Adultery

I had a weird dream today. Well, two, but only one's PG-13 enough to tell, and even so, it's borderline.

I was living in some trailer in a trailer park (perhaps this is a prophetic dream), and I was friends with a couple of other families living in the next-door trailers. One of those families was a couple, and the wife and I seemed to have a history. I don't know what the history was, but I have the feeling it was mostly the horizontal kind. Anyway, we had a nearly adulterous incident in her trailer, but her husband came back and ruined it with the usual suspicious-husband's lack of tact. He didn't notice anything, we hadn't really gotten anywhere, but we couldn't very well continue in his presence. Somehow we stole a second and agreed that she was going to come over later that night, as soon as suspicious-husband slipped away into dreamland.

So later on, I was back in my trailer, it was getting dark, and I was considering my predicament. Unfortunately, I don't get much practice with these types of situations in my dreams, or in reality, so I found myself struggling with the moral issues. I finally managed to quiet my conscience. I told myself that it's not good to think so much, and that I could debate the morality at leisure after the deed was done. This is true to the philosophy of Emo Phillips, as summarized by this quote I often put into practice:

"When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me."

However, my conscience yielding to this excellent idea didn't put an end to my ruminating. I also considered the possibility of being shot in the head by a jealousy-possessed man upon successful completion of fornication, but failure to uphold secrecy. I was wise to remember the Russian saying that concerns secrets:

"When only one knows, only one knows. When two know, twenty-two know."

In my situation, the only way I could keep the secret to myself after the dirty deed was done, was with a brick upside the pretty head of my co-conspirator/mistress. And this my conscience would never let me do. My Mom has taught me that girls are at worst to be spanked, never to be beaten with weapons.

Anyway, all the excellent philosophy and common wisdom I am schooled in never amounted to anything. As it often happens in dreams, my conversation-with-self took about 10 seconds, but the outside world had meanwhile reached morning. Perhaps I was zooming around the inside of my trailer at an appreciable fraction of light-speed for those 10 seconds. In any case, she had never come.

I came out of my trailer only to find myself surrounded by grieving, slobbering people. "What happened?" I demanded of some blurry dream face. He told me. It turns out that the couple had fallen asleep and the husband had his arm around the wife's neck in a "we're lying on our backs and he has his arm under and around her neck" kind of way. Then, it seems like the husband dreamt that we had already perpetrated our heinous crime, because when he woke up in that very position, he found he had strangled her.

I woke up shortly after, but there was one last strange moment. This was everyone's unconditional acceptance of the fact that it was not the husband's fault. There wasn't even going to be a trial. This completely undermined my belief in dream-justice.

Anyway, how bout some real tragedy?

Mario has hit a new low. Yesterday he was sitting on the couch, reading something on his laptop, while flipping through the channels on TV. He might as well have been pressing the channel button with the TV turned off for all he saw or heard. When I commented on it, he gave a typically brain-mangling retort: "if there was something worth seeing, I would have looked."