Dear diary.
First day back at work today. Not nearly as bad as I feared. Possibly didn’t need to bring handcuffs and a shotgun after all. But I did have some sleepless nights leading up to it, which included a few unhinging dreams. One of which was the most violent set-piece I’ve ever witnessed, and almost certainly been a party to – other than the time I killed that toddler.
I dreamt I was in bed with my girlfriend, and next to us, on a raised bunk slept Powers Booth. Now, if you’re not familiar with who Powers Booth is, you’re missing out. He’s got the biggest face in Hollywood, big like a joint of beef that’s ideal for braising, with a boot brush for a tash. And he’s terrifying. He played one of the (many) bent presidents in 24, as well as the hellish Cy Tolliver in the excellent Deadwood. He’s also got a brilliant name. The Power Booth. Somewhere one might go for an express tug.
Either way, he was sleeping next to us. Dreams never explain their reasons, they only reveal their demands. In my dream, my girlfriend had to sleep with Powers in order to appease him. I was at first accepting of this, for the greater good. He was like an ogre.
But as she clambered onto his heavy, hulking frame I felt a pang of injustice rip through me like botulism. And I tried to pull her away from him. This just made him mad, and he tried to rape her. So I set about him, grabbing him round the neck, but he threw me off, slammed me into the wall and started simultaneously throttling me whilst trying to gouge out my eyes with his dustpan-sized hands.
Like a heroine in some unrealistic film, she hit him over the head with an unidentified heavy dream object (perhaps a sense of shame or my unwavering neurosis), I wriggled free from his grasp, as he launched his massive mits at her – squeezing the life out of her face.
It was at this point, the secateurs took centre stage. From nowhere (but the horticultural depths of my mind) I realised I was holding a seemingly innocuous pair of pruning tools. They were closed, and quite blunt, but they made light work of his spine as I plunged them repeatedly into his vertebrae, over and over again, like a frantic pub landlord with a plunger, working out the boozy-stools from trap number two, until the big man wheezed into a heap and yawned out a sick-full of token (and possibly symbolic) blood.
Then, for safe measure, I got him in a headlock as he lay dying. Dream over. Great start to the day. For the rest of the day, everyone was cunts.
