Ejected From the House of Boing Boing

Jesse "The Devil" Hughes, BoingBoing contributors Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin

BoingBoing is more than just a blog. It's a mecca, a shining golden temple in the sky for pseudo-hipster geeks like me ... its blend of tech activism, great digital art and high internet weirdness is more than a little addictive to web content creators and consumers worldwide. Maybe addictive isn't the right term. Shrews aren't exactly addicted to eating, are they?

Apparently I'm enough of a BoingBoing fan and Web geek that the site has wound its delicate digital tentacles around the folds of my brain and crept into my subconscious. Here's the dream I had the other night -- what do you make of it?

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All of BoingBoing's contributors lived in a crumbling wooden house on a cliff overlooking the San Francisco Bay. The house was shaped exactly like the Hall of Justice from the Superfriends cartoon, but showed signs of serious termite damage on the front porch.

I walked up the gravel path in front of the house and knocked on the sagging screen door, but nobody answered. I called out a few times, but nobody answered -- so I gingerly let myself in. The interior of the house was decorated with all manner of spectacular original paintings by Shag, Coop and Robert Williams. The overwhelming decorative theme was a homey retro- futurism -- a stylistic mashup of Kubrick's interiors in '2001' and the Jungle Room at Graceland.

I tiptoed up a set of iridescent orange shag carpeted stairs to the second floor. On the wall at the first landing there was sky-blue cloth hanging on a hook next to a large glass porthole covered with thick condensation. Water dripped from the edge of the porthole, but boiled into mist before hitting the carpet. A small placard next to the porthole said simply "Tomorrow Evening."

 I could hear muffled voices from further up the stairs and tiptoed up to investigate. Cory Doctorow sat in the middle of the room, reclining in a large easy chair. He was fast asleep with his laptop open, resting on his gently moving chest.

 Cory had a shiny, robust handlebar moustache just like Jesse "The Devil" Hughes, singer/guitarist for the Eagles of Death Metal. Although I couldn't see them through the walls, I knew that 1) Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz were up there as well, and 2) they also had Hughes-style moustaches.

I could hear a sizzling hum from a back room. "Cool!" David shouted. "Mark, you've really done it. Using old Kleenex, a USB port and Starbucks coffee grounds, you've invented a device that reverses global warming AND cracks DRM codes! Let me try!"

With that, Cory jerked awake. "Who the hell are you?" he asked. "And how did you get in here?" I stuttered and stumbled. Coolest house in the world or not, I hadn't been invited.

"Err, ah, Xeni's little brother is an old friend of mine, and I just thought ..." It's true, though. My friend Carl's older sister is Xeni Jardin. That held as much water with Cory as it does with anyone else I've told: zero.

He aimed a small laser pointer at me and pressed a button. Suddenly I found myself out in the oyster-shell parking lot, completely intact except totally barefoot. With a giant inhaling *pop* sound the house closed in on itself and vanished completely. I crept carefully across a field of broken oyster shells to the nearest intersection, raising a hand to hail a cab and preparing myself for a very long wait.

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Do you have any idea what this means? Let me know in the comments ...