"I have a dream, I'll cross the stream"

There are many types of dreams, and I don't mean the stuff that Freud examined to death. Some dreams are born from strife and give hope for a better day. Others cannot be denied, they give purpose to a life so it may be better lived. I have some of those, but I also have a dream that is neither of these. Here is my dream, my whimsy.

I was a teenager when I saw the film "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and it's images impressed me very much. I saw Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow in their dilettantish and smartly (un)dressed, scooter-driven leisure through picturesque Rome and Venice and I wanted to be just like them. Young, hot-to-trot, and able to kill a man with a oar in the bottom of a boat. Truth be told, however, I never could develop the taste for bloody violence.

At about the same time I had first seen Mr. Ripley in it's spoiled rotten splendor, I was also taking courses on how to pilot a horseless carriage. I dreamed for hours with my friend Mo as we watched our instructor heft his corpulence back and forth in the alleyway sized classroom of the Advantage Driving School in Soquel. Somewhere among the gossip Mo and I passed back and forth and the fatigued wheezing of our instructor, I heard of a certain film called "Red Asphalt" full of true life gore that was culled from the motorways of America. We waited with itchy bottoms until the day we got to see this legendary horror flick, screened solely to incipient and transgressive drivers only to be disappointed by the grainy quality of the police camera documentary footage. Given the celluloid degredation of the picture, blood trickling out of a bodybag through tiny fissures in the asphalt looks very much like rasberry sorbet would after tumbling off the cone of an overzealous licker. Tasty, but not very gory.

One shot, grainier than the rest, haunts me even more than my mother's story of a motorcycle accident in Malaysia. We see a motorcycle on the ground and a human with a black garbage bag. Siren lights further denude the picture of any perceptible detail and the world assumes a comic book sense of chiaroscuro. The person bends down and begins to scoop something into his garbage bag. As the camera creeps closer, forms become more clear. We all gasp in our seats, our instructor wheezes in response, we perceive the low definition horror, peering into the black hole of an empty cranium, voided of its gray matter like a pumpkin-cum-jack-o-lantern. The shot is the briefest of the entire film, a few more scoops of brain into the garbage bag and the empty head had stolen the show from every other accident that had ever endeavored to stain the asphalt red.

The turning of my stomach at this point served as an indication that a murderer I shall not be. The image of Mr. Ripley and his friends stays on, minus the killing and demented personal relationships. What I really want is a scooter. Since I have arrived here in France, I have been eyeing every scooter as a possible candidate to help me bouger (boo-jay 'get around') around town, Ripley style. I had never known such a cornucopia of two-wheeled vehicles. From 50cc models that whine like enormous mosquitoes to the futuristic bubble protected BMW C1. After an arduous search, I've found my own scooter, the object of all this whimsy and it's deliciously retro. Soon I will be rolling past olive trees and vineyards, a baguette in my pocket and a cigarette stuck between my lips and, since I can't think of the effect of French police footage on my velvety complexion, I'm going to wear a helmet. A full cranium is a better cranium.

I leave you today with a thought from a great comedian, Eddie Izzard, "Ciaaaooo. Vroom vroom! Ciaaaooo!"