I Dreamed a Dream...

So for the past few day's I have been feeling a bit under the weather. Not full-on sick, but my head has been stuffy and I've been swimming around in that general malaise that colds bring along when they stop by for their unexpected little visits.

I stopped by Wally-World for some groceries yesterday and made the wallet-ending mistake of going while hungry. Not only did I spend way too much money on food, but the majority of it was spent on what turned out be a culinary cacophony of mix matched edibles.

Sauces with nothing to sauce, a jar of pickled cauliflower, that sort of thing...

The one thing that I did manage to get right in all that mess was that I had ended up with all the ingredients for hot dogs. So yesterday evening I begin to float around the kitchen and slowly but surely it all started to come together.

Wieners, ketchup, brown mustard, chili, onions, sweet relish, and cole slaw... delicious.

Like I said... I went hungry.

So with that I put on a DVR'd episode of Conan, and sat down to enjoy my mammoth dogs.

It wasn't, however, until about halfway through my second one that the thought crept into my mind that something seemed a bit askew. It had been forever since I had eaten a hot dog, but I was pretty sure they didn't taste like this on the last go-around. Foolishly, I shrugged it off, popped the last hefty bite into my mouth and leaned back, giving my cat a satisfied grin.

"You don't know what your missing, my hairy friend."

She seemed oddly disinterested, as if it knew something that I didn't.

There was that thought again.

I go to the kitchen and pick up the pack of wieners.

"Ball Park Bun-Length All Beef Franks"

That was when I noticed it.

It was pretty obvious, really, but in my aforementioned malaise must have slipped past the boundaries of my perception.

About a half-an-inch on the end of every single wiener had turned a sickly yellowish green.

I felt an almost involuntary, "Ut-oh..." pass over my lips.

I turn the package over in my hands, dreading to find what my cat had somehow already seemed to gleam.

"USE OR FREEZE BY: SEPT. 14/09"

I felt an almost involuntary, "Fucking Wal-Mart..." pass over my lips.

I slowly laid it back down, unable to look away from the flaccid little pouches that contained the two plump franks that were at that very moment slowly working their way into my system.

My cat was now watching my every move as I walked back to the couch and sat.

I could almost swear I caught the glimpse of a satisfied grin hidden beneath her whiskers.

"Well now what?", I thought to my self.

Do I just sit idly by and accept my fate, which is bound to be an unrelenting bout of food poisoning, or do I hearken back to my glory days as a fashion model and induce vomiting?

I sat.

As the hours passed I kept asking myself if I thought I was getting worse. I certainly felt strange, but I have had food poisoning before when I lost a no-holds-barred cage match with some bad bacon dip and this wasn't it.

I decided to take the most logical course of action that I could think of at the time... gulp down some Nyquil and pass out.

Let my body battle it out with the bacterial horde that was no doubt massing on my colons borders while I was safe in a clinically induced slumber.

As a swallowed the last of the emerald elixir, my stomach let off a low rumble like distant thunder, a signaling of the storm to come.

If the dreams that took place in my feverish mind over the next 12 hours were any indication of the war being fought within my body, it must have been hell.

No sooner than my head hit my pillow I was plummeted into a bizarre, twisted version of the film 2012, which is even stranger when I point out that I have never seen it.

I am now a military scientist trying in vain to escape the apocalyptic horrors that are befalling the planet.

I'm trying to heard a group of raging civilians up into the highest parts of a secret government library in Washington D.C. to avoid the rising oceans. At every floor I'm confronted with increasingly complex puzzles that I have to quickly solve so we can get to the next, higher level, all while the world is ending around us. We have calculated that a precise blast from a huge orbital space cannon called "HAMMER" fired on a dormant fault line will trigger an earthquake of cataclysmic proportions and open a massive fissure that will swallow up the rising water and save what is left of humanity.

Here's where it gets interesting.

Just before we reach the top, I discover a secret chamber that contains the governments most secret treasures.

Scrolls and documents, alien artifacts, the mystical armor of Genghis Khan, supernatural Nazi amulets, and my favorite, a bag of Magnetic Moon Sapphires worth billions. All of these priceless treasures were being guarded by a purple Yoda who began to hand them out to the remaining members of our rag-tag crew for protection from the rising tides and mindless mob of frenzied humans that pursued us. The small purple creature recorded our breath in a flash of blue light that emanated from a small device that resembled an ipod with a stun gun on top of it, thus insuring that we could be found and the treasures retrieved if we succeeded in our mission.

So, my pockets heavy with Moon Sapphires, and sporting new bionic phone-shoes giving to me by me by my little Yoda pal, I was up the stairs to the final control room. I could hear the howling mob growing louder, they were almost upon us, and they followed by the raging sea.

Was there going to be time?

I burst into the room and using the advanced footwear that I had just acquired, I quickly sat up a device that allowed me to talk to the HAMMER satellite and call in the blast.

I entered the commands.

The sky turned white.

There was an earth shaking explosion. I could feel every atom in my body trembling furiously from the impact as I was tossed about the room.

The world went dark.

I woke up, still in this damn dream, to find that it had worked! There was, what looked to be the Grand Canyon just behind the capitol building and all the water was flowing into it.

Everyone cheered and we all started hugging each other in celebration.

"We did it! We did it!", I kept saying. Then I was suddenly stunned to realize that I was now lying in my bed, heart still pounding.

As reality crept in I looked at the clock.

Twelve hours I had been "asleep".

My head cold it seamed had taken up permanent residence in my sinuses.

"I should probably get some medicine," I thought out loud,

"and some water... and the cat probably needs fed too.

But all that will have to wait, because right now, I reeeally gotta poop."

--nate