Continue reading →

I started my COVID-19 Narrative Project in part to capture the first-personal sense of what it was like to live through the COVID-19 crisis, and in part because I simply enjoy reading stories of this sort. Every now and then, I encounter submissions I wish I’d gotten. Here are two. Continue reading →

If you need a break from the Coronavirus Diary for some comic absurdity, then you probably want to hear about this dream I had last night. It featured Irfan Khawaja.

In the dream, Irfan lived in a small but comfortable one bedroom apartment somewhere in urban New Jersey. I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I was headed to his place, but some kids stopped me on the way. They figured I looked like the sort of middle aged guy who wandered through their neighborhood looking to buy drugs, and they told me that this dude Irfan had good drugs to sell. Knowing Irfan, I had two thoughts: first, he is probably not selling drugs out of his apartment (but maybe he’s that desperate?); second, with his history of interaction with the police, the rumor that he’s selling drugs out of his apartment might get him into some serious trouble. So I thanked the boys and proceeded to Irfan’s apartment to ask him about this rumor. I figured that he’d want to know that his neighbor kids were telling random strangers that he sells drugs, whether it was true or not.

When I got there, Irfan wasn’t home. The situation seemed pretty urgent, though, so I thought I had to act fast. I knew that the lock on his door wasn’t particularly strong, and that if I just leaned into it pretty heavily at the right spot, it’d pop open without breaking anything. So I bumped into the door, and sure enough, it opened up. I found some paper and a pencil to write him a note, but I figured I shouldn’t leave any evidence that would incriminate him, whether the charges were true or not. So I wrote the note in Latin. That way only he’d know what I’d written.

Before I left, though, Irfan returned. He was furious to find me in his apartment and proceeded to lecture me on property rights and boundary transgressions. Soon enough, more serious matters arose. I didn’t even have time to tell him about the rumor that he was selling drugs, because he didn’t have time to listen to it. He was, he now revealed to me, leading a team that was fighting Michael Myers — yes, that Michael Myers:

In fact, he was surprised and a bit irritated that I hadn’t already figured out that he was part of the fight against Michael Myers. He had, after all, starred alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in the most recent installment of the Halloween franchise, so it wouldn’t have been hard for me to infer that he was in the process of a career shift. He gathered some weapons from his closet and told me to lock the door behind me and not to break into his place again.

I have vivid and strange dreams pretty regularly. Usually, though, they star people that I’ve interacted with personally in recent days. Maybe because school has moved entirely on-line with the Coronavirus lockdown, er, stay-at-home order, and I’m no longer interacting with the same few dozen teenagers for 40 hours a week, my mind has had to get more creative and work with more distant material. I haven’t even been keeping up with Policy of Truth, I’m sorry to say. So there’s really no apparent explanation for Irfan’s showing up in my dreams.

The rest of the elements in the dream make a great deal of sense to me, but explaining them all might get a bit too personal. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a bit sad that Irfan doesn’t actually have a side job hunting supernatural killers, though.

I hope this dream amuses you half as much as it’s amused me.