it with a satisfying crunch.

I remember precious few of my dreams, too few to waste my time on verdammt nightmares. You hear me, randomly firing synapses? Nein!