I had the craziest dream last night. It was a restless night and I don't really feel rested at all this morning. We went to bed at our normal time of about 11:00PM. For some reason I woke up at 1:10AM craving some potato salad. After a few minutes of thinking about it I fell into what I thought was a very light sleep and the adventure got started.
It began with Tanya and I spending every waking moment for two weeks in our tiny kitchen trying to develop a really good recipe for potato salad. No jobs, no responsibilities, no bills to pay. Just potato salad. We tried countless combinations of ingredients. We laughed. We bickered. We tripped over our calico cat. We thought about long passed relatives. We contemplated man's purpose for existence and speculated about mankind's ultimate and certain demise. We reminisced about our childhoods, mistakes we had made in life, and all the things that make up two lives well-lived.
Eventually we hit the target and came up with a recipe for the best potato salad either of us had ever tasted. Jackpot. We quickly recorded our precious recipe on a small scrap of paper. After two full weeks we were done with our masterpiece.
We were having a close friend over for dinner the following Friday and decided to grill out some kind of meat so we could serve our fabulous creation as a side dish. The anticipation grew every day as we got closer and closer to Friday. It felt like you feel when you special order a brand new car and the dealer tells you it will be ready to pick up in a few days. There was electricity in the air. The dog and both cats knew something big was about to happen. They could feel it through their special senses that humans do not possess.
We carefully gathered our ingredients during the week. Potatoes and Duke's mayo from Kroger, onions from Trader Joe's, cage free eggs from Hy-Vee. It was like we were putting together an epic symphony of flavor. On Thursday we brought it all together and produced about two pounds of our glorious masterpiece. The stage was set.
Our friend arrived a few minutes early and, after a couple of cocktails, we grilled some burgers and set the table. Our guest took one bite of the potato salad and he just stopped moving altogether and then just sat there motionless for an extraordinarily long time, letting his eyes roll well back into his head. After what seemed like an eternity, he put down his fork and proclaimed that he had just eaten a bite of the best potato salad of all time. We were all ecstatic and the three of us finished the remaining potato salad without even touching our cheeseburgers.
At this point we knew we had a winner. Word of our incredible other-worldly potato salad spread rapidly. Within a few days we had dozens of requests for the recipe. After some careful consideration we decided not to share our miraculous formula. Neither of us had robust 401k accounts or government pensions that would actually allow us to retire and live comfortably, so we decided that we might want to monetize our discovery sometime in the future.
Here's where the dream got weird. When I was the Executive Chef at a fine dining restaurant in Omaha, I briefly employed a very talented cook. He left after a short time to start his own restaurant and he has since become very successful. We don't keep in touch regularly because he is a very, very busy man and running a restaurant takes up about 200% of your time. In my dream he showed up at our door one day and asked for our recipe. When we politely declined he asked if we would be willing to just make large quantities of our potato salad for him each week so he could sell it in his restaurant. We also politely declined this request.
Over the next month we were contacted by many other restaurants, cookbook publishers, magazines, and internet influencers who all wanted the recipe. We did not relent. To keep the recipe secret we even hid the scrap of paper containing the recipe on page 43 of a Southern Living cookbook.
Then one day the doorbell rang. Once the dog was confined to her kennel we opened the door only to find Elon Musk standing on our porch. Although both of us regard Elon Musk as a loudmouth windbag who sucks the very soul out of everyone who crosses his path, he made a very compelling offer for signing over the recipe to him. When we asked him what he planned to do with it, he said he wanted to fill a 55 gallon drum with really good potato salad and shoot it into space. We declined, knowing that one day there would be a very real risk that some poor person out watering his or her garden could be killed or maimed by being hit with 300 pounds of potato salad falling from the heavens at supersonic speeds. He stood on our porch and wailed for some time, eventually climbing into a ridiculous looking CyberTruck and speeding away, all the while shaking his fist angrily at us. If this sounds impossible to you then please remember that this was just a dream. The mind can be a terrible thing.
Some time later we received a very official-looking certified letter in the mail. At first we were a little afraid to open it, but eventually we decided to see what it contained. It was from Donald Trump. He was demanding that we turn over the recipe to him immediately, stating (incorrectly, as always) that it was a matter of national security and that he was willing to go to extreme measures in order to obtain it. After some thought, we decided to ignore the letter as we do for anything originating from Donald Trump. Shortly thereafter we received a more aggressively worded letter, again demanding that we turn over the recipe. We decided to ignore that one too.
Ignoring the letter turned out to be a mistake. We thought that Trump's attention would soon turn to deporting anyone who wasn't old and white or possibly to stripping basic human rights away from all women and people of color. There are still parts of the USA where the air and water isn't quite fully polluted yet, so we reasoned that decimating Earth's resources and a good part of it's population would keep him pretty busy when he wasn't playing golf at the taxpayers' expense and ultimately he would forget about the recipe. We were wrong again. Elon Musk really wanted our recipe and he had Trump's ear, so he kept it fresh in the very front of that feeble little adolescent mind.
Very early one morning there was a loud knock at the door. It was about a dozen fully geared-up members of the Nebraska National Guard and the Trump puppet Republican Governor of Nebraska. They demanded that we hand over the recipe. Again, we declined and both of us were promptly arrested and ushered into two waiting Humvees.
That's where the dream ended for now. I've been contemplating whether the events that took place in my dream could actually occur and at this point I think it's entirely possible. After all, we just elected a person who was arguably the worst President in America's history to yet another term. Hispanic males just overwhelmingly voted for a candidate who has pledged to deport as many Hispanics as humanly possible. A large percentage of women just voted for a convicted sex offender who has said he would favor limits on birth control and is more than willing to strip them of any rights to their own bodies. Strange times indeed.
I hope to be able to go back to that dream again tonight and see what happened. Sometimes I can do this if I think about the dream a lot right afterwards. Believe me, I've been thinking about this one quite a bit today.