I awoke this morning to a very disturbing dream. While this happens quite often, I’m thinking that each new bad dream that I have is getting a bit longer and more intense. Probably from all that experimentation I did with lucid dreaming and altered states when I was a psychology major in college, but I digress. This morning’s bad dream was something drawn straight out of the Dead Zone. Election 2008 had come about, and Hillary Clinton was elected President. Soon after, former President Bill Clinton became a U.S. Senator for New York. Then, all hell broke loose.

I saw the dirt all around me was blood red. I stood before a segment of a jet black slab of wall. No one was being allowed to go past the wall. I couldn’t tell why this was the case. I speculated it was a biological, nuclear, or even an illegal immigrant bomb. Then, I went back to the city. The streets were dark and empty. I was heading toward the closest  parking lot. The office buildings this parking lot were attached to had been renamed Progress Energy Mall, and it was to host a pro-state rally. Progress Energy must have been more focused on sponsoring Rollerball teams or something. The darkness created a scary and ominous walk through town with screams and sounds of scuffles coming from every alley. I wanted to run, but wasn’t able to since this new world led me to be messed up on opium every day.

This was one of those dreams that haunted me all day long. Hopefully it’s not a prophetic dream. Kind of makes me want to set up my own anti-Hillary 527 to get someone else in there. Then I can be blessed with Romney or McCain-inspired dreams. Oh, joy…

…But we knew that for awhile now, even if Fred Thompson (and his equally lazy supporters) wouldn’t admit it. I’m not sure if he even made an actual announcement that he actually showed up for — I mean, I’ve been watching the news for it, but I just haven’t seen it yet today. Now he’ll have more time to watch his trophy wife.

Yeah, let’s keep the lazy storyline going about this guy. It’s a good way to diminish the drubbings he took in most of the early states from Ron Paul. As we know it’s pretty hard to get beat by a candidate that allegedly only exists on the Internet — unless, of course, you are truly lazy. His low numbers certainly weren’t due to his scintillating ideas that helped him stand apart from what the media called the “leading candidates”. Can you name one idea? I surely can’t.

I heard a self-described libertarian supporting Thompson since he wouldn’t get much done — government can’t get bigger if you are too sleepy to sign bills into laws. That would definitely be a boon to the economy — definitely a lot better than those CYA stimulus package ideas that will make politicians look concerned. Outside the box thinking, but still not good enough for me to support Thompson.

While Thompson will be missed, I hope that next week after the Florida Republican primary we can talk about some of the broke candidates dropping out (probably Giuliani, but maybe even  Huckabee).

I spent most of today recovering from last night’s night out on the town. My friend and former co-worker from my college days, Neil, was in town for a week of training at Red Hat corporate headquarters.We started the evening off by visiting Neomonde, a Middle-Eastern eatery on Beryl street in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We then headed downtown for drinks. Originally, I thought that we might head to Tir-Na-Nog on Blount Street, but as we were driving back into the downtown area we passed a bar that I’ve wanted to go to for quite awhile — the Flying Saucer. I started out with a local brew called White Wolf Golden and we began chatting. Eventually, Neil called one of his colleagues who was also in town for training, Steve. Steve joined us shortly. It was kind of odd, they seemed to have worked together for awhile, but never actually met since both worked remotely. Neil worked from Colorado, while Steve worked from Massachusetts. This was a good opportunity to ask a lot of questions about life and culture in the Mountain West and the Northeast. I’ve never been to these parts of the country I’ve never visited, but felt these areas had a lot more in common with my personal and political views than the more authoritarian areas of North Carolina or the religiously conservative areas of the Midwest where I used to live.

I had a number of beers throughout the evening, but I knew that I was in trouble as soon as Neil opened up with a few rounds of shots. I wasn’t really down with the technical aspects of shots since I get confused with things pretty easily — you know, dropping a shot glass into a bigger glass and chugging. Shots soon led to darts. This seemed really dangerous, but I was too far gone to care.

There were a lot of high points during the evening. One of the crazy moments, though, was when Neil got the idea to call our old boss in Indiana. It was about 1pm and the fine folks at the Flying Saucer wanted us to leave. But we decided to do some drunk dialing anyway. Oddly enough, our boss picked up and talked for awhile. Neil and I decided that we’ll call him every time we get together at one of these bar outings.

I didn’t pass up the opportunity to take a few snapshots of the waitresses. Anyone who would so graciously put up with my drunken antics would definitely classify as a saint.