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TVBC
After living most
of his life in Northwest Ohio, DJ KINNEY moved west,
where he received a bachelor’s degree in English from the
University of Montana in Missoula.
While living in Western Montana,
DJ completed three novels and published his short story “It
Happens All the Time” in the Allegheny Review, and the
essay “Rules for Healthy Dreaming in East Berlin” in The
Vincent Brothers Review.
In
the summer of 2003, DJ moved to Gainesville, Florida,
and completed his fourth novel,
Avalon Place: A Situation Comedy. DJ is currently earning
an MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida.
From
Rules for Healthy Dreaming in East Berlin / DJ Kinney
I have never
dreamt of midgets.
I’ve never dreamt of clowns, poison apples, or forgetting
my
pants. I’ve never dreamt of my mother naked,
my father dead, or
cigars. Maybe if I had,
I’d tell the story, because maybe those things mean something.
Maybe. Usually—and this is a good thing to keep in
mind—it’s all just nonsense.
A matter
of etiquette: after staying
the night with
friends, never
attempt to recount your dreams over breakfast. It’s rude, and
you’ll end up looking (and sounding)
like the ass you might very well be.
I
think of my subconscious as East Berlin.
It is very dark and very
poor, and if
you know where to
look, you can get your rump rosied by a dominatrix named
Mistress Elke Ärgert. There is a wall
between that place and the Free World.
It’s a massive wall, backed by minefields and heavy coils of
razor wire. It says “VERBOTEN” several times along its
length and it’s generally impenetrable. At least,
it was designed to be.
The problems with those mornings as the guest of
friends
is that
dreams find a way. They push for the weak spots in the wall. And
there are so many the morning after, too early after three cheap
jugs of Carlo Rossi and brains still pickled in noctu- rnal juice.
Dreams find a way like Easter Berliners, common sense to the
wind, they crawl through sewage up to their necks, and come out
through a manhole on an empty street in front of an old lady who
drops her knockwurst and goes running, screaming about the size
of the filthy socialist rats.
“Smells
like freedom!” they say.
No. It
smells like scheiza
. . .
—TVBR Issue #21: Vol.
VIII, No. 2—Cats
and Dogs
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