Friday, February 19, 2010

Lewis Carroll ain't got nothin on me.

Ok, so admittedly," 'Twas Brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe" is pretty awesome. When I think of poems, the first two that pop into my head are Jabberwocky, and the little crocodile.

How doth the little crocodile

improve his shining tail,

and pour the waters of the nile

on every golden scale.

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

how neatly spreads his claws,

and welcomes little fishes in

with gently smiling jaws.

So yeah. Lewis Carroll is cool. But sometimes I think the stuff in my brain can get even weirder. I don't remember my dreams very often, but when I do, sometimes I wake up thinking "what the...?"

The most recent dream I can remember involved my sister Jenny, Kirsten Busse, and some random dude as yet unidentified. This is not even the weirdest dream I remember. In fact, this one actually mostly makes sense, like a real story. It all started with Jenny and me walking into this vineyard for some kind of mini-vacation. The vineyard was like a combination vineyard, park, and track. It had a huge hedge all the way around the outside, so it was closed in. The grapes grew from the hedge and decorative trees. It was oval shaped with this dirt track running around it. The middle was all grass, like a park. You could do stuff like play frisbee or catch in the grassy part. You were supposed to just leisurely walk around the track. The giant purple grapes fell on the track, and you pick them up as you walk around and you eat them.

While we were walking around the track, a guy chased a frisbee over to where we were. He had really dark hair with bleach blonde highlights, and it was braided kind of like dreadlocks, but not gross looking. Him and Jenny had one of those cheesy love at first sight moments. Jenny started hanging out with him all the time, and they were boyfriend and girlfriend. I thought he was cool enough at first. So later on we were at my apartment complex, which was just like the one I live in now, except for facing south instead of north, and it was built into the cliff wall directly below the vineyard. I lived in the same one, but Jenny also lived there in apartment 8 right above me. She was roommates with Kirsten and Bekah Elliot.

I was hanging out with this dude in a large room off to the side of our complex. We we're joking around sending Harry Potter spells at each other like Jelly legs, or Rictusempra, when it just gradually escalated into a real battle. Suddenly I realized he was trying to actually Jinx me, and so I did Protego first, then expelliarmus, and then I shoved him into this old creepy back room that oddly enough looked a lot like this old pantry/cellar/basement place we had when our family lived in Orem. You know, the kind with loads of junk in it that's so old you don't even remember what all's in there, and it's all the same color because of the tons of dust. Once he was in there I locked him in by using Impervius on the door. I'm still not sure why that worked, cuz that's more like a waterproofing sort of protection spell, but at any rate it kept him in there long enough for me to grab this flying green mo-ped sort of thing and get out of there. It was like a cross between Hagrid's flying motorcyle and the Green Goblin's flying green glider.

I discovered that this dude was actually planning to take over the world, and he needed one crucial thing for his plot to succeed: a necklace with a small glass rosebud on it, conveniently owned by Kirsten. So him meeting Jenny in the vineyard was all planned, and he'd been using her to get to Kirsten all along. I tried to warn Jenny, but she was too boycrazy to even realize that her boyfriend was a psycho dark wizard trying to take over the world. I tried to warn Kirsten, but she trusted Jenny that he was ok, and thought I just didn't like him because he was taking my sister away from hanging out with me more.

After several minor struggles where the glass rosebud changed hands a few times, I finally ended up getting it away from him, and I fled on my green flying scooter thing to this place that looked a lot like the cheesy flowery cottages in Jane Austin books. It had thatched roofs, and vines all over, and rose bushes growing up the walls, and everything. I put on some kind of disguise, and pretended to live in this cottage, so when the bad guy came looking for the rosebud, he didn't recognize me, so he didn't know where to look.

That's where I woke up. So it remained unresolved. But perhaps I could make up an ending. Hmmmmmm. OK, here it is. Once the bad guy decided that I wasn't in this cottage, I followed him back to his lair, where he was planning to re-asses his search methods. I had the advantage, because the rosebud could make his inventions work, or they could destroy them completely. That was his big weakness... he not only needed the rosebud to take over the world, but to keep others from destroying him. Using my masterly stealth skills I explored the compound. He wasn't a very clever bad guy. He made a lot of the common mistakes that bad guys generally make. Those things always lead to downfall, but they never learn.

Mistake 1: Dark and mysterious corridors. That made it really easy for me to spy on everything without getting caught. Mistake 2: He liked to kill his generals when they did something less than perfect. The high turnover in command posts led to chaos and disorder. When it was time to strike, I could use that to my advantage. Mistake 3: He depended way too much on his brainless security guards. They were too stupid to tie their own shoes, and yet he didn't even carry a weapon with him. He just sauntered around his hideout like nothing could get in. Mistake 4: Gigantic central, glass enclosed chamber housing the secret weapon that he needs the necklace for. Easy to find, easy to get into, and hard to guard effectively.

Needless to say, it was easy for me as a trained auror/CIA spy to figure out exactly what I needed to do to defeat him. Before he even knew I was there, I was already in the inner sanctum typing self destruct codes into the secret weapon. Before I alerted him to my whereabouts with a giant explosion, though, I hacked into the computer system and sent a virus into the network which destroyed all backup files on the construction of the secret weapon. They would have to start all over again if they tried to remake it.

I set the timer on the explosives, charged with the glass rosebud, and went crashing through the glass into the bad guy's own bedroom. It really is a bad idea to NOT carry your own weapons when you're a bad guy. His guards got into the room only just in time to see the end of my cloak disappear through the window. The ensuing explosion rocked the compound and lit the night as I ran through the woods to safety.

No one really knows what caused his memory loss. Well, no one but me. Some think it was the explosion. Some think it was some secret magic I learned from the grandmaster. I say, a magician never reveals secrets.

The end.

So that was pretty cool, I think. I imagine that if the dream had been allowed to run it's natural course, the ending would have been much weirder, and maybe more interesting than that. Who knows? Whatever the case, that is the story of Kirsten's glass rosebud. Moral of the story, don't own glass rosebud necklaces, don't swoon over dreadlocked guys that you meet in vineyards, no matter how charming and cute, and don't make brainless mistakes if you are ever an evil overlord. That is all.

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