Dream in the Afternoon

This is an excerpt from a dream I had after staying up all night reading short stories by Ernest Hemingway. It's not meant to be written in Hemingway's style, more in the style of one trying to recall a really depressing dream after a lot of really depressing stories.

The two men sipped their coffee or whiskey slowly as they watched the sun rise or set. They were either outside a cafe in Madrid or a hotel in Marrakesh. You know, some place that men stayed after the war. Men who were too changed to ever go back to the lives they led before. Men who wrote for the newspaper because writing was a masculine thing done by masculine men.

They were also raging alcoholics. They would have liked the idea of the AA meeting, but not the idea that no one drank at them. They liked the idea of men pouring out their feelings to other men, but only if they were both killing themselves with liquor.

They were each sleeping with the other one's wife. Somehow this was all the wives' fault. But maybe this wasn't an issue really because I think they were divorced. The waitress brought them some more of whatever it was they were drinking. They weren't really interested in her until they saw her wedding ring. She saw them noticing the ring and they all rolled their eyes. They all knew that now they would both fall in love with her and she would fall in love with both of them and there would be all kinds of sneaking around and probably someone ends up killing her husband. And in the end she just runs away and the men find themselves back at this table drinking again.

Oh yeah, and at some point they go out on a safari. So this is probably in Marrakesh. They also have automatic pistols, but they're never loaded until they start drinking heavily. Probably one ends up shooting the other one and we never really know if its an accident or not. The whole world is an accident really.

Also, at some point some tourists come through and everyone really looks down on these people because the tourists think that life is pretty good and they think they're happy and they're totally oblivious to what is going on around them. Newspaper men are totally going to sleep with their wives.