NP: Just the voices in my own head.

Still no word on New Year's Eve. I put in a call, still waiting to hear back. If Vaughan's falls through, there are a bunch of good bands playing The Note (Drive, American Motherload, Matador Down) for not too much dough. That's what I'm leaning toward.

In the meantime, I think my sleep patterns have been massively different and or disrupted out here on the East Coast. It's not like it's all that far away from Chicago, but my bed is supremely uncomfortable, so I guess I'm more likely to come all the way up to wakefulness after my REM sleep.

Anyway, the net result, for the last two days, anyway, has been that I'm remembering dreams, which doesn't happen all that often. First up was one where I was asked by Emilie Autumn to play percussion in her band. This involves bringing gear to a warehouse-y loft somewhere that feels more like New York than Chicago, and somehow she and I wind up traveling down a story or two in a frieght elevator with some drunk and occasionally vomiting alumni from my high school (at least they're wearing Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School stuff, so I assumed) in order to get something, but we end up watching a hockey game together on TV instead.

Quick analysis: A good friend of mine works with Emilie, and had a holiday party a few days before I left. Given my time working synth-and-sequence-heavy music with a female singer in Oncle Julien, I've expressed some opinions in the past as to how I'd approach that gig compared to her current drummer. Obviously, I'm back in Scotch Plains, and the hockey part goes to this hilarious story (registration required) about the New York Islanders' game of Christmas Eve.

Then, last night, there was something about playing soccer on the deck of a large boat, maybe a cruise ship, and trying to impress some tall woman in the process. I was playing right mid, but that put me off outside the main deck on that little walkway that those ships always seem to have. So I switched with some little guy, who may or may not have been Fire midfielder Ryan Futagaki or 14-year old wunderkind Freddy Adu, to take a more inside position and have more impact on the game. Don't know if I was successful in getting the girl. Waking up is a bitch.

Not to hard to figure this out, either, as my mom was watching Titanic the other night, and there's a scene after they hit the iceberg (oh, no, now I've given it away!) where the crew is kicking a piece of it around like a soccer ball. If you still have to question how the Fire or Freddy might fit in, you clearly haven't been paying attention. The tall woman wasn't precisely the tall woman I would have expected it to be, but probably a proxy for her nonetheless.

I'll save the big philosophical revelations and other navel-gazing from my last NJ Christmas for when I get back. I'm not expecting to make the same kind of time tomorrow that I did last week, but it would be nice.