Dreams. The final frontier. I had a doozy last night, lemmie tell ya. It started reasonably enough with me in the waiting room of some tattoo parlor. Suddenly this receptionist-type chick comes up to me and tells me,

"Your regular tattooist is on vacation James. Replacing him today will be Dr. Leonard Mccoy. You're in good hands!"

Oddly I didn't seem to give a crap, but then I quickly remembered who Dr. Leonard Mccoy was. I try to tell the receptionist-type chick, but she blithely & happily ignores me. Typical dream character.

Anyway sure enough Bones himself comes out gruffly motioning me into his...well it turned out to be his Sickbay on the Enterprise - replete with all the Trekkie beeps, lights & whistles and all that shit. We proceed.

The tattoo is coming along nicely. Mccoy seems confident and calm, but then all-of-a-sudden this peculiar expression comes over his face, and he starts to loose his shit like in that episode where he has temporary super mental ability to re-attach Spock's Brain, but loses it right in the middle of the procedure. Like he just has with me. Marvelous. I dare to look down, and the good doctor tries his best to block my view of this tattoo snafu, but I finally get a glimpse. To my horror he's stitched me up a severely shitty representation of the Enterprise on the inside of my forearm. And the asskicker? He also tattooed an angry X over the whole thing, and the word "OOPS!" underneath with an arrow pointing from the word to the shitty, X-ed out Enterprise. I remonstrated him,

"You know you need to be more careful. This shit doesn't wash off with soap & water you douchebag." To which he barked,

"Dammit Jim! I'm a tattoo artist, not a doctor! Now shut-up I'm trying to concentrate!"

Now I was really getting concerned. Mainly because I haven't been called Jim in a long time. And certainly never in this context. I decided to take my chances and try to bail, but as soon as I bolted from the chair Nurse fucking Chapel appeared holding my arm with one hand, and aiming a phaser at me with the other. A phaser I noticed that was set to kill (it had a big sign and another one of those annoyingly helpful arrows pointing to the word "kill").

After Bones was done fucking up my tattoo he tried re-assuring me that he'd take it up with Kirk, explaining mildly how the Captain would probably just find some advanced alien technology, distract everyone by sleeping with some alien chick, then use that technology to remove my tattoo. Nobody would be the wiser. It again sounded reasonable to me.

It occured to me later when I was in Sickbay (oh yeah at the time there was this really weird alien dude in the bed next to me that I'm pretty sure was masturbating. He/she/it was rubbing it's elbow-protubence-thing-a-ma-jig, and mewling in this very disconcerting way. Tres unsavory, but I digress) that with all of this fancy-assed space technology they could just laser/phaser the goddamn thing off. Kirk didn't have to boink any alien 'tang after all. Then it further occured to me - why the whole dramatic issue with getting a simple tattoo right in the first place? Can't a computer and/or robot take care of that shit - no fuss no muss?

That seemed to break the spell. I awoke after that.

It does make me wonder what it means (and also: what the hell is wrong with me et. al). Do I need to watch "Star Trek" some more (I haven't in ages)? Should I get another tattoo? Should I get a tattoo of the Enterprise?

Should I sleep with some alien chick?


(Of all of them I sure hope it's the last one.)