by Joseph Aaron Friedman

Created on: March 13, 2009   Last Updated: March 14, 2009

Sour Milk at Bedtime

I think it was a nightmare, but in truth, I can't be sure. For a while there I had thought I lost my mind, which really isn't such a bad thing, if you remember where you lost it, Ms. Weiss' class... in high school... reading Ionesco? Or maybe it was later on, on Haight Street in that bar with Mikey Jones. It really doesn't matter; it's the dream that matters, if it was a dream.

I was sitting at my lap-top, and the screen, it just transformed... transmuted actually... turned to jelly crimson red, right above the knobs and dials that were once the keyboard.

And then the strange thing happened, it turned to cable news! I never watch such a thing...was this an omen? Something was most definatly amiss.

Sean Hannity was anointing Rush Limbaugh's head with oil, as they discussed their grad school dissertations from Imaginary U.

And with allegoric reference to a Jerry Falwell revelation, that God will judge as heathens all who fail to heed his word, they quote, "If you're not a born again Christian, you're a failure as a human being," and say amen.

They were naked, eating pudding as Hannity quote Regan from the Bible, popping Oxycontin while appeasing Limbaugh's self-esteem with obsessed, adoring eyes. Limbaugh closed his eyes and dreamed of waned Antarctic icecaps disclosing virgin mountain peaks to be proclaimed the Fourth Reich's prospect haven under plutocratic rule.

Hannity then took a call. Obadiah Bush, it seems, had risen from his briny grave to find a payphone off the Jersey shore and begged forgiveness for his kinfolk's wayward ways.

Limbaugh grew increasingly upset and threw his pudding at a passing griffin before ripping out the cord. By then the set was overrun by over-zealous homophobes seeking absolution for their sins by hunting down the liberal slime that cast aspersions on the grave of William Randolph Hearst.

Then everything went black.

When I came to, I was on the toilet with an Etch-a-Sketch, bewildered by the fact that someone, had somehow, retraced the grout lines of my bathroom tile using Cheeto's as an agent, and filled my tub with gummy bears. My head still spinning from a Kafkaesque rendition of the nightly network news, I erased the hieroglyphic icons from the Etch-a Sketch's screen, and dismissed my new decor to gain more focus on my dream. That's when it all made sense... at least, to me... I've been watching too much television.

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