Dee and S.C. won a dinner at a restaurant of note in a charity silent auction. We were invited to join them. The restaurant's set menu for that evening (from which we had to order, under the terms of their prize) was a tribute to South African cuisine. The restaurant had set little African animals on each table, tiny big game amusingly at odds with their fine decor. By the door they'd set up a display that was supposed to evoke some colonial past. Curiously, the only Person of Colour we observed was the singer.
The evening passed nicely, until we left. I could not find my awesome Koolah hat, which I'd worn due to the inclement weather and set down to dry in the coat room.
Dee's sharp eyes proved invaluable, as in, "I'm sure I saw a hat like that by the display..."
Yes. Quite. Some employee of the restaurant had assumed my hat was a part of the neo-Colonial display and hung it there like some work of art.
That really happened. The dream followed, after we'd gone home and fallen sleep.
The Big Game is American Football, played in a very American stadium, big, bloated, colourful, and reeking less of testosterone than the fear of inadequate male qualities.
It is also a lake.
I walk onto a dock. The crowd both fills the stands and stands, a small handful, on the beach. The field can be water into which people fall, but the players stay atop even when tackled, the Jesus Christ League of American Football.
A pair of late-teenage girls approach each other and look like they're about to pull a Leisha Hailey, but they're just kidding. In fact, they're there for the hunky players. One slaps at mosquitoes. "Why can't they spray this area with that shit and get rid of these," she complains.
"DDT?" asks her friend.
"Yeah. That shit."
"It's bad for the environment."
"Whatever. They dumped a shit load of it into the Montreal River for Expo 67 and no one complained about mosquitoes." She's talking like Expo 67 is a recent event. Maybe we're in the past.
One of the players, I learn, is named "Banana Dean."
Cut to a photograph. Identical twin infants, except one has dark hair and brown skin and the other, blonde hair and light skin. They have strangely distorted faces. I move like a follow shot into a hospital ward. Both girls have been seriously injured. The nurse, the singer from the restaurant, asks the mother to explain what happened, and she can't. She's incredibly simple-minded, the mother, a eugenicist's nightmare, ill-equipped to parent. The father opens his mouth. He's barely intelligible, but whatever he says, the nurse fights to hold back tears. Ma and Pa look like children, confused about how they broke their favorite toys.
The camera moves on. In a nearby house, one little girl is spanking her Barbie while another pretends to play chess. Something vile happens in a kitchen, so vile I cannot recall it when I wake, but the non-thought of it chills my blood. The camera exits through a window. Outside, children play happily in someone's yard.