My Glorious '70s TV Childhood, Writ Large

I have been reading up on Mech E. I don't know how this came to pass, but it turns out I have been learning some very practical things about how roller coasters work. I surprise myself when I read text from a scholarly article about the application of the new "triple contoid rail shifters" or some such, and I understand pretty much all of it, despite its grounding in forces and principles of physics that probably don't exist. I am so excited by this new area of learning that I am, for the moment anyway, dead-set on changing careers to becoming a roller coaster mechanic.

It's a butch place, though, this coaster shop (a simply vast factory floor, the kind of place you drive golf carts through to get from Point A to Point B) and one of the guys has already expressed his smirking disdain for the new faggot. He's a 40-ish tank with neat graying hair, an old-school 'phobe who, deep down, couldn't be bothered less but feels the need to keep up appearances with the mates. I'm trying to make nice, partly because it's the morally superior, adult thing to do, partly because I don't wanna get beat up, and partly because holy shit I'd suck that in a trice. Anyway, I make a point to thank him, politely and professionally, whenever I can—e.g., on returning a gizmo I have made use of that's not really his to lend but the company's. It's working, I can tell: he'll be fucking my face soon.

I'm off shopping now, seemingly both for hardware and foodstuffs. (There may even be a stupid pun like "mixed nuts" going on here.) I visit the supermarket that's always there, whether the story is about actual grocery shopping, frustration over a mass of humanity in the way, or anxiety about being naked. In this case it's just here to be visited briefly because what I really need is over in a separate space across the parking lot: operated by the same grocery company but more like a hardware store. Except with tacos. They have tacos. I hear some folks in here complaining about how windy it is while I'm looking around. They apparently do not carry what I'm looking for and I don't want any tacos, so...

I step out onto the narrow terrace just shy of the roof of this retail/office building. There's a tired old guy out here smoking, and after we exchange greetings, he mentions that he's "about done with this damn wind". Sure enough, just as I look through the cloudscape in the near distance I see evidence of a cyclone forming. It is far too bright out here—really only partly cloudy—for a tornado, but there one is, and it has just touched ground, maybe a couple blocks away. I say to the senior, "That's it for me, I'm going in" (he seems less alarmed) and I head back toward safety. But the door I came through is egress-only; no handle on the outside. So I find the next door, which leads into a utility corridor, then going through another steel door opposite I end up in a main building stairwell. I am the first in here but other humans start gathering almost immediately; presumably it's a safer part of the building structure than their offices, with all those windows. I am surrounded by shouts of "C'mon, hurry!" and general panicking. We are all trying to determine whether the twister has passed or lingered, and where it is now.

It is here. It is precisely here. We humans lurch and scream as it becomes obvious the building is coming down. The space where we are all standing has become a steel and glass cube, an oversize elevator, and it is plummeting toward the ground. I am faced with that moment I have long contemplated: what happens when the plane is going down? What happens when I fall off a cliff? How do I react and what do I think about in that excruciating last minute before certain death?

There is no right answer. And anyway, Brain declines the question by an unexplained scene change. Brain always pulls that shit when it doesn't know.

Well! Since I'm not dead, I am in Carol Burnett tribute mode. There's a particular episode I remember, with a particular guest, and in which Carol Burnett sings a particular song at the very end. (In real life, the guest is probably Sammy Davis, Jr. but I have no idea what the song is. It may have bled over from Jerry Lewis singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at the end of this MDA Labor Day Telethon every year.) In what is almost certainly Mary Richards's newsroom, I sit and page through a mountain of old TV Guides until I find the episode in question. Apparently we are pre- or otherwise devoid of Internet research tools; and yet, having found paper reference to it, I have immediate access to the video in stunningly high quality—like being right there by the stage as Carol does her finale.

Once the song is done—and Carol has tugged on her earlobe—I am back in the parking garage, heading for the car with John, my partner in crime. John is played by Paul Newman. The car is played by a generic 1970s workhorse sedan. I am contemplating my performance during the twister/falling tower incident; in retrospect I was more than sufficiently reasoned and calm even as death inexorably loomed.

I have passed the test; I have found the tao; I have faced death without fear; I am a fucking badass.

So it is clear what I need to do: "I need a gun, John," I tell my partner as we open the car doors. He seems surprised. "I've never owned a gun, never even fired a gun." (True in our story, not true in real life.) But I need a gun to go be a hero—perhaps like Frank in God Bless America but this is not what occurs to me at the time: my end goal is left tacit—though one may assume enough thematic linkage with waking life that "overthrowing the oligarchy" is basically it. I need a gun to accomplish it in any case.

There are two women not far from us in the parking lot; they are clearly involved in some other sort of criminal activity and are newly on the lam. I ask John whether we should give them a ride; he declines, opining that that would be asking for trouble. We head out; but for whatever reason John drives the car down the stairs, every flight.

I sit up to grab and pen and paper to make notes about these dreams; except that I do not really sit up. I only dream that I do.