DementoDreams: Quarantine Day #Whatever

Joseph Labriola
DementoDreams
Published in
3 min readApr 7, 2020

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Disclaimer: DementoDreams are fictional accounts of, well, demented dreams of writers. All resemblance to any real-world figures are merely coincidental.

Dunno about you guys, but I think I’ll stay put right here on Spaceship Earth, thanks.

I was renting an apartment in NYC and Chris Hadfield was there cooking dinner. He was training for a mission to Mars and so he wanted to make me and my friends one of his homemade stews before he left. We were horrified to see that the main ingredient was four big raccoons. “It’s traditional,” he told us as he smacked them on their heads with a big soup spoon like they were eggs. “Won’t have this on Mars.”

We each tried a bit, just to be polite. The big furry chunks were barely edible, so we mostly just sipped the sallow broth. He didn’t seem to notice, happy to enjoy bowl after bowl of “mom’s old recipe.”

After, we watched a movie in the other room. It was something about a heist in a marine science lab. The black-coated bad guys somehow stole a valuable treasure (something in a brown-leather bag), that was then recovered by the heroes, and then pursued by the bad guys.

They chased the heroes — a painfully attractive man and woman — into an 80 story office building. The protagonists were able to hide on the top floor, which was the world’s largest sun-room under construction. The ceiling was almost complete but they hadn’t peeled off the protective tarp just yet.

Most of the rest of the movie was about the heroes trying to plot how to escape — all whilst falling in love, of course — since the bad guys knew they were somewhere in the building. All this contrived plotting happened to coincide with the grand opening of the super sun-room.

And speaking of contrived plotting: the heroes — having used some of their wits, more of their charm, and mostly their beauty — befriended a few of the 1% elites who were attending the grand opening, procuring pairs of protective sunglasses. Right when the bad guys came up, ready with guns-to-go-a-blazin’, the tarp was flapped away and the bad guys were blinded. They shot wildly in fear and rage, crippling the world’s largest glass dome. Glass shards as big as cars and as small as teardrops rained down on the panicking crowd — all while the heroes escaped to street level via one of the many ziplines that had been strung with small, decorative flags.

The protagonists had repeatedly mentioned how they were afraid of heights. But this spectacle was simply too stunning to pass up.

They retreated to a rail-yard: which was — coincidentally — another of the world’s biggest construction projects about to be completed. Two bridges/railroads were about to be merged and opened for traffic: a mega-highway 20 lanes wide that cut through the woods over a 20 yard-wide stream.

Another group of tuxedoed 1%ers had gathered here for the celebration. Whether they’d heard about the super sun-room debacle remains unknown to this day.

In fact, this latter crowd was so large, and the bad guys (the ones who made it at least) were so late, that they simply couldn’t push through the bulging crowd as the heroes boarded the maiden train out of town.

And so the heroes escaped — only now deciding to check the brown leather bag that they had so direly suffered to protect all this time. They figured — with all the other marine scientists dead — that it was finally theirs to keep. They’d earned it. Sort of.

Inside was a hundred grand in cash.

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Joseph Labriola
DementoDreams

Professor, author, beach cleaner, etc. currently studying “Life” at “the University of the Earth” https://professorlabs.podbean.com/