Dream Log: "Friends" with Money

Money money money money. Moolah. Skrilla. Cabbage. Cheddar. L'argent. Clams. Lucre. Currency. Simolians. Smackeroonies. You know what I'm talking about.

I dreamed that the characters from "Friends" were real, and that I knew what had happened to them since the show. I was not a friend of theirs. Not really even an acquaintance. More of an observer of the Friends. 

 

Ross and Rachel stayed married for 61 years! What happened then? Divorce? Death? I don't know. But somehow, I do know that they made love to each other 5 times during those 61 years. They made love to OTHER people much MORE than that. For example: on their wedding day, Rachel said something, and Ross, not for the first time, over-reacted. But during their wedding reception was the first time he had a 3-way with Rachel's sisters, played by Reese Witherspoon and Christina Applegate, and Rachel got really mad -- it was sort of like what happened over and over again in the show.

Don't feel too bad for Rachel, though; she had lots of sex, just, not with Ross. They got along pretty well with each other, just, not in that one way. Like in the show.

Chandler quit his job in advertising, and became an actor. Monica was doing better and better as a chef so they didn't need Chandler's income anymore. They never said in the show what sort of business Chandler was in, but in the dream, I knew it was advertising.

In real life, at least in the US, lots of people go from advertising to show business. I don't know why, but I do know why a lot of show business sucks so hard: all those assholes from advertising. You thought you were going to spread your wings, but you're still a weasel. And weasels don't have wings. 

Phoebe stayed on guitar and vocals, but Mike joined her on air piano -- yes: air piano -- and they made it big. Multi-platinum albums all over the world. They became billionaires. Air piano.

You may recall that Joey went out to Hollywood after having been in a huge blockbuster movie with Gary Oldman. In my dream, he kept making blockbusters. He starred in like twenty hugely successful movies in a row, it made him a billionaire. Then he started directing and producing and made some REAL money, and the first thing you know, Joey's head of Paramount Studios.

But he missed his Friends. So he re-located Paramount HQ from Hollywood to Manhattan, bought a huge townhouse in Greenwich Village, just a block away from where Joey and Chandler and Monica and Rachel lived during the show, with Central Perk downstairs. And he gave the townhouse to Chandler and Monica and moved in with them.

From Henry VIII to Richard Nixon

Political, religious, social and cultural leaders often bring forth popular movements at odds with their own intentions. Perhaps this is particularly true of religious leaders, or perhaps it seems that way to me because I've been studying the history of religions lately. 

Henry VII's son Henry was born in 1491, became King Henry VIII of England in 1491, shortly before his 18th birthday, and reigned until 1547. In 1521, with Lutherism spreading quickly all over Europe, Pope Leo X declared Henry to be defensor fidei, Defender of the Catholic Faith. In 1530, however, Henry became a Protestant when Pope Clement VII refused to grant him a divorce. 

Henry envisaged the Church of England as being very much like the Catholic Church, except that it would allow divorce, thus allowing him, he thought, to have many sons, making the succession of the English crown more secure. But once he opened the door, many forms of Protestantism poured in. 

There were very bloody religious conflicts in England for a long time after Henry VIII died. By far the bloodiest was that we now call the English Civil War, from 1642 to 1651, pitting King Charles I, very Catholic-friendly, against Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, as Calvinists were called in England, and not Catholic friendly at all. 

During the Civil War many new Protestant denominations sprang up in England. One of these became known as the Quakers. Their official name was and is the Friends, but they accepted that they were known as Quakers. The Quakers took the Protestant principal that a Pope and a strict Church hierarchy were unnecessary, took it much further, and declared that no preachers were necessary, and that no-one should tell anyone else what to believe.

The Quakers said that everyone had within them an inner light. They said that everyone should look within themself to understand what was right. And so, naturally, many of them were killed by Anglicans and also by Puritans, both in England and in the American colonies, where many of them emigrated. Quaker emigration increased greatly after 1681, when King Charles II gave William Penn, a Quaker, the colonial territory which would become known as Pennsylvania.

Not only Quakers came to Pennsylvania. Their reputation for religious tolerance also attracted many Lutherans, as well as many Protestants from Germany who no longer called themselves Lutherans, such as Baptists and Pietists. Some of these offshoots of Lutheranism greatly resembled the Quakers in their de-emphasis on church hierarchy, their encouragement of all members to participate and speak in their meetings, and their pacifism.

Spinoza, when he was cast out by the synagogue of Amsterdam, found friendship and support from Quakers who had emigrated to Holland. John Locke was exiled from England in the 1680, and he too found friendship among Dutch Quakers. Two examples of those who found that you don't have to be a Quaker to be accepted and defended by Quakers.

Remember, officially, they've never been called Quakers. Officially, they're Friends.

And yes, Richard Nixon was a Quaker. Some might say that he was not a particularly good Quaker. Others might possibly refer to Matthew 7:1, a Bible verse not infrequently cited by Quakers over the centuries.

Dream Log: Inept Mayhem

"So where were you when the shooooting started?"/ "Oh I was there, I started the shooooting."

I wrote that last night in my sleep along with the music to go with it. Trust me, you don't particularly want to hear how it sounds in my head. I've never written any good music. I've never written any music at all except while I've been dreaming. This little ditty sounds like something from a Broadway musical about some 18th-century armed conflict. A light-hearted bad musical. (Does this happen to other people: do they compose music, while asleep or waking, which they themselves can't stand to listen to?) My dream got more light-hearted and silly as it went along. The people with guns got worse and worse at aiming, so there was less and less chance of getting shot -- on purpose, at least. They were 21st century people at first, but they gradually morphed into caricatures of silly 18th-century people who, although they remained in the thick of a shooting conflict, were more concerned about having the proper ruffles on their shirts. There was one sort of triangular piece of ruffle which people wore on one side of their shirts which everyone -- except me -- was taking much more seriously than anything like the the bullets whizzing merrily all around us.

The dream began much more grimly. Yesterday evening, for the 1st time in years, I watched an episode of "24," the extremely-violent TV series starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, the extremely-violent American hero. Jack wasn't around in the dream, but as I was being driven through wet streets to a rendezvous with a terrible person, with the water sometimes so deep that I was amazed that the car kept moving ahead, as opposed to floating away, driven by someone who might've been an ally or an enemy, it wasn't clear, somebody mentioned that the dangerous person I wanted to go see had been on an earlier season of "24."

When we got there the bad guy was torturing someone. I won't go into the grisly details of that, you're welcome, except that he seemed to be really enjoying it. The torturer, I mean, the bad guy I'd come there to see, not the torturee. The bad guy was a Kurtwood Smith-type, scary looking in more of a psychological than a physical way. The guy who'd driven me there, who maybe was my friend and maybe not but I'd had to take a chance because I had to get to this bad guy, was big and imposing, starting to go grey but very lean and tough.

My perhaps-friend talked to the bad guy while I took a seat in the next room, which was very nice, glass-topped tables, beige stone on the walls, comfy sofas. The other two came in, the bad guy looking annoyed because his sadistic fun had been interrupted. He truly seemed like he might have been torturing that day more for fun than for information. He had washed off all of the blood and and put on a clean shirt and jacket. My maybe-friend sat down to my left, the bad guy sat close to me to my right and stared at me expectantly. I was sort of scared. Hoping that my fear wasn't showing, I went for a real hard-ass approach. My approach surprised even me, and I hoped it wouldn't go very badly: I just stared back at the bad guy and didn't say anything, and when he finally broke the stare-down by making an annoyed face and asking me want I wanted, I really scared myself by saying, "You know what I want. You'll either give it to me or you won't, so why waste my breath talking to you?" I hoped I didn't look scared.

The bad guy pondered what I'd said for a little while, and then pulled out a knife which was small but looked very sturdy and very very sharp, and attempted to stab me, but I caught his knife hand in both of mine and pointed the knife back at him. We struggled for a while without either one of us gaining a clear advantage. The big lean silver fox, my maybe-friend, just sat there and watched, as if he were neither a friend nor an enemy to either me or the bad guy, but was just going to sit this one out and deal with the result, whatever it was. However, I thought maybe he was my friend, and simply had way too much confidence in me. I was concentrating very hard on the bad guy and especially on the knife, so I couldn't see if the big lean guy had his gun out, ready to end it one way or the other once he had a clear shot.

Anyway, I ended up killing the bad guy Jack Bauer-style with his own knife. I'll spare you the grisly details.

Then the atmosphere changed abruptly, from "24"-style horror to sitcom- or frat-movie-style silliness. There were still deadly weapons, but all of a sudden no-one seemed very capable with the weapons. The big grey-haired tough guy was gone, and most of the people were in their 20's or 30's, and the action was more slapstick: rushing around all over a city assaulting and robbing each other, indoors and out -- come to think of it: sort of like Grand Theft Auto, but more white-bread, and much less violent, in large part because nobody could shoot straight. Somewhat like a Grand-theft-Auto-"Friends" mash-up. Even by the standards of this slapstick environment I was inept. I was no longer anything like the badass who'd just gone all Jack Bauer on that sadistic torturer. Now, suddenly, I was a sad sack who kept losing things like my jacket and my laptop and getting in my friends' way as they tried to take over this non-shootin' cracker crime empire.

And then came the transition from 21st to 18th century: weapons became older and less effective. Men's hair got longer and eventually was tied into pony tails with ribbons. Women's clothes became less revealing below the waist and more revealing of the décolletage. Everybody, men and and women, suddenly became obsessed with getting that triangular piece of ruffle right. Then came the terrible song, and I woke up.

"So where were you when the shooooting started?"/ "Oh I was there, I started the shooooting." I sang the song. By "I started the shooting," I didn't mean that it was I who had shot first, but that it was I who had annoyed others until they finally started to shoot at me.

Mental Illness, And a Traditional Approach to It

In part this is an update of my last post, which appeared four days ago, entitled And Still More, which itself was a continuation of earlier posts. (Well, of course. If it wasn't, it's title would've been very misleading. But I ramble.) In those four days, I cleared up some things with "CITIZEN 1," and the two of us have even friended each other on the website where all this discussion is taking place. Before that, a 4th "CITIZEN" jumped into the conversation, and this person and I just didn't get along at all. "CITIZEN 4" ended up not only calling me crazy, but also invited "CITIZEN 1" to join in laughing at the "crazy person."

I don't think I'm crazy. (If I were, how would I know? Whoo-hoo-hoo! That question applies to everyone, in my opinion. And I think many people can't admit to themselves how worried they are that it might indeed apply to them, and that that's why you see the hostile sort of behavior I describe below. Misdirected fear. But anyhow) (To match my mood while I'm writing think, let Gnarls Barkley's Crazy play in your head as you read.) I'm not sure whether "CITIZEN 4" really thinks I'm mentally ill. I kinda think so, at least on the surface. Subconsciously, labelling me so may have been a defense mechanism, because I might actually have been making good sense and may have struck a nerve. So, instead of opting for introspection, considering whether I might have had a point, "CITIZEN 4" lashed out: I'm not the one with the problem here. You are. You're crazy!

So far, not very remarkable. The part that seemed strange to me, that got me writing here, is where things went from there. Assuming "CITIZEN 4" really thinks I'm crazy, he or she seems to think that the appropriate way to deal with the mentally ill is to mock them, and to invite others to join in on the mocking. "CITIZEN 1" was the first invite to join in with the mirth and mockery. "CITIZEN 1" didn't respond at all to the request; on the contrary, as I said above, he engaged with me, we sorted out our miscommunication and are now officially friends on the website. A 5th party did join in with "CITIZEN 4," saying "just slowly back away and avoid eye contact."

I was reminded of scenes from centuries ago. In my mind's eye I saw "CITIZEN 4" laughing and throwing rotten fruit at someone who been deemed insane and now was in stocks in the village square. I wondered if "CITIZEN 4"'s ancenstors threw rotten fruit at people in stocks, I wondered whether "CITIZEN 4" would join in with throwing rotten fruit at someone in stocks if people were still put in stocks today.

I was reminded of the sitcom "Friends," which I generally like -- it definitely got better after the first couple of seasons -- and it's approach to two different, mentally unstable guest characters: the woman played by Brooke Shields who stalked Joey and thought he was Dr Drake Ramore, the character he played on a soap opera, and the man played by Adam Goldberg who was very briefly Chandler's roommate, who was depressed, perhaps even suicidal, over being dumped by a girlfriend, and was strangely obsessed with dried fruit.

In both cases the cast members got rid of the disturbed people by tricking them, and the characters were presented as people to be simultaneously shunned and feared.

I know, it's only a sitcom. But generally speaking, "Friends" put out positive messages about acceptance and tolerance. They really dropped the ball on the mental health issue. I'm not demanding that sitcom characters embrace and befriend the mentally ill; but at the very least, they could've encouraged them to get help; or, in the case of severe delusions such as Brooke Shields' character had, even called 911 and said, "This person could be a danger to herself or others." Because, clearly, a delusional stalker could be a danger.

What did those scenes sounds like before the laugh tracks were altered? I'm picturing some members of the studio audience laughing, but many either in stunned silence, or muttering things like "That ain't right!"

Maybe I'm not in touch with the mainstream on the topic of mental health. Several of my relatives are psychologists, one first cousin is a psychiatrist. We're the people who, historically, objected to the mentally ill being locked up in dungeons or in stocks in the village square, who argued that the mentally ill were not to be shunned, that that was good neither for good nor for the community at large. Some of the avant-garde of the profession were even among the early voices questioning conventional divisions between sane and insane, although psychology wasn't quite as quick in this as the arts.

So no, I'm not used to the mentally ill being shunned and mocked, this traditional approach, thousands of years old, was not instilled into me as I grew. Perhaps I'm still in the minority in this regard, despite all of the gains of psychology over the past couple of centuries. It would be sad to think so.

Or maybe "CITIZENS" 4 & 5 and the writers of "Friends" are just shocking rubes, way behind the curve on this one. It would be comforting to think so.

Oh and lest I forget: of course, some knuckle-dragging rubes still think that autism is mental illness, and when I say I'm autistic they think I'm retarded, and my tagline on the site is "Triple A: Angry Autistic Atheist," so of course that could've played a role too. Some people, perhaps insecure about both their mental stability and their IQ, could feel doubly tempted, consciously or sub-, to mock me just for the opportunity to feel mentally superior to someone.

Or, of course, like I said: Maybe I'm craaaaa-zy/Maybe I'm craaa-zy/Maybe I'm craaa-zy...