I Know Kung Fu... By: Joe Alfano Posted on: 7/22/2009

This morning I was woken by a dream – a nightmare really. Also I wasn’t really woken by it as it came after the alarm clock woke me up. Of course it wasn’t really the alarm clock that woke me up as the alarm clock was playing the decoy for the smaller clock that woke me up. Apparently I scared the smaller alarm clock and it had to hide behind its big brother. Confused yet? Imagine going through this all when you are not really awake yet.

As I prepared to go back to sleep and get as much rest as I could before starting the day, I fell into The Dream. This particular nightmare was not one of monsters chasing me, the world coming to an end in some cataclysmic way. This dream was a nightmare for two reasons alone. The first being that apparently my character in this dream was being played by Keanu Reeves – and for the record no, I did not know Kung Fu. Perhaps even scarier was that the great leaps of insight that came at the end of the dream in a method similar to JD at the end of an episode of Scrubs made sense to me. Yes, the Keanu logic seemed normal and intelligent to me.

So, I lay in bed trying to make sense of the nonsense. Although I have watched a few Keanu movies in my time, I am not particularly prone to hearing my voice in that of Ted Logan or Bill S. Preston, Esquire for that matter. Also, while the voice was the Keanu that was made fun of in the Celebrity Jeopardy skit where he was played by Tobey Maquire, it was the Point Break Keanu that I was stuck in the head of. See how confusing it can get?

This Keanu was not reflecting on the nature of Bodhi and his relationship with him, but his balance of getting out riding those tasty waves, but getting side tracked when he sidestepped a manta ray that was hanging out in a small inlet waiting for a tasty treat. A fellow neuron-addled surfed dude had called to me that I was wasting time while there were waves just waiting to be tamed. My Keanu voice was going through the internal dialog, breaking the fourth wall and explaining to the viewer that while my original purpose in coming out to the beach may have been the waves, my real motivation was to be close to the ocean in general, as any day you spend doing something you love, no matter how great your success at it was a day well spent.

Thank you, Johnny Utah. You have cost me an hour of sleep and have got me considering where in the hell this came from. I don’t surf. I don’t even swim. The most water I will ever experience this side of the cruise to Alaska my wife is planning for our 20^th Anniversary is in a hot tub. I don’t even really like the ocean that much. Near as I can tell, my visions of the ray floating serenely through the water came from a Facebook album that I had seen yesterday about someone’s honeymoon to the Bahamas. They weren’t even my friends – it was one of those friend of a friend things that wind up in your news feed because someone you do know commented on a photo or clicked the little “thumbs up” icon on it.

But what it did do for me was vocalize in my head what I had been thinking since this past Saturday. This being the part in which I see how my subconscious mind pulls everything running through my noodle and puts it into Keanu’s voice – spooky, innit? You see, for the second weekend in a row I was driving through Illinois. Both weekends I had planned on not driving so that I could write while we drove, but both times I wound up driving. In the end though, the day of driving was just as good as riding and trying to work on my work in progress while ignoring the driver. Since one of those times the driver would have been my wife, it was likely the safer decision anyhow.

The culmination of this weekend into Keanu’s soliloquy on the ocean was not the drive though. As The German Kid and I were walking back from the Sonic that was in the parking lot of the mall in which we were visiting for a trio of Highlander Trading Card Game events, a group of kids – which I will call kids, although all of them were old enough to join the military but not old enough to drink a beer – drove from the parking lot of the Sonic where they had seen us to speed out of the mall lot yelling a compliment to me for my “redneck tuxedo.”

For the record, I was in fact wearing a sleeveless denim shirt over my “I’d Tap That” CCG shirt from Penny Arcade. What can I say? I am not terribly hindered by the style gene.

Now The German Kid and I enjoyed a good laugh over this (after I explained what a redneck tuxedo was). First off, apparently the four of them were concerned with their ability to “take me” causing them to shout their insult from a speeding car. Either that or they considered this to be in better form as they were at least pretending to be polite to my face. Either way, if you are going to spew insults at someone, have the courage to own up to it. I will likely thank you and extend my hand to shake.

The reality of it is that the source of their insult to me, should I have seen it as an insult, was the same font from which I draw from for my writing. Believe it or not, my freedom in choosing a shirt from the Larry the Cable Guy Collection at the local Farm and Fleet store is the same freedom that draws me in to researching the size of the average human liver in the middle of a Starbucks over a latte. I don’t think that poor bastard will be reading over anyone’s shoulder for a long time.

No matter if it is some kids striving to prove that they are their own person by insulting that which is different at extreme velocity or some poor nosy coffee drinker getting more than he bargained for, their opinions of me do not matter. Or, to quote Ministry (before Al Jourgenson went completely insane), “I let their teeny minds think that they’re dealing with someone who is over the brink, and I dress this way just to keep them at bay ‘cause Halloween is every day, hey!” Or to translate, any day where I can wake at 5:00 in the morning and write about Keanu Reeves, the industrial rock era, or a paranormal investigator for the Wisconsin State Crime Lab is a successful day – no matter how good the writing is, or who reads it.

For me this is the culmination of nearly seven months of following the Year of the Edgar. If you are wondering how it is I can look at any of this as a positive, pop on over to his site and check it out. The Year of the Edgar is not about Edgar. It is about me. It is about The German Kid. Heck, it’s even about the kids in Illinois who were envious of my denim shirt. But, most of all it is about you. Find something you love doing, or something you have always wanted to do, and go do it. But don’t do it because I told you to, or some therapist told you it would solve your supposed problems. Do it because it is what you want to do – do it for yourself.