In which I ramble about very little, in an attempt to make you laugh.

The other night I had a dream about Vladimir Putin. I don’t regularly dream about world leaders — the Angela Merkel sex dreams notwithstanding, of course — and Putin isn’t really a world leader I expend a lot of mental energy on. He always seemed like something of an obvious choice to lead Russia, the man in the world most likely to wear a toque rudely fashioned from wolverine pelts and point at a hapless apparatchik and say, Keel heem. There’s something to be said for casting against type, is all I’m saying, and Putin just seemed too easy, sort of like casting Bruce Willis as an alcoholic ex-cop with an anger problem but a wicked sense of humor.

Anyway, my Putin dream turned out to be another in a long series of dreams in which I am trying do convince somebody to do something impossible, only to be interrupted by someone I used to date and have the whole tone of the thing turn tragic and desperate. These dreams are never funny in the moment, but they always seem a little funny to me after because they’re such a parody of how I feel when I’m at my worst: like I’m always either chasing phantoms that won’t have me, or refusing access to people who want me. This is a pattern, if course, but I almost never recognize that I am perpetuating it until it’s too late. And besides: it feels inevitable in the moment.

So, one wonders, what was it that I was trying to get Putin to do, and who was it that interrupted us? Oh, I can’t really remember. The first part anyway. It was something absurd, imbued with that compulsive dream-logic that makes the absurd seem necessary: he needed to sew hands on a penguin so that it might juggle, maybe; perhaps it was necessary that he swallow a thousand pomegranates and shit rainbows. I do remember he had the killer eye, and I was frightened.

As to who interrupted us, it’s probably best that I don’t say, out of sensitivity to her feelings. Someone I saw for a while in New York, a lovely woman who caught me at exactly the wrong moment in my life for me to have been of any value to her. I was too caught up in the meltdown of one of those other kinds of relationships, one of the ones with a phantom I couldn’t reach, and on some level I wasn’t really able to look anywhere but at the wreck of myself. We broke up kind of by surprise, during a conversation in which I think she hoped to ratify our relationship with some official status. I didn’t do the breaking — she just seemed to realize as the conversation went on that I was elsewhere. Oh boy, was I ever.

Anyway, she was outraged that I should be wasting Mr Putin’s time trying to get him to bicycle kick the Earth into a goal of stars: outraged both because Putin was so important, yes; but also outraged that I should be wasting my time on something so stupid when there she was, and spending time on her wouldn’t have been a waste at all. If only I had known.

I’m not usually one for dream analysis, but this one seems so obvious that I kind of had to do it. Most of my dreams are, I’m fairly sure, simply the excreta of a brain that spends too much time sucking in data. My cigars are surely just cigars. But then I have these ones and … well.