My planned column is put on hold so I can tell you about the most wonderful dream I had.
First a little background.
My brother-in-law, Randy, stayed in our basement about a year ago. It’s not an apartment with its own kitchen and bathroom, but it is large and finished, so it makes a nice space.
He seemed to fit in well with our family, but he did drink huge volumes of alchohol. Beer, wine, it didn’t matter. He’s not a mean drunk, if anything a funny drunk, but he rarely pitched in for the booze. And that did bother me.
As Stephen would testify, I’m cheap.
I try to save every dime I can.
Years ago, I tapered back on the booze, not for health reasons, but to cut back on the expense. Eventually I broke the drinking down to one beer a day, and two thimbles of wine at night.
I’ll still drink like a real man once a week. I just don’t like wasting money that way, I feel like it’s just flushing cash down the crapper.
Then along comes Randy. His first day, I told him, “Help yourself to a beer.”
So he did, then he downed the six pack I had designated for the week. So the next day, I bought some more and he just waltzed into the kitchen and drank it in one sitting. I figured, since I offered, I didn’t want to go back on my word. Plus, we’re not hurting financially anymore, so no harm done, I’ll just make adjustments to the spreadsheet I use to track our finances.
At first, I thought, maybe he can’t afford to buy his own booze right now, and since he likes it so much, we could ablige. So I started buying a 12 pack instead of a 6 pack. Soon, I was buying a 24 pack each week to keep stocked up.
I should have said something, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to seem petty, since it was obvious we could afford the expense and he couldn’t.
So, a year later, when my wife had had enough of ‘ol Randy, I was ok with that, mainly because of all the alcohol I ended up buying.
So now you can guess what that dream was about.
for whatever reason, not explained in the dream, we invited Randy to move back in. I’m helping him move back in the basement, when he sees a canning jar and picks it up.
“This will be perfect to pee in.” he says to himself.
“Wha?!” I mutter.
“I don’t like walking to the bathroom at night, so I pee in jars and bottles.”
“Like liter bottles of soda?”
“Exactly.”
“No, no, there’s no peeing in bottles. The bathroom is just a few feet away.” I say as I point to the bathroom. (In the dream, there was a bathroom in the basement.)
“Oh, it’s ok. It’s just what I do.” Randy explained.
“No, no peeing in bottles, just use the bathroom.”
“No, I think I’ll just use the bottles.”
“No that’s not ok.”
“I really prefer to use the bottles.” he say while looking intently into the empty jar.
Finally, I had to put my food down, which I rarely do since I was raised by red-neck hippies and being direct was not the way of the Senitrams. “Look if I find one bottle with pee in it, your out.”
He looked down and gave a shuffling kick to a box on the floor and said, “Aaaaaw. Alright.”
What does it all mean?
There must be some psychological explanation to all that. If you have the answer please help me out and leave a comment below.
And now you know (but I don’t).
Song in my head (For my lovely wife who has to spend a lot of time at work this time of year):
