I Had a Dream

Wednesday May 18, 2005
This morning I had a dream. In this dream, I am sitting at, what appears to be a kitchen table, or the counter at a diner.
To my left is my father, to my right is my mother, who is now deceased, but appears to be quite healthy in my dream.
In my hand is a small flashlight, the kind that uses two "AA" batteries. There was no cap to hold the batteries in place. I am trying to push the batteries into place with my thumb.
In front of me is a tabloid sized newspaper, displayed prominently on an easel or a music stand.
My mom says "Pray and things will get better"
.
The next thing I know, I am screaming at the top of my lungs "God help me, things never get any better, they just keep getting harder, and harder, and harder"
.
Out of the blue there appears two very bright flashes, which appear to be emanating from the newspaper, or the flashlight in my hand, bouncing off the newspaper.
Transcribed on the newspaper appears to be two sequential frames of a very overexposed, or negative, or x-ray of a human head in distress.
As I am stumbling out of my chair, the words going through my head are "What the fuck was that?" The look on my parents’ face reflected similar astonishment.
At this point I woke up.

My latest, latest greatest novel

The White Whippet
©2006
by:
John McCullough

As I walked from the house, what should appear?
A racer, a hound, a whippet I fear
As white as a ghost, and swift as the wind
It dashed into sight and then out again
In this flavorless age, for magic at least
Is it wise for a wizard to appear as a beast?

Whatever comparison I found, between a white whippet and a white rabbit is phonetic at best. Chasing either seems a task best left to an acid head. Not that I am a virgin to LSD, but it seems like hundreds of years since last I imbibed.
I didn’t actually chase it, but it just so happened to be going in the same direction that I was heading. As I pulled up to the stop sign at the end of the street, I looked to the left to see if there was any traffic in the lane I had to cross, and I looked to the right to see if there was any traffic in the lane in which I was about to merge. There, in the corner lot, stood the white whippet, giving me a look like it noticed, that I had noticed.

Not that I have any empirical proof in the existence of magic, would that this whippet were to trans…whatever Carlos Castañeda called it, I would be more than willing to videotape it and to show it on the talk show circuit, if the would be sorcerer were willing to be videotaped and I could get him to sign the necessary release forms.

When I was younger, I thought a would be was a wood bee. What slayed me was the number of wood bee assassins. Save the wood bees! Wisdom is a process. There is no coincidence that wise rhymes with eyes, and wizard rhymes with lizard, no coincidence whatsoever.

This story began as an observation, turned into a poem and evolved into story, because, if the truth be told, poetic justice is an oxymoron. If meter and rhyme are your partners in crime, and syntax is your master, at some point, sooner than later you are going to have to resort to the language of the gibbers, a.k.a. gibberish.
At that point why not revert back to a simpler form of communication. Because it is not how you say it, but what? You say!