The Dean Martin Memorial Manhole Cover
When I say I want to share my dreams with you, I’m not talking about my aspirations or my visions of a happy future —but the incredibly disturbed fragments of the R.E.M. cycles I sometimes happen to awaken with. These are rare for me to remember, which is why I find them worth relating.
This morning, I awoke with one such fragment still flitting about my head. I was northbound on North Lamar Boulevard here in Austin, driving in some sort of white SUV. I became aware of being followed by a woman in another large vehicle, with whom I was keeping constant and —yes— phantasmagorically impossible eye contact. She wasn’t hostile or anything but, in our unspoken communication, it became incumbent upon me to pull over there in front of the headquarters of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Getting out of the vehicle, I walked around to the sidewalk where I immediately saw the object I had been instructed to inspect: in a concrete slab abutting the sidewalk was, naturally enough, the Dean Martin Memorial Manhole Cover. It was inscribed in Italian, which I, with complete fluency, understood.
I don’t remember anything from it, except that it somehow referred to the Mafia —the term la cosa nostra being implied in the phrase “our hereditary markets.”
The only connection I see between this dream and the one I reported to you from the other night is the connection between the names Howard Dean and Dean Martin.
If I happen to dream about Martin van Buren or Martin Luther tonight, I am calling a psychiatrist.
