Actually, he also reads books about baseball.

Dad, aggrieved: Sarah, have you everread a John Grisham book?

Me: Have you ever read a Patricia McKillip book?

Dad: No, Sarah, he's a really good writer -

Me: Do you even remember the last book you read?

Dad: Yes! It was on vacation last week. I read the latest John Grisham.

Me: So you only read John Grisham books, and political books with titles like "Obama: How He Won."

Dad: That is accurate.

Me: See, this is why I can't trust you when you tell me John Grisham's a good writer! You've got zero credibility! - Did you even read The Great Gatsby last night, like you said you were going to?

Dad: I got about two pages in and then decided to go to bed.

He decided he was going to read The Great Gatsby because he was watching Midnight in Paris YET AGAIN, and he likes Zelda Fitzgerald. (Also, he can't read anything by Hemingway or Faulkner because it's too dark, and he can't read anything by T. S. Eliot because it's too "effeminate." I don't know what his problem is, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is basically a Woody Allen movie.)

If you'd wondered, I do excise stuff from my dream posts.

Because in terms of content, a lot of the stuff that happens in my dreams doesn't make sense. Like, last night there was an immortal woman who had a friend who was an independently motile right leg, with a strand of long black hair wrapped around it. The friend was murdered (don't ask me how you murder a leg), so the immortal woman wrapped the hair around her own right leg on the grounds that "it will wear well." I assure you that this made perfect sense when she explained it to me in the dream.

The Pentacle Worm dream was relatively coherent, but there was still a lot of confusing and boring stuff going on that I cut out. For instance, my brain apparently expended a lot of effort inventing a system of street signs that it claimed Paris used to mark Locations Of Interest.

It's sort of a disassembled pie chart; if there's a circle with a red slice in the upper left, it's a church, and a pink slice just below there is a shrine. The worm's church was marked with both slices, suggesting that the church is a church, but its basement is a shrine to the worm, or whatever force the worm represents.

(Apparently I do think that all foreign countries are Japan. France, too, must have some indigenous animistic faith worshipped at places slightly separate from but frequently adjacent to those belonging to its imported, more-hierarchical faith.)

My dream was specific on the issue that, regardless of how many slices a location got, there was always room for the full circle on a sign, even if it wasted space. Like this:



...actually, I kind of think this might be a good idea. If it were, you know, implemented by somebody who didn't just half-assedly generate it in Google Docs. The insistence on leaving all that whitespace makes it uniform in size and shape, it's easy to draw, it'd be usable by colorblind people, and maybe you could even implement it in pop-up or indented form for the blind? It's more the sort of thing you'd want to use to delineate subway lines or something, though. I feel like you could engrave it in a square in the ground, the way they do the Walking and Stopping lines and bumps and Japan, with some sort of groove marking the bottom of the square. You could feel around it with your foot and know if you're facing the right way on the train platform and suchlike.

You know what? Somebody tell Paris that I am now open for negotiations over my awesome idea for their signs. Though I must warn them that I will give preferential treatment to whatever municipality, state, or nation first produces an actual shrine to the Pentacle Worm. I think it's only fair.

Anyway, the day I had the dream I spent a while trying to figure out what the rest of the pie slices would indicate. I mean, my subconscious mind only came up with two, and one was imaginary. I've come to the conclusion that I know shit about France.



You will NOTE that half of it is STILL IMAGINARY.

I think my Japan one's a little more realistic:



I am not very good at being a tourist, by the way.