Trimming bushes

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

I’ve written about some silly stuff in this little column, but this has got to take the cake. Dreams—the ones when we’re sleeping—are about as irrelevant as anything human beings do. Oh well, this column is supposed to be about irrelevancies, except when it’s not, so here goes.

Last night, I dreamed I was trimming Osama bin Laden’s shrubbery. The shrubbery was outside his cave, a dozen and a half or so mostly Japanese Barberry. (I’d guess atropurpurea, that reddish, purplish variety.) At any rate, every once in a while, bin Laden would come out, dressed in his sort of Muslim, sort of military garb, and shoot at me with his automatic weapon. I’d drop my pruners, dive behind a rock, and fire back with my little Glock semi-auto until he went back in the cave, and then I’d go back to pruning.

Foolishly, I came into the office and asked the team, “So, who’s an interpreter of dreams?” Brad Bynum spoke up, knowing whatever I was about to say would probably be stupid. I told him the dream.

“Well, there’s definitely some Freudian stuff going on there,” he said, stroking his Joseph-from-Genesis-like beard. “It sounds like you’ve got a monster you are trying to keep in the cave.” He laughed, realizing suddenly and at the same time as I did that the cave probably represented the … womb, and the monster probably represented the … cigar.

“So what’s with the trimming of the bushes?”

He didn’t dignify the question with a response.

···

I mentioned a week or so ago that my car was broken into, and my Sirius radio was stolen. I called Sirius to hold the subscription until I got a new radio. Well, they sent me a new radio, the car kit, and a free-installation card. I ended up having to buy a cable, but I’ve got to say, that’s pretty good customer service.