November 2002

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November 28, 2002

There was a small black bug, around the size of a beetle, and it was sticky like fly paper. It reminded me of what a dung beetle looks like. I got my hand close to it and when I did, it spit on one of my fingers. The spew was a line of warped, gelatinous discharge coming from the front part of its body, looking like that trail of spit I spewed that Lisa caught on film with one of her pictures when me and the kids were walking along a trail in the woods around Lake Wenatchee earlier this year. I don’t recall any pain or other sensation but I get the feeling it was a poisonous type spit and doing it meant the bug was trying to kill me or something like that. Because of this, the bug was put before a judge to be dealt its fate. I imagined the judge to be one of those white wigs they used to wear in George Washington’s time. This judge sat up high behind a tall desk and read, from a piece of paper, what was to happen to the bug because it spit on me. The words on this piece of paper that the judge read from were ones that I believe he wrote himself, perhaps with a feather’s quill. Everyone in this dream, including myself I suppose, felt that the bug should be dealt with in the strictest of manners, but this was because this was my dream and what I felt was thrust into everyone else’s opinion as well. The judge, looking down from his high judicial podium, then began reading the sentence and I guess the bug was around there somewhere to hear it, like he really would have understood it. The judge read words indicating that the bug “. . . was to be slowly tortured in the most painful way. . .” such as having its guts slowly pulled from its body, or to be sliced up methodically into pieces that would not kill it but simply inflict the most intense pain. The exact words escape me now but you get the idea. Then, wouldn’t you know it, something really weird happened. The bug was then a laser printer that resembled the Okidata OL400e I used to have, or still do, or maybe don’t but might. It sat in front of me on some type of shelf at about waist level. I approached it and touched a plastic panel on the side of it, and this popped open. Inside this panel, which was an opening about 2 x 3 inches and 2 inches deep, were some round metal sprocket things that resembled those small metal spools that thread is wound on. Attached to these may have been cables or wires that power this tool. Because I had opened up this panel on the side of this printer, this caused the printer/bug/spitter-of-gelatinous-drool to begin to lose power and, perhaps, die. This was evidenced when a small metal prong, an eighth of inch wide and even thinner than that, protruded from one of the metal thread spools and began scraping off some kind of brown debris that had formed on the inside of a small plastic drum about an inch round that was also on the inside of the panel, recessed further back in on the right hand side of the panel. The debris was some kind of resin or built-up film that had accumulated during the operation of the printer, and this small one-eighth-inch wide metal probe was cleaning it off the spool as it spun round and round like a sharpening block for axes and knives. The debris started peeling off like curled ice cream from the round plastic tube.