Greetings from outside The Coffee Bean, the world’s only coffee shop without wifi. Of course.

My mother dropped me off here for a few hours while she gets her hair done, so I could use their (non-existent, but free!) wifi. However, I have found a weak and moody signal coming from The Bon Bon Hair Salon next door, and with any luck the fates will smile on me, and I will be able to share my continued tale of woe with you.

This is obviously not my mother, but this is kind of like what her hair looked like when she drove up.

But the thing of it is, she doesn’t read the blog, so I figure no harm, no foul. If it will even mildly entertain you, it’s going in the blog. Moreover, as I’m sure you will agree, it was very nice of her to come mid-hair coloring session to try to help me out like that. As you know, I generally leave my friends and family out of the blog because I don’t want to offend them or reveal things that embarrass them and mostly because they don’t really have a way to state their own side.

However, when they start dying off? Look out. There will be some hard-core tell-all memoirs hitting your closest book stand. Augusten Burroughs ain’t got nothing on the yarns I’ll be spinning.

Meanwhile, I have pretty much no amusing stories to share with you, so let me tell you about this crazy scary dream I had last night (which somehow I ended up telling like a comedy when I was telling my mother. I don’t know why this happens. I can apparently never be serious).

Any amateur dream interpreters out there? Feel free to have at it:

Okay, so in real life I watch this show “Big Love” on HBO about this family living in plural marriage in SLC, Utah. It’s really well done and fascinating, and I guess that information was somehow in there with the other items tossed into my dream salad? Thus, in the dream I was one of many wives, and I had twins who were about 8 months old, and we all lived in this huge old house together. I put the twins down to nap, and was upstairs in my room when I became aware that this evil force was in my room. It scared me, and I went to leave the room, but it somehow made it such that I couldn’t reach out for the doorknob. I felt like I was arm-wrestling someone.

So I went to this old armoire in the room and opened it, and the entity (as it will henceforth be called as I tell you this story) had made this vacuum cleaner sitting inside the wardrobe start smoking. I threw a glass of water on it, and started screaming and screaming for someone to come help me because I couldn’t get out of the room.

Eventually this older man came in the room, and I recognized him as a leader of a different polygamist group (not the one we belonged to), and I wondered what he was doing in our house. However, I was so freaked out by the entity, I didn’t care. So I told him what had happened, and he looked around and everything seemed normal. Regardless, he appeared to be very shook up, and the next thing I knew, he had run out of the house and was getting in his car and driving away. I watched him leave through the window.

I should mention that I wasn’t ‘me.’ I was younger and looked different and had the twins that I already mentioned. So anyway, I was still in the bedroom, and the entity started slamming the doors of the wardrobe, and there was this intense feeling of pressure in my body, and I started to think I should get out of there. It was like the entity was trying to take over or possess me or something, and it was everything I could do to fight it off. I kept screaming at it to leave and leave me alone, but it seemed like it kept getting stronger.

I called a friend and told her I would be coming over and bringing the children, and she started fretting about how small her room was, but I figured if I could get out of there, I’d go there regardless.

I managed to get out into the hall, and there was another room adjacent to mine. It was a bathroom with a clawfoot tub, but also all my clothes were in there. I went in to grab some things, and somehow the vacuum cleaner (the one from the closet in the other room) was sitting in the middle of the room, and it turned on – unplugged – and came toward me and sparks were flying out of it and it was smoking. I briefly considered throwing water on it again, but decided to slam the door and run out of the room and just leave.

Then I heard this awful banging I presumed the vacuum cleaner was banging up against the door to get out, but it turns out in real life the door to my room was banging in the wind, and I woke up.

And there you have it. A little glimpse into my twisted subconscious.

With any luck, something funny will happen in the next twenty-four hours, and I’ll have some good tales to tell when we reconvene tomorrow for the next installment. Or if not, I’ll just have to see what kind of wacky trouble the people of the world are getting themselves into now…