Mark
AIHRACHT
is over
Another day or two and we would
have had to sound the civil defense
sirens, but, by whatever auspicious
alignment of planets occurred
Monday, our kitchen sink was safely
decontaminated
without any majo:
trauma suffered
by myself or my
roommate. This
was our Battle of
the Bulge, and
having overcome
it, my roommate
and I are finally
able to see
ourselves as the victors of a war.
It began relatively harmless, a
party here, a shindig there. The
garbage did begin to mount, but then
was always room to socialise. It
wasn’t until we began to let the
animals into our apartment that
things began to spiral out of control.
Our first inductee was a gold
piranha named Mr. Blonde, a morose
little fish who’s sorry to be alive. Oui
apartment then became a Noah’s Ark
for discarded pets, many of which we
also discarded after trial periods, but
some we kept. Our ecosystem, as we
now call it, contains a wider array of
animals than Marlin Perkins ever met
in a single week—most notably a
ferret we’ve named Cornelius after
Roddy McDowall’s monkey in “The
Planet of the Apes.”
The fish typically and the frogs
generally don’t make nuisances of
themselves. The frogs do have a
knack for mating loudly, despite the
fact that they’re all males. We have a
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy at our
apartment, so my roommate and I let
what goes cm under closed aquarium
lids be.
Cornelius is another matter
entirely. He is a big reason why we
let things slide in terms of maintain
ing domestic order. Actually, he’s the
big reason why my roommate and I
vigorously hurled domestic order
down the wet banana of household
disarray. That’s a lot of blame to
place on one ferret, you might say.
But you’ve never met this particular
* weasel.
With our attention focused mainly
on Cornelius, other problems seemed
to sprout without our remembering
how they even began. We were no
longer able to tell which beer bottles
went to which party, nor which
unwashed dish went to which day-of
the-week’s meal. What’s worse, at
that point we didn’t even recognize
the situation as a problem. We only
needed to remember to wear shoes in
the house and to bum as much
incense as possible.
We had taken to calling ourselves
biospherians and were tooling around
with ways to recycle our waste in
order to perpetuate the colony.
However, this idea immensely added
to our problem as we couldn’t figure
out how to reuse emptied-out Chef
Boyardee cans, toe nail clippings and
the like. Smaller peaks rise in the
Himalayas than the one that was
mounting in our kitchen wastebasket,
clothes. Or 2: Our landlord would fix
the problem himself, mainly by
getting new tenants. I will refer to my
landlord as “Spiro Agnew” to
prevent him from discovering that
I’m talking about him.
Spiro has an uncanny sixth sense
which he uses to determine what’s
out of whack at the apartment
complex. For example, he can tell a
beer stain from a soda stain on
pavement by its color and flow
pattern. Facing such formidable skills
such as this, we knew that we had to
act quickly before any telltale odors
wafted themselves into Spiro’s highly
perceptive nose.
We decided to become men and
face our greatest fear, which on that
day was tire kitchen. Dressed head to
toe in surgical garb we marched to
the frontlines, the whistling of
“Colonol Bogey March” muffled
under our masks. But that soon gave
way to bouts of coughing and near
retching as we were ill-prepared for
the enemies we faced—tire nacho
dip, the 10-day-old TUna Helper. The
horror... the horror.
At this point we decided that one
of two things would happen if we
continued to let the mess grow. 1:
The increasing vegetation would trap
us inside the apartment and we’d
eventually become like feral chil
dren, losing our ability to speak
English and forgetting to wear
We looked about frantically for
safe refuges. We had Lysol spray for
an aerial assault, and for the sink,
liquid detergent. “I love the smell of
Palm Olive in the morning!” I
shouted between gags. “It smells like
victory,” added my roommate as he
clutched his throat.
Diving into the pile of dishes on
the kitchen counter, we were pretty -
confident that it would become only
a matter of time before our kitchen
problem’s bud would be nipped. It
was at that point when we met
several Martian microbes who had
been living in a bowl of macaroni
and cheese. Arrogant little creatures,
they had declared the bowl a
sovereign nation and claimed that
any attempts to regain control would
be met with aggressive retaliation.
This all seemed strangely historic,
but of course, it may have been a
hallucination. There’s no telling what
tricks rancorous kitchen vapors might
play on the mind. We washed the
microbes down the garbage disposal.
Several hours later—and several
obliterations of other alien life forms
perpetrated—the dishes were
finished. We still have flashbacks
occasionally, an unrinsed dish on the
counter is enough to cause night
mares for weeks, but we have
persevered. If we should ever let
home sweet home once again dip
below the standards of common
decency, we may opt to forgo our
lease, lob in a grenade and let Spiro
Agnew sort things out.
Albracht is a junior philosophy
major and a Daily Nebraskan
columnist.
Nick : ..
WILTGEN
* " • *’.■ •
Days are restless, nidits are dreamy
All I do anymore is work, go to
class, eat and sleep.
Therefore, given my human need
for leisure and recreation, my brain
has done me the favor of making
efficient use of
my sleep time by
allowing me to
have rather
interesting
dreams. In fact,
my dreams more
than make up for
my inability to
relax during -
waking hours. ’
some say “dreams can come
true.” Mine are usually beyond the
realm of possibility. I have made
people laugh for multiple-hour
periods by telling them my dreams.
Allow me to explain why with some
examples:
AN “AVERAGE” DREAM
This morning I had an average but
unrealistic dream. In it, I was a
professional basketball player who
had just beat traded from the Detroit
Pistons to the New Jersey Nets (is
that a team?). I was quaking in fear
. because I had to board a plane to go
to die next game.
Since I don’t play basketball or
follow professional sports, I attribute
this dream to seeing the word
“PISTONS” on a vanity plate shortly
before going to bed. It also didn’t
help that I watched Robert Hagar
reading the final transcripts of the
ValuJet crash on NBC News the
night before.
u--—
My dreams more than make up for my
inability to relax during waking hours.”
THE “WESLEY SNIPES SERIES’
. After seeing the movie “Rising
Sun” on video two years ago I had
two strange dreams.
In one, I was in the elevator in
Schramm Hall (where I lived then)
with Wesley Snipes. I pressed “4”
and he pressed “7.” The elevator
went up, but it didn’t stop at the
fourth floor. No biggie,I thought, it
had dime that before (in real life).
But then it didn’t stop at the seventh
floor either. Instead, it accelerated
ever faster, and Wesley Snipes
screamed “Oh shit!” just before the
elevator crashed into the roof.
In the other dream I went from my
then-dorm room, Schramm 421, up
to Schramm 521. However, this was
not at NU but at the University of
Wichita for some reason. It was
supposedly Tom Brokaw’s dorm
roan. The doa was open. I went in
and took a $20 bill off the window
sill. As it turned out, it was actually
Madonna’s dorm room, and she and
Wesley Snipes chased rhe down the
stairs to the basement, through a
weight room fell of weightlifters
(there was a 3-D map of San Fran
cisco on theceiling), and outside into
a grassy field. I tried flapping my
arms to fly away (a common element
in most of my dreams), but the dorm
> food must have weighted me down
because I only got about five feet of]
the ground before Wesley Snipes
grabbed my ankles and pulled me
down.
“TERROR IN THE SKIES”
A few days after an airplane
explosion on the runway of
Milwaukee’s international airport, I
had a dream that 1 was watching it
happen on CNN. However, during
the dream I was somehow absorbed
into the scene. I was standing in a
flat, open field about 500 yards from
the nearest runway. The airplane
blew up,knocking its repairmen to
the ground. Then a nearby wing of -
the airport blew up; then the rest of
the airport blew up as well. Balls of
fire welled up from the horizon as
black smoke filled the sky. The next
thing I knew, thousands of dark,
silhouette-like corpses were raining
upside-down from the pky. I caught
(me by the ankles as it fell, prompt in:
me to scream so loud my parents
heard it upstairs in real life.
In a similar dream, I was walking
in a park near a small airport when a
jumbo jet suddenly fell out of the
sky, in a normal horizontal position,
and slammed into the ground at >
terminal velocity, sending flames at
least 5,000 feet into-the air. Thank
fully there were no corpses.
WEATHER DREAMS
Being a meteorology major, I
have many dreams about weather,
especially tornadoes. One dream
stands Out particularly strongly.
I dreamed I was in Duluth, Minn.,
with famous weatherman Willard
. Scott. (I’Ve only spent 15 minutes of
my real life in Minnesota.) He was
covering a massive flood on the
Mississippi River (which doesn’t
really go through Duluth). After he
got done talking to Katie Couric or
whoever, we heard rumbles of
thunder nearby. Quickly we ran for »
his car, which was a white Chevrolet
sedan of some sort. Only 10 feet
from the passenger door, I dived for
the ground as a lightning bolt hit me.
I screamed an obscenity as I saw my
right arm glowing. I thought I would
lose my memory.
I also had a dream once that the
lightning outside was so bad that the
sky cracked into a million pieces and
fell down. That was pretty cool.
I AM NOT INSANE
I suppose I should note, now that I
have risked my reputation as a sane
human being, that I have never used ■*
. illegal drugs. I swear on my honor
. that these are all legitimate dreams
that I had under normal sleeping
conditions.
Unfortunately I don’t have room
to tell you All my other dreams, but I
hope these woke you up. Uh... hello?
Can you hear me? Are you awake?
Wiltgen is a junior broadcasting
and meteorology major and a
Dally Nebraskan columnist