Do you guys get the dreads? Where you wake up in the middle of the night or way too early in the morning and think about all the things you feel like you should accomplish but aren’t? Or that every decision you’ve ever made in your life has been the wrong decision? Dark, I know. Sorry, it must be the weather. This is why I get stupid-silly excited every year when I see the first crocus blossom popping up in some Brooklyn brownstone’s front garden. To me, it means there’s still hope for the world. If that fragile little purple flower has the tenacity to come back, year after year, sometimes pushing right up through the snow and showing its pretty little face, then I can do it, too. You go, lil’ crocus! I’ll be watching for you soon!

Back to the dreads. Often, what I wake up dreading, is having to come up with a new show theme or topic every week. People, it is a LOT of pressure. I mean, after 145-odd episodes, it is seriously not easy to do. In fact, last night, I dreamed an entire show script, I knew in the dream exactly what the show was gonna be about, down to the jokes, the title, everything…and in the dream, I was so relieved about it, because it came together so easily, that my brain let it go, since I thought I had a whole show done and written.

And then I had a dream about watery overcooked spinach, and that I was putting it in the fridge in my old house from childhood and the green murky water from the spinach overflowed and leaked out of the fridge and flooded underneath the white vinyl flooring that our kitchen had and when you stepped on the floor, the green water would gush up around the edges of the kitchen and overflow onto the white floor. Who puts a white floor in a kitchen, btw? Oh and there was something about pickles, too…

And then I woke up, and all I could remember was that the show that my dreaming brain had written wasn’t about floods of spinach water, but had something to do with the movie “The Martian”, which I watched twice on my flight to Mexico last month. (Once in English, once in Spanish, just for practice)

But that was the only thing I could remember from the dream, that the show was gonna be based on “The Martian”. Something about his immediate need for food, and how he grew those potatoes, and about the packaged space-food he was eating until then, and how he almost starved. But that’s the only part that stuck beyond sleep. Matt Damon and his potatoes grown in Mars dust and his own poop. It WAS really impressive, the way he did that. Grew that huge crop, only to have it destroyed by stupid Mars sand.

See? Monoculture, no bueno. It’s a very bad idea to only grow one variety of one crop…just saying… We give Matt Damon a pass because he had no choice. But don’t tell me it’s too hard to just EAT real food down here on earth, because Matt had to GROW his in a giant spacesuit, inside a plastic bubble, after hauling in dust from a hostile, water-free, uninhabitable planet, make his own water, save his poop for fertilizer, and wait for the plants to grow, while being fueled on vacuum-packed turkey tetrazzini and Foodiness space-bar Snaxs. I mean, where do you think all the original Foodiness technology came from? Space? Well, not FROM space, but from space-age technology. Uh…hello? Tang?