I have a dream (and faculty have a union)

"We're an organization, and we have tasks to perform!" said the rabbit

    [Colleagues, on Monday, at IVC, the SOCCCD Faculty Association held a Rep Council meeting.]

     Gosh, I woke up this morning from a terrible dream, and you know how that is: you’re in a twilight zone as your brain stumbles from sleep to wakefulness; it's like a trip in one of those Star Trek transporters, which means that, for all that you know, the old you is obliterated and a new you comes into being, oblivious that he’s just then started to exist, a fraud, a copy, with fake memories and a fake ID.
     So maybe I’ve got nothing to do with this dream, but, anyway, in that dream I seem to remember going yesterday to a meeting of the AARP, which somehow was the faculty union, and it was just horrible, man. It was in some awful room at IVC where, on the wall, there’s a map of the world, but China and Indochina are obliterated by a handout. What’s that about?
     I sat there, feeling unwelcome, like people with harry eyeballs kept expecting me to say something obnoxious, but I had no intention of saying anything, and, in any case, I remained silent and just sat there, marveling at the decrepitude and lunacy around me. Everybody seemed old or sick or demented. I wanted to get out of there, but I was frozen.
     “We’ve got a new office!” screamed geezer #17, and then a group of oldsters suddenly ran to the white board and tried to pin up a poster of James B. Utt, but every time they got it up there for a second or two, it just fell down again, and the pins flew across the room causing everybody to duck and run, but in the manner of elderly folk.
     Then somebody who was lying on the ground, sleeping, suddenly got up and started reciting a nursery rhyme followed by the numbers 30, 32, and 38. It was some kind of geezer mantra I guess, and it caused some of the old farts and lunatics to get mad and start tearing up chairs. “These are chairs,” they declared. “And they’re worth more than you think!”
     OK. That was weird. But then some gal said we could rescue the whole situation if we just get everybody to give a quarter of their senses. But that didn’t make sense to me since we’ve got five senses, not four, but I’m pretty sure that everyone was agreeable nonetheless, and that worried me plenty, cuz I started to think that I was that quarter or that sense. You know dreams.

RG in England, years ago

     The geezers started singing a song that everybody knew and liked. “Make rich bastards pay and pay!” they chanted, whilst one guy with a really big two-toned head started laying out spread sheets with zillions of numbers on ‘em. “15 to 1,” he said, and everyone understood. Not me, boy.
     “Get your clingy car stickers!” shouted the lady from kindergarten. "Talk to your friends!" Don’t know what that was about. She drove a Honda, I think, but how would I know?
     Somebody handed the guy with the head a sack of nickels, and he eagerly grabbed it, as he carped bitterly about his predecessor, a “political consultant” that “we paid for” through those cool automatic deductions that some people think are downright un-American.
     It was all very Alice in Wonderland, complete with Mad Hatters and white weasels and a greasy fat guy sitting high above us on a wall, smiling and cracking and seeming to know something important.
     Somebody scrawled “Meldau” on the whiteboard, and, just then, that Utt poster popped one of its two pins and started swinging across the room straight at me like some giant tractor blade. That’s when the Wizened Ones sauntered into the room, saying little but smiling at the fat guy up on that wall. “We’re here,” they said, and they started to cry. They invited Fat Boy to “come on down” and receive valuable cash prizes in the amount of just over $5,000—evidently, a gift from the AARP. But there were some oldsters there who were totally against the idea somehow, but, despite that, the appearance of the Wizened Ones and the Fat Boy caused the “Meldau” on the whiteboard to fade and disappear. Evidently, that was some kind of disaster, and some people started to moan.
     That’s when a rollercoaster suddenly roared through the room, first threatening to kill the organization’s new Prez, who was oddly silent for a moment, but then it veered violently to the right into that greasy fat, stupid, and corrupt guy, who was clutching his $5K. He dropped and farted but hung onto his cash, still smiling. The Wizened Ones then commenced carping about their latest round of plastic surgery and the inconvenience of keeping tabs on their many investments. “Fuck Brown,” they chanted. “Long live the Tio Fountain.”
     Sheesh. I’m getting too old for dreams.


A joker is not a devil, but a demagogue is a jackass

     Then somebody dragged a huge chair into the room, demanding that it be valued properly, but that activity got “tabled” or something, and nobody knew whether to shit or go blind.
     “Well, we can make a motion that we’ll just sit here and wait,” said the blond robot with the glasses, but the guy sitting to my right said flatly, “You don’t need a motion to do nothing, stupid.” I looked over at ‘im with admiration, but then he, too, disappeared, leaving only a smirk and a late grade submission form.
     “Breast implants!” screamed somebody, probably a woman. “We now get breast implants!” Everybody seemed to agree that that was a good thing. Guess so. “Didn’t we get those before?” I asked. “No!” screamed the crowd of oldsters in unison. “It’s your union at work,” they insisted.
     Next, the Prez stood up and said that the “evaluation forms are written,” and that we’d all have to use them to get evaluated by our students. On the other hand, said geezer #5, after students take 'em, nobody gets to look at ‘em, and they’re just gonna be thrown into the trash along with collegial consultation and single-semester sabbaticals. That seemed to please everybody except the guy who wanted MySite evals.
     Well, that’s about when I woke up, unless you buy into the "five second hypothesis," which, as you know, has never been disproved and that may well be true.