Jeff’s Advice | Just Smile All The Time

Sitting here, crusing on the wireless laptop, listening to Wilco singing “How to Fight Lonliness” and thinking about my dreams.

Stopped dreaming there for about four weeks, plenty of reasons why . . . nothing to be alarmed about, but it was starting to bother me. I missed them.

Then, this morning, I find myself holding a handful of live shrimp in my hand, pink and wriggling and I realize that if I don’t get them into water soon, they’re going to die. I get them over to the fishtank on the counter and dump them in, horrified to discover that they’re not shrimp at all but baby mice. I desperately fish their fragile little bodies out, pink and hairless and tender, and it takes far too long because I’m trying not to crush them. But when I lay them out on the countertop, I realize I was wrong, they’re shrimp after all and they’re dying so I get them back into the tank, watching once more as the baby mice twist and drift and drown . . . I go through this maybe three or four times in my dream before I realize that I was wrong both times and right both times . . . there’s shrimp and mice, mixed in together . . . and so I sigh and start to sort through them one by one, separating one little pink body from the other accordingly…

Please, no interpretations.