So after the four A.M. glowing poop episode, I crawl back into bed, the dog snuggles up next to me on his back, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth and his feet in the air, ever once in a while making little running movements as he dreams of chasing rabbits (is there ANYTHING more relaxing than watching a puppy sleep?) I drift off again.

When we first took posession of this house, we had to rid it of it’s former occupants’ shit. THere was a LOT of it, and we spent ages getting it moved. I still have nightmares about it.

I have since found three or four other houses of similar squalor and wierdness, and I have worked pretty hard to avoid buying them. I do, sometimes, dream about it.

So I nod back off, my right hand on the wife’s right hip, puppy breath in my face, and I dream of this place over in Steger, Illinois.

It’;s hard to see from an aerial photograph, but this place is a shithole of biblical proportions. THe two houses back off the road are neat homes on multi acre plots, set far back from the road. THe house in the middle is closer to the road, and all the maze of colors in the yard? are 8 foot tall mountains of garbage. You cannot possibly imagine how much shit there is there. Baby carriages. Televisions. Tractor parts. Shit you cannot believe. It’s as if someone backed truckload after truckload of shit up to the place and just dumped it, and it is all the collection of a man who goes trashpicking and dumpsterdiving, and obsessively collects the shit. I dreampt that I bought the house for $30k under the condition that I get rid of the shit, and I discover, much to my surprise, that the entire hundreds of thousands of cubic tons of refuse is refuse from another alien civilization- wheels with bearings that are not round. Musical instruments that are strange combinations of electronics and woodwinds. Clocks that tell time based on hours of forty minutes and days of nineteen hours. And while all the shit looks as if it’s decomposing trash, once you get close to it it all appears to be in perfect order. And as they are hauling away the owner, he looks at me and says “It’s on you now. You have to keep folks from getting their hands on this shit” and as I drive back to the bank to sign the final papers, I see, parked next to a garbage can, a wonderful beautiful rifle of clearly alien design, made for a being with more than two hands and arms much shorter than ours, with a binocular scope that is clearly made for eyes set much further apart than six inches. I stop and grab it, throw it in the back of the truck, and the wife says “What do you want with that ratty old galf bag anyway?”. I stare incredulously as I wake up. My heart is racing a bit, and then I see the dog, who, roused by my sudden start, wags his tail thump thump agaisnt my chest, licks my nose a couple times, and we both drift off to a bit sounder sleep.

Glowing poop. Alien devices. Shit, I need a vacation.