Waking Up With Industry On My Mind

I usually get a good night's sleep, but last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't doze back off.

Of course I had one topic on my mind -- in addition to an itching mosquito bite on my leg and a possible spider in the bed -- and that was industry. What the major industrial powers might try next. How the Residential Industrial Movement (RIM) would counter. What sorts of products we might manufacture. How to take over all the supply lines, not just most of them. How to freeze the major powers out of the big retailers, Walmart, Bud's 5 and 10, Target, etc. There's lots of worries for me over this stuff.

But then I had this terrible itch. I don't actually remember a mosquito biting me on the leg, so it must've done it on the sly. Then somehow had the foresight to bury his venom six inches under, only for it to bubble to the top in the middle of the night like an oil spill. All I know is I had one of the worst itches of my life, I scratched and rubbed, it protruded in a nasty way, and I ended up with mosquito venom all over my sheets. Mosquito or something, anything equally ravenous.

It might've been a spider. I didn't see it happen. But there was a tiny spider on my bed a couple nights ago. This is true, every word: Before bed I was reviewing my causes for future paranoia from that day, things I'd seen on TV, like bacteria on counter tops, the fear that I'd run into that Progressive insurance woman in real life, and bedbugs. I literally saw a report on TV of bedbugs in New York. They pulled back the covers, then the mattress, and there were bedbugs everywhere, disgusting filthy things. Then I went over to prepare my bed for the night with this on my mind, and what do I see? A tiny spider crawling on my bed! I've never seen that! But there it was. I immediately killed it and started looking for others. But I never saw any others. Except when I went to bed and turned out the lights I felt like they were everywhere...

So last night when I had the itch on my leg, then a million other sympathetic itches -- I hope that's all it was -- I went through all the vast storehouse of my worst fears, losing a limb, getting cancer, having scabies, and of course the Progressive woman. The complete, terrible swirling of this whole scene, always worse at night, kept me awake for quite a while, from 1-something to after 3 a.m.

The good news is I eventually fell asleep and had a rip-roaring dream concerning my extended family and we were all in a house that had immense flooding from the second floor, a major river flooding down the road 10 feet from the door, and an old cousin of my uncle who was a terrible drinker. When I woke up, all this liquid mess coincided with the flood of mosquito venom coming out of my leg.

So that's what I had on my mind in the night. That and industry.

I was thinking about the successes of the RIM so far, then worried about how much farther we have to go. Because some of the major powers aren't falling yet. And I believe it comes down to supply lines and stocking shelves, delivery lines. Everyone needs to have a UPC on their goods, and somehow that information needs to get entered into a computer. Until we get that mastered, of course Firestone and Goodyear are going to keep rolling in tires. And when it comes to disposable diapers, we have formidable competitors in Pampers and Huggies. We all want to pull them down but we still have a ways to go.