Tristan Omand
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Blog posts by American singer/songwriter Tristan Omand, consisting of various short stories, poems, and other writings.

The Plane Crash


    My dream had every detail of our little home, but with a few fictional appointments.  To the shades on the windows, to the half drunk bottle of wine sitting on the green kitchen counter top. It was all there in slightly diffused, dream-like detail. My girlfriend and I, lying in bed and each in our own little world, were awakened by the high rpm whoosh of a small prop Buddy Holly-type plane. It became very clear from the growing closeness of the sound that it was going down. No doubt about it. We threw the covers off, both knowing that some shit was going down, and rushed to the front door window, pulling up the blind with one quick snap of the cord. The shaky, smoking, and soon-to-crash Cessna made it over our house at close range, and suddenly made its inevitable CRASH into the lower end of our dead end street.

    Our hearts collectively raced, and we gaped at each other with a look of holy-fuck amazement. All of a sudden, lights were snapping on in all the neighbors houses, and people were slipping out their front doors and into the streets, clad in their nightgowns and crumby sweatpants. The plane was in a smoking heap at the end of Meek Street, and we could see the pilot stumbling out of the hatch in a daze. Before we knew it there was a cop on the scene. My immediate impulse was to run out there and help, though the thought of possible explosion of the plane was in the back of my mind, and of course, it was a dream and my feet appeared to be glued to the floor. My girlfriend was in the same super-glue-like state of being immobilized. I must remind you once again, dear reader, that this was a dream.

    In my mind as I was seeing all of this, certain segments of the sequence were glossed over, and the next thing I knew we were back in bed, but in a newly formed bedroom on the opposite side of the house. We were sitting there propped up against the drywall, legs under warm covers, smoking some pot with the window open, apparently not too worried about the plane that had just crashed outside. Suddenly, a helicopter with a cop in it, complete with government issue cop mustache and aviators glasses buzzed by the window in a small helicopter - something that a farmer in Colorado might use or something. He looked right at me, shook his head and pointed in our direction, and then down to the front door, indicating that he wasn't too pleased, and would be coming in to do his policing.

    I said to Danielle, "God dammit, I knew we should have closed the shades…" to which she replied "Maybe we're not in trouble, just go down and see what he wants, baby." We called each other babe and baby quite frequently in the way that young lovers do. All of a sudden, the dream flashed with a white light, and I was in some sort of airport terminal converted into a police station. He was running my file and checking my background, looking for something to give him reason to arrest me besides the puny amount of grass he caught us enjoying. I was being polite as a country boy in church speaking to the Preacher. Smiling, and standing up straight under the florescent glow of the terminal. Realizing it was a dream, I could tell that things would turn out OK in the end. Waking up is a true blessing.

    "Well kid, we're letting you off with a warning. Stay away from that hippie lettuce. I should take you right down to the Armed Forces recruiting center and sign your ass up. You need some discipline, son." the stern, aviator-shade-adorned douche of a cop said to me with a wag of his boney finger. "Thank you sir." I replied in my overly polite, dreamlike grinning-idiot tone. And just like that, I was jolted from the sequence and back to the darkness of our actual real bedroom, located on the proper side of the house this time.

    The red digital numbers of my bedside clock read 4:21 in the a.m. and I blinked my eyes and felt a stiffness to my body that told me I had been restlessly dreaming again. Nightmares and sleep tremors were my forte from a very early age. This was never seen as a problem in my household growing up, but then again, we rarely went to the doctor when hurt or in sickness. My parents were old-fashioned like that. "Oh, you're brother sharpened a stick on the asphalt of the driveway and then threw it like a native and it stuck in your wrist? Come here, lets go bandage you up, son. Nothing a little hydrogen peroxide and gauze won't fix." I still have the scar on my left wrist. It wasn't too serious an injury to warrant a hospital visit, I must concede. The pilot of the dream-plane, well, that's another story.

    Laying in our warm shroud of blankets, I went over the whole thing in my mind. Printing it there instead of getting up out of our love-cocoon to get a notepad. I call myself a writer, yet did not have a tablet or even an old receipt and a pencil on my nightstand for emergency dream notation. What the fuck? Ok, I'll work on it. And with the the ease of which the plane crashed into our dead end street, I was back into some sort of slumber. This time, no visions were had, just the blackness of sleep. I'm glad that I woke up, and that my hallucination was just what it was - a dream.

    My alarm clock alerted me that it was time to get up. It was sometime around 6:30. I willed myself out of bed, ready to go downstairs and write while it was all fresh in my mind, and I could bend the internal agenda of my brain towards creativity right at the start of the day. I think I read that in a John Prine interview once. Writing is best done in the morning, after your mind has been percolating all evening.

    I now find myself writing this little story at our kitchen table, with French-press coffee in a cup next to me and the greyish-blue of winter just outside the window. It is warm in the kitchen, and the rumbling hum of the oil furnace in the basement can be heard. I am glad to not be dreaming anymore. Reality is much more convincing, and the coffee is just too good. I don't think you can taste in dreams, can you?
   

Tristan Omand