Sweet Dreams IV: All In A Mouse's Night - Interpretation please?

1) Holding on to the rear fenders of two old cars, a Studebaker and a two-toned Rambler, I am dragged heroically, like a cowboy charging his enemy between two horses, but this is done in some sort of a normal parlance as I am having a conversation with a woman in the backseat of one of the cars and I feel no fear. This is just how things are. My friend, Tom Nelson, is driving and he speaks to me through the rear windscreen whilst holding up a platic wine cork - the kind with the metal aperature that one levers down to make sure the seal is complete - as if he has just pulled the stopper out of the fuel fill pipe, and says, "You might try putting some gas in it next time". 2) Jonathan Hoffman, my old partner from Leo Burnett, sits at a lathe in a dingy old factory with grease smeared all over his face and hands. He smiles broadly as I walk down the aisle of the shop towards a set of swinging aluminum doors and enter into what can only be described as a Wal-Mart-like office setting - rows and rows of blue cubicles under even more rows and rows of flouresent lighting in a scene resembling the last shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark - a cavernous, huge, clean, bizarre space that goes on forever. I have been asked to review the design for an electrical device, a not very technical intrument that is simply a switch where two sets of contacts will touch two other sets of contacts whenever a button is depressed. This is my design somehow and it works precisely. It is pointed out to me that what I have done is akin to a fine suit and I am a tailor. 3) We have traveled an hour and a half. I smile.

For more Sweet Dreams Click below:

VI: I Woke Up Drunk Today
V: Homecoming
IV: All In A Mouse's Night
III: Fragmented Fermentations
II: Strange Dreams
I: White Huskies: Interpretation please?

That Embarrassing 70s Show - I Was In It!

Oh dear. It's all about to come out of the closet - and I'm not talking about my gayness - although from this photo, you've got to wonder. Note particularly, my full-length denim jumpsuit (I'm on the far left) and my buddy's not-so-delicately-cross-hatched pants. Fucking hilarious, you've got to admit.

This photo comes from Sylvia, a really good art-friend during our freshman year in college and the dude standing next to me is my best friend at that time, Tom Nelson, or "Nels" as everyone knew him. I was known also as "Carls" at the time and together we composed a most deviant organization called "The Swedish Mafia", a clandestine cooperative dedicated to art, beer drinking, cigar smoking, classic car repair (we both drove junk piles of ever-changing make and model including Studebakers, Ford Mustangs a Buick "Invicta" and a Datsun) and the chasing of many women who were essentially bad for our mental health, although many times more than good for our physical health. From that was born another private club, "The Porker Brothers", but that's another story entirely. Tom now makes a "clean" living in custom homes.

In these days, we were both obsessed with getting through school (Black Hawk College in this photo) and finding jobs in the ad business (His mother was an art teacher and his dad had an advertising company of some sort) and Sylvia was a bit of a Tom-boyish art buddy of ours who was just really, really sweet and truly a good friend as well. Little did we understand that these days would pass quickly and this photo is probably the last time I saw or spoke to Sylvia. Until now.

Over the last year, since starting the blog and posting thrice weekly at least, my Internet presence has increased exponentially. Along with Facebook and LinkedIn, I'm pretty easy to find and any great number of voices from my past have popped up recently - and interestingly enough, primarily female - the account executive from my first TV shoot with Bozell & Jacobs in Dallas, the researcher and media woman who worked on the Nintendo Game Boy account with us in the early 90s, and another woman with whom I had an affair with at Leo Burnett. Oh, dear. If 25 year olds start popping up calling me "daddy", I'll start to worry. But that hasn't happened, yet. Yet. So there is definitely another side to being a Web 2.0 provocateur. A side that tax collectors, old enemies and older ex-girlfriends might find to use to exorcise antique angst. But that isn't what has happened to me at all - conversely, everyone I have re-met has been just so sweet and nice that it makes me wonder what kind of a guy I really have been? Even Tom and I are still in contact. Wasn't I supposed to have been a Porsche driving, cocaine snorting, advertising-creative-hero-in-his-own-mind, sort of asshole in all those years up the ladder? Well, we'll do a call-in show for that later. I'm sure we can find a guy I bullied in gym class - or maybe art class for sure. Are there art class bullies?

Thanks so much to Sylvia for this, and for letting those of us who have spent time in divorce court know that there is another side to that 50% figure. Sylvia and her husband in the photo, Jim, are still married. But no damn thanks for the fashion faux pas "outing". Damn that hurts!