Saturday, November 29, 2014

Beach dreams...

So I dreamed I was staying in a... well, "hotel" would be a grandiose term for the palm-thatch and corrugated sheet metal building on stilts, but it had semi-private rooms for rent. And it was located on an island off the coast of a dream version of South Asia or the Horn of Africa or some other sort of anti-tourist-destination.

And the reason I was staying in this hotel room is so that I could wait for this stuff I'd rubbed all over myself to darken up my skin so I wouldn't fluoresce in the sun. See, they didn't want me to look obvious when I was getting a ride in the open skiff to the mainland from the smuggler/slaver, what with all the pirate boats about, their crews glassing the water looking for business opportunities, which a solitary Westerner certainly would have been. I was supposed to meet with some friendly guerrillas in the hinterlands once I got ashore.

So my "hotel" room had two means of passing the time: A little patio enclosed by corrugated sheet metal but open to the sky, where I spent time during the day trying to catch some rays and even out the blotchy "tan" that had left me with a distinctly chestnut-and-palomino brindle look. The other means of passing the time was an old TV set with a built in DVD player and a buttload of local movies.

My favorite was this low-budget Bollywood Dragnet series, with some Punjabi dude playing the Jack Webb role absolutely straight, down to the hair and the Fifties LAPD detective sergeant attire, except it was set in some modern low-budget action cinema version of Los Angeles.

The best scene in any of the episodes I watched was when Joe Friday had the bad guy cornered in a parking garage, and the bad guy was shooting at him, and Joe hopped on a GSX-R1000 and was riding it right at the bad guy, firing an M4 carbine one handed, with the gun's light and laser, as well as the bike's twin headlights, lancing theatrically through the smoke-filled parking garage.

I thought the scene was so cool that I was trying to rewind it so I could record it to a thumb drive for later, but while I was jumping back trying to find the start, I woke up.

I was sorely bummed.
.