Byrne Ditches Naked Man at Mall

It was so vivid, I could almost swear it really happened," said Littlehead City resident Wyatt Touchdowne about his recent dream involving prominent musician David Byrne. "I mean, we were hanging out together just like we'd been friends for a long time. It was really cool."

Touchdowne, 32, a systems analyst for a California software firm, admitted that in reality, the two have never met.

"But in this dream I had the other night, not only did I get to meet David Byrne, but we spent what seemed like a whole lot of time together, just talking and doing things and stuff. First, I was just kind of walking along this beach, and I realized there was this guy right beside me, and when I looked, it turned out that it was David Byrne, former leader of the band Talking Heads. So we were just walking along, and we were talking and everything, and then pretty soon we were riding in a car together. We got to this house, and I realized in the dream that it was the house I had lived in when I was a teenager. And then David Byrne came into the house with me! He was actually in the house I used to live in!"

"I remember we talked about music and all kinds of stuff, and he was really friendly, just very low-key and casual, and it was just a really very pleasant encounter. At one point I told him that sometimes when I listened to his music, either the things he said or the way he said them just made me laugh. I couldn't help it, I said, I just laughed. He thought that was pretty funny, and he told me in the dream about this part of one song that he sang by calling over the phone and then holding the receiver up to the microphone. That part was really amazing, you know? I mean, how many people get musical tips like that in their dreams from someone like David Byrne?"

"Anyway, so there we were in the living room, and then my mom and my sister came in the room, and then I think they asked me to go to the store or something, because the next thing I knew, the dream kind of shifted, and I realized I was at the mall, but I was standing there naked in front of the Hickory Farms store, and everyone was looking at me. So of course David Byrne was gone by then, but still, it was pretty cool that we got to hang out together."

Asked if it was common for him to have dreams about celebrities, Touchdowne admitted that he had also had dreams involving personalities such as Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Nixon and Cameron Diaz, among others.

"One of the strangest ones was where I was hanging out with Harry Nilsson," Touchdowne said. "Harry was really cool and everything, but I kept remembering in the dream that he's really dead in real life. So in the dream, I kept saying, 'But aren't you dead? You're dead, aren't you?' He never answered me, but that particular dream never seemed as real as most of the others. Because how can you hang out with a dead guy, you know?"

When this reporter pointed out that Richard Nixon is also dead, Touchdowne replied, "He is? Really? Wow, when did that happen?"

Despite repeated calls to his publicist regarding Touchdowne's dream, Mr. Byrne was not available for comment.

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Well, first thing's first and I have to say I was very disappointed in the response to my shout-out last issue for little Asian kids to join my rock family. So far I haven't got a single kid signed up, not even any tone-deaf little Asian tykes who can lip-synch or white kids with squinty eyes. I can only think this says bad things about literacy among our nation's Asian kids. So much for the myth of Asian toddlers speaking three languages and piloting biplanes and shit. I guess I should have expected as much from a culture whose "language" is just a bunch of little drawings of houses. I like picture books just as much as the next guy, but we all know the truth: all pictures and no text means it's not a men's magazine, it's a porno.

I did get one response for somebody to be the Asian rock band family mom, I think. Whatever it was, this Asian chick showed up at my door the other night and has been living at the Bricks Manor ever since. She doesn't speak of lick of English, so she could be a Yokova's Witness or one of those gag mail-order brides Ramon Nootles keeps sending over or something, but she cooks some pretty badass duck so I haven't had reason to question the arrangement thus far. She doesn't look like she can play the tambourine, so it's possible she may have been responding to the column. Though unless one of us gets a whole hell of a lot better at charades we may never know for sure.

So anyway, Osaka and I (that's just a name I made up for her, since she wasn't wearing a name tag and all that "ra ra ra" sounds the same to me) were toilet papering Ramrod Hurley's house when the idea it me: I don't even like music. So maybe the lack of qualified Asian rock band child applicants was more of a blessing in disguise. Like they say, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Not that I buy into any of that crap, but they do have a lot of convenient ready-made quotes like that which come in handy sometimes.

The one good thing to come out of all of this, besides the awesome duck dishes, is that Osaka is way better than Foghat at Monopoly. That's not to say she's good, since she's not, which is good because I like winning. But she at least gives me the impression that I'm playing with someone who's aware the game is taking place. Foghat's one strategic decision in years of Monopoly playing was to eat the little pewter shoe, which was sly but I still won that game regardless. I brainstormed at ways to get that shoe back, but after considering my poop-sifting options I decided that if anybody wanted to be the shoe in the future, tough shit. Go buy a shoe-wearing Barbie doll or something, you big sack of weird.

It's not like the shoe could win any conceivable kind of Monopoly token battle, not when you consider how big that damned thimble would be in real life. If Foghat had eaten the racecar or the wheelbarrow or something it might be a different story, but he made the right call in eating the gayest token available.

Like I said, Osaka's better at Monopoly, but she's not going to take Donald Trump down to the mat any time soon. When we played she bought one property, built a house on it, and then just saved her money for the rest of the game. I kept trying to pantomime that she needed to buy up whole city blocks and cover them with soul-crushing cookie-cutter hotel megastructures like I was, but I guess when you're not from America the whole concept of crushing the poor with your privilege and gluttonous might is harder to grasp. It's hard to explain why it's good to take way more than you need just using shadow puppets and forming letters with your body.

Now I know how the pilgrims felt when they got off the boat and had to explain to the Indians why they were building mini-malls and hotels and all that shit. You just know there were some hilarious scenes when the pilgrims tried to start charging the Indians camping fees and all the Indians had was some beads and feather hats and bullshit to pay for it. You can bet the Indians were washing some serious pilgrim dishes that night.

Bricks out.

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Every year around this time I get a lot of mail from readers asking about the holidays. It seems like everyone's got a question on their mind like: "If you run over a kid with your car on Halloween, and you're dressed as a giant baby, can you still be tried as an adult?" or "Is there a statute of limitations on stealing thirty turkeys?" or "Omar, I think you got my sister pregnant at the Christmas party last year." Unfortunately, I can't answer every question personally, since as Twain said, "Time is money," and nobody's sent a valid cashier's check or money order along with any of their questions so far. (Incidentally, the answer to all three questions above is "It depends on which state you're in." That's a freebie to get you started.) But this year I thought I'd do a column answering some questions about the holidays, since all I've had going on lately is jury duty and I can't tell any of my hilarious court stories here until they fry that pigfucker.

So anyway, last week I was at the courthouse on a Bicardi break during this big-shot trial I was telling you about. (And like I said, I can't discuss the details or who it is or whatever, but suffice it to say this is one guy won't be buying his wife any hats any time soon. Because she's dead, and also because he cut her head off with a chainsaw. And also because he's a cheap bastard... and also because his name is Steve. That's all I can tell you though.) While I was on my break, I ran into commune research editor Griswald Dreck out in the hallway. Turns out he was on the jury for a trial down the hall, something about this chef at a restaurant who was putting Comet in everything, he was a crazy bastard or some shit like that. Anyway, while we were on break we started talking about the upcoming holidays, and how those dumb-assed Canadians don't even know what month Thanksgiving is in. And that got us started on where the holidays came from and who thought to cram all that bread up the turkey's ass or if that was an accident the first time. It turned out that Griswald knew a lot about this kind of stuff, and it dawned on me that I could probably hash out a column on the origins of the holidays during some of those long-winded eyewitness testimonies.

We all know the story of Thanksgiving that they taught us in school, about how the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower and ate the Indians and we should be thankful that Inidans taste pretty much like chicken, or else there would have been trouble since the Pilgrims didn't think to bring any Tabasco sauce with them from England. Turns out this is really a crock that they taught us as kids so we wouldn't ask too many questions or complain if they served Indian in the cafeteria.

Griswald clued me in on the real story, which goes like this: the Pilgrims were all Puritans from England, a radical religious cult who wouldn't wear white wigs like everyone else and instead wore green ones, like it says in the bible. They were pissed off at the king for not getting their royalty payments on sales of oatmeal, which they needed to pay for all of their wig dyes and the printing of their "The End is Near: Eat More Oatmeal" shirts and their huge stockpile of muskets. Just when they were about to get all of the back-payments straightened out they suffered a huge setback when the Puritan's lawyers and the king's lawyers were all thrown into the sea during the Great Lawyer Dunk of 1643. The Puritans decided that screw it, they were moving to America, where the squahs were easy and all of the streets were paved with shell beads. So they sold their wigs and changed their name to "The Pilgrims" to keep from being made fun of in the new world.

The Pilgrims actually came over on three ships: The El Nino, The Fredo and The Challenger, the last of which blew up half-way here because they'd picked that ship to carry all the fireworks for the 4th of July party. The El Nino and The Fredo made it to America though, which was known at the time as West London. The Pilgrims settled and assimilated into the local culture, but they were sad because all of their sports teams were getting their asses kicked by the Braves and the Redskins and Indians and all that (this is before the Yanks had Mussina, BTW) and they didn't have any food and they were all sleeping in this old Camero at night. And so the Indians held a food drive and brought them some cans of green beans and butter squash and some other stale shit they wanted to get out of their teepees. And now everybody was happy, except for the Pilgrims who had to eat that nasty canned shit. The Indians had ribs and hot wings and some bitchin' stuffing with sausage in it and they drank and watched football while the Pilgrims had to sit at the kids' table and they couldn't even have any of the lousy fruit salad with marshmallows in it until they'd eaten all of their asparagus spears and other inedible soggy crap. So the first Thanksgiving really sucked the big tit but the Pilgrims had the last laugh because along with all of their knick-knacks and ugly-assed hats and Big Ben and the other shit they brought over from England, they also brought rats and mosquitoes and the plague, and the Indians hadn't had their shots since they were away for a pow-wow or something on that day in school, so they all died. Except for Crazy Horse, who was off carving his face in a rock and babbling about the CIA and mind-control beams from the moon.

So every year we celebrate Thanksgiving to give our thanks that we're not eating any of that mushy canned shit, except for hobos and orphans and people like that, but if they had a wall to hang a calendar on to know it was Thanksgiving, they wouldn't be homeless in the first place, so it's kind of a tough shit kind of thing for them.

Griswald also told me the story of the first Halloween, but right then this great big fat guy in the hall fell right on this ice cream cone he was carrying, and we were laughing so hard I think we both forgot where Halloween came from. It had something to do with giving out candy to keep people from dying on your lawn during the plague or something, trust me you're not missing a lot there.

Not long after that our break was over and we had to go back to deciding the fates of the damned. It's demanding work, but hell, I made four dollars and got to dress up as a judge for a while, so I'm not complaining. Okay, before we go I'll take a second to answer three more reader questions: "No", "Yes", and "Use the whole fist." I hope all of you out there in commune territory live it up this Thanksgiving and don't forget to give something nasty from your cupboards to those less fortunate than you. Bricks out.

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