at the drop of a hat

(translation of the idiom: immediately and without delay.)



last night i dreamed i was staying at a very exclusive modernist hotel with the biggest library of modernist works anywhere in the world. while fiddling with the side of my mattress one night, i found an opening in the material and discovered that within my mattress was a sealed trunk of some kind. it was sealed with ancient packing tape that wasn't hard to pry away. when i opened the trunk i found it to be filled with rare and pristine first editions of books by virginia woolf, rebecca west, and others. i knew that if i took them i could sell them and make a fortune, but, even within the dream, i felt very strongly that they were not mine to take.
the rest of the dream was spent with me fretting over how to get the trunk sealed again and the mattress repositioned so that it would go unnoticed that i had disturbed it. so i staged an elaborate theatrical scene and invited the owners of the hotel into the room to watch it, because i thought it would make me seem less suspicious. but the bed kept slipping everytime we sat on it in the scene, so we had to be careful to only look like we were sitting on it and not put any weight on it so it wouldn't capsize and expose the thing i'd done.
one would think that in a dream, one could get away with such things, and upon finding a treasure would take it at the drop of a hat. but this is a recurring theme for me. the last dream i had like this one, it was a series of rare paintings i found, also in some hidden trunk, and i left those where i found them too.



photos and their who-abouts can be found here:
1. my kid is unique, he wants to be a musk ox when he grows up..., 2. des larmes amères, 3. After the Murder, 4. beachin birthday hat, 5. the lamp shade lady, 6. DEEP SEA HARDHAT DIVER #8 "NO EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH"