I dreamed this, OK? I'm NOT comparing Vanilla Ice or Eminem to Rick Moranis, I'm not dissing any local blues or rap clubs, or the white nerds who often patronize them (in one sense or another). I'm not aiming a racist slap against nerds. Why, some of my best friends are...

Well, no, I forgot. They aren't any more, not since they read this dream.

I'm sitting in the Pen Protector Social Club, a blues bar in San Francisco. The blues are America's authentic music, even though they were critically neglected for so long, just because they were invented by an oppressed minority: nerds. The geeky guys who real men laugh at, and real women don't date. Oh, the pain of nerddom. And so the blues were born.

The band I'm watching sure looks like the real thing, not the usual bunch of wannabes but noodly little pink gnomes, all bow ties and thick glasses and checkered shirts. But I wonder if some are really non-geeks dressing to pass, because people think nerdless blues aren't the real blues. Like only nerds know pain!

Anyone in the blues business knows pain. Bar owners and managers exploit us musicians blatantly. We're so used to being neglected, we're easy marks.

And there are others who'll prey on our hunger for fame. I'm friends with a couple of the guys in this band, and I heard from one that an older, respected bluesnerd exploited a young, naive band member. This older musician is listening now, in the corner. An aura of cool surrounds him: the smallest, tensest, palest, geekiest guy in the house. Real roots! He's the Nerd Archetype himself: Rick Moranis.

Woody Allen, you say? Don't make me laugh! Woody intellectualizes his pain, and under his neurosis, he knows he's smarter than anyone around--even if he's not. But Moranis--he's got nothing going for him. Nothing!

That's so COOL!

So it breaks my heart to say what I heard of him--a guy who should know the pain like no other. But others must be warned. I'm told he offered the timidest member in this band to "get you a gig at the Pen Protector Social Club--but only if you... suck my cone!"

And then he unzipped his fly, and pulled out what he's got bulging out of his crotch. It's an ice cream cone. One of those tan, grid-ribbed, pointy ice cream cones. I wonder if other nerds have cones too, but keep quiet about it.

Whatever it is.

I guess the guy did it--sucked his cone. Because here they are. I hope their big break was worth it. It's ruined the evening, and the blues, for me--to know that a geek at the height of his power, who knows first-hand how it feels to be jerked around, using his power to jerk around those below him on the ladder.

I'll never ask, and I'll always wonder, what flavor Moranis's cone is.

Though really, I know. So do you. Has to be.

Vanilla. The taste of the blues.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• The blues this dream is talking about are probably: whining! Can't be literal, about blues music. Bluesmen mostly support each other; it's a small field. But lots of people 'sing the blues' quite tunelessly...
• Nerd blues = my own life, for sure. White suburban kid, nervous, guilty, inept, shunned, laughed at, hit, and spat on. Not even witty about my fear and guilt like Woody Allen. No, it has to be bit-part actor Rick Moranis--who else but The Man With No Chin is geeky enough?
• His cone = saw an article on antique carousel restoration. A kid saw a wooden warhorse, and pointing at the conical spike on its brow, told a restorer "Mister, you oughta go easy on your unicorn, his horn is all worn down."
• So the cone = 1: brains (sharpness on your forehead!), 2: magic/healing (the horn was famed for healing powers), plus of course 3: sex, and 4: self-defense!
• Why ice cream? "WHY?" I scream. And whine. And complain. And so on...
• Sucking off nerds: when geeks like PeeWee and Crumb (and me) become trendy, how DO we act? Do we use others as we were used? Will I demand they suck up to my wit, my magic, my sexiness, my anger... MY cone?

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