Potato God worship
1:20pm, Friday, 4-19-2002
In this dream, Al Gore is giving an informal speech to some folks, including myself, at a library (not recognizable as one I have been in). In the course of his talk, he trys to quote Edison. He flubs the quote and his audience is laughing because even though he did not deliver the quote, people recognize that the quote he is reaching for isn’t actually from Edison anyhow. [This reminds me of the whole spelling of potato issue which plagued him for so long.]
Anyhow, Gore is making a joke about flubbing the quote as he walks across the library toward the card catalog so he can find reference to look up the quote. The card catalog is not where he expects to find it and he says something about how the audience rearranged the library while he was gone. “Did you guys short-sheet my bed while you were at it?”, he jokes. The audience laughs, and his self-deprication comes across as quite charming.
Gore can’t find the quote in the reference work, so he paraphrases it. The gist of the quote is that is has to do with an experiment involving agitating electrons and noticing that the electrons take the path of least resistance in their movement to fill the container they are held within [This is like stuff I read in "The Arrow of Time" for research]. Then, I say: “Some Chinese guy noticed that same phenomenon while watching a waterfall thousands of years ago; that’s the East versus the West for you.” [Obviously, the waterfall has more to do with fluidity and gravity, but the similiary had to do with element taking easiest, or most obvious path based on physical laws].]
I immediately feel bad because my statement is interpreted as a slam on Gore that ties in with audience first laughing at him for flubbing the quote. I didn’t mean to demean his comparison or use of the metaphor, I merely meant to disparage the use of habit in forming perceptions in America and how that leads us to proving the obvious only via technology sometimes. Or, at the very least, preferring to use technology metaphors instead of natural ones.
The whole concept of this dream seems to tie in with how I have always gotten into trouble by using the second person form of speech, and my tendency to generalize a topic beyond it’s current context, and in the end I seem to be disparaging the person I am talking with (the “you”) while to my mind I’ve moved to another level of abstraction. And this tendency in general, which has been justified via intellectualization, seems to tie in with the fact that I joined in the joking about Gore being stupid back in the day. And now, I seem to realize a) that I did not know him at all, and b) that alternate spellings are okay and valid. As a matter of fact, the more I study portuguese, the worse my English spelling becomes as I re-map my brain.
p.s. uhh . . . turns out that was Dan Quale, not Gore 
Some themes:
Language
Social embarrassment
Judging others
Quoting Sources
Technology verus Nature
Tags: potato dream language judging technology nature embarassment
