I awoke this morning numb. Like I had the most chilling, realistic nightmare, well not really a nightmare, because I wasn't afraid, just bone chilled numb. Cold, but not from my AC, cold from the feelings the visions of my dream left with me all day. I am writing this in the evening waiting for my wife to call so I could pick he up from work. I had to write it. What also made this even more chilling is the fact that I turned on "the news" on CNN and see Michael Chertoff, the head of the Department of Homeland Security giving a speech about the thwarted terrorist attempts in the UK. Cold feeling inside, cue Social Distortion music now.

My dream was probably spurred on by watching The End Of The Century, the swan song documentary of the Ramones... Buzz warned me he heard it was sad. Not only is it depressing but also all the guys are dead, at real early ages, all except for the drummers, go figure, huh, but it also had Joe Strummer in it too, so it was double depressing.

I crawled into bed and my wife goes "how was the end", she couldn't stay up any longer and didn't see all but the last 15 minutes of it. Which was just them receiving their rock and roll hall of fame induction and Dee-Dees exit from the world via an overdose. I replied, "sad". And passed out.

Well my dream started out ok, juxtaposed events from my life played out all scrambled together, my house in Chicago on my mothers suburban lot, with a real cool high front porch that reminded me of the Lost Cross porch from the eighties, but on the second story. My wife, little Snot and I are sitting on the porch, looking down on our neighbors who are having a barbeque in their front yard, looking all happy and frolicking.

Then it hit us, it was a blast of warm air followed by a deafening howl. It was a long sustained hum, with mixes of crashes and crunchy noises followed by screams and whimpers of fear. I remember looking down at my neighbors who were still outside, they looked Hispanic this time even though my neighbors are Polish, but they were all covered with a bright gray soot, like the people from New York did on the WTC attacks and subsequent collapse. They all looked like ghosts. They were all confused and were coughing. We were fine for some reason, probably because we were behind the house, which blocked most of the blast. It was like the blast was real far away so that we were just getting the fallout from the initial blast. We could hear blasts from explosions off in the distance, air raid sirens, sounds of vehicles jets and then a roar of panic ensued. People were running, scared on fire covered in crap.

My neighbors were in shock and they were trying to comfort each other and just then military vehicles started to pull up around us and soldiers in riot gear and gas masked pulled up. They told us all to go inside and not to come out.

They declared Martial Law. We were not allowed to go anywhere. I asked if they expected more bombs to go off, the soldier, who did not have a mask on looked at me and said "probably".

He had a walky-talkies and the sound emanating from it became my alarm going off. I felt numb and mumbled something like "I just had a fucked up dream" to my wife who was jumping out of bed to hit the snooze button. She asked me what it was about and I replied "Nuclear War".

I guess this is just the beginning of what could be another "fun" war without end.

Just like the neo-con's planed in their Project For A New American Century.....