Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Getting Down With Joe
I think I've been dreaming, which is strange, because I don't usually fall asleep at the computer. I was dreaming I was in the belly of Jonah's whale, of all places. Jonah was there too. And he had--a laptop, I think. He was blogging from the belly of the whale. And somehow there was a yellow cab in the whale's belly with us, and Doug was there, or I was Doug, or something. And I think I sat down on the packing crate Jonah had left his laptop on, lifted the computer onto my knees, and typed in http://warincontext.org/, and suddenly--I wake up here at my computer, at home in New Mexico. And I can hear my wife Svetlana in the bathroom next door, singing some Russian song in her weird little offkey voice.
No, wait--my wife is Susan, and she should be back home in Oxford, Mississippi. Or could she be at work? Then who is that woman singing offkey in Russian?
I get up, tiptoe to the door. For some reason I'm trembling like a son of a bitch. What am I afraid of?
I peer around into the bathroom. Imagine my surprise when the woman standing there in her bra and panties, splashing warm water on her underarms and singing that strange little melody in Russian, is Joseph Stalin.
He turns and sees me, and my blood runs cold. I have time to notice that the swells of his breasts above the Lycra look real. Hormonal treatment? Then he cocks his ear, holds up one hand, and as the screaming of the missile penetrates my mortal hearing too he yells something in Georgian-accented Russian that sounds like "GET DOWN!"
