I just got back from scenic Port Clinton, Ohio. It was great to be able to catch up with Rojo Grande. We drank at a couple local places, watched Oklahoma get schooled by USC and then crashed out. Overall, it was a night well-spent.

Beyond that, and I don’t know if it was the bourbon all the fumes I breathed in from being so close to Lake Erie, but I had the strangest dreams. There were three that I remembered upon waking up and two that I remember now (I’m wracking my brain to remember the other one, to no avail.) Anyway, let me share and see what you think.

Dream 1: I’m a member of the Mighty Ducks (stop laughing). Anyway, we’re walking into some outdoor stands in the American south to scout a team we’ll be playing the following week. Upon walking up into the rickety, wooden stands, I realized that we were watching the Texas A&M hockey team. While we’re watching, people keep coming up under the stands trying to steal our hockey gear by pulling it through the slats under the bleachers. After a while, we got sick of watching the game (we couldn’t figure out how, in 80 degree weather, they kept an outdoor hockey rink frozen.) So we went down to the concourse where our team manager (a middle-aged woman) was fretting about confessing her crush on our coach. I tried to convince her that it was a bad idea, and I woke up as she went against my advice and told him.

Dream 2: This one is more exciting, I promise. I was accompanying the President (not George W., just some generic guy who, in my dream, was the President.) Anyway, he and I were in this town in Siberia with no way out. We were put there, and had the freedom of movement for the most part but we couldn’t leave the town. On top of that, we were always being watched. Along with us in the town were hundreds of thousands of Russians. This was the kind of town Stalin had carved out of the permafrost in the 30s to exploit its natural resources. The thing about these cities is that they were left, during the communist era especially, pretty much on their own. They ended up developing a lot like Western cities as far as fashion trends and social values. This is even more true now that they have more freedoms. The thing is, it’s still a lot like that, except that it’s a mish-mash of Western culture from different time periods. The cars are old, the clothes are an array of styles including leisure suits and parachute pants. It’s all over the board, almost like a collage of the last 50 years of American culture.

OK, so back to the dream. We’re walking around this town, and everyone seems like they’re an actor in some big production meant to fool us. Every day, we wake up and, for lack of better things to do, walk around town. In the evenings, two soldiers come and escort us to a video game arcade where we are strapped into a virtual-reality game that places us back in this town. (I told you this dream was weird). I’m not sure what the point of this game is, but Russian soldiers are hunting us and always end up shooting the President. The time we spent away from the video game, all we could think about is “why the heck do they keep puttin us in this video game?” We couldn’t figure out what purpose it served to have the President play a game continuously where he gets killed. Finally, the last time we played the game before I woke up, one of the characters (a civilian) in the game ran up to me and said “Hurry, Vladamir Putin is in Chicago!” The game wasn’t about the president, it was trying to get him to see life through the Russian President’s eyes. It was a very odd dream, and I’m kind of freaked out by it.