Clint the tenant

This is what happens when you have movies on the brain.

Last night I had the most vivid dream. I dreamt that the tenant of our rental property was not, in fact, a mild-mannered paralegal, but Clint Eastwood. Why the 78-year-old director and screen icon would want to rent a 3/2 ranch in Carmel is beyond me, but you've got that thing going where dreams honor their own internal logic.

It seems that Mr. Eastwood was planning to have a cook-out in his backyard, and some of his neighbors were objecting. You see, Clint was having the party in honor of VV Day. Don't know what VV Day is? No surprise, since I invented it in my dream. Like Victory in Europe or Victory over Japan from World War II. This was Victory in Vietnam Day. Again, you might find this curious, since by most accounts we lost in Vietnam. Not in my dream.

So Clint was planning to round up a bunch of his old war buddies from Vietnam and have a cookout to commemorate the fictional victory. Doesn't sound too bad -- other than the fact that Eastwood served in the Army during the Korean War, but not Vietnam. Again, dream logic.

Problem: His two-doors-down neighbor is a naturalized citizen originally from Vietnam who fought in the North Vietnamese Navy (if there even was such a thing). He and his large extended family are appalled that Clint and his buddies are going to celebrate his former country's defeat.

Anyway, most of my dream consisted of me interviewing first one party and then the other to see if I could resolve the conflict. I remember that Clint started to cry during our talk -- not about offending his neighbor, but about all his comrades who died in Vietnam.

I think it ended up with me telling the Vietnamese guy that I couldn't see any reason to ask Clint to call off his cook-out, or that I even had the right to do so. My secret agenda was to convince Clint to invite the Vietnamese clan to his cook-out, but it never quite worked out. Then I was asked to look at some light switches that were acting up (a landlord's duty never ends).

It has been suggested, not for the first time, that I watch too many movies.