(270): Living the Dream…or the Nightmare

About 20 years ago, my husband and I were driving about 600 miles to see my folks, and we were blue-skying about winning the lottery and what we would buy, and where we would go, and what mad luxuries we would spend our windfall on. Right at that moment, a sportscar zoomed past us. We both looked at it in jaw dropped amazement. Its license plate said basically “UR Dreaming”. I can’t remember the exact license-plate-ese but that’s how we read it. And so we were!
It was one of those cosmic confluences that made us look up in the sky and wonder if God was having a joke on us. We both began laughing outrageously. Anything to make a long trip more bearable, I say. I suppose it’s at least as good as playing license plate Bingo.
Today, I was dreaming a little dream of a new refrigerator/freezer, as the one we have has a broken heater element or thermostat and thus must be emptied and defrosted once every month or so. As I was searching for the biggest possible cubic footage and looking at a cute French door number from Best Buy online, I remembered that license plate.
This time, I merely smiled one of those wry one-cornered smiles and shook my head. $1299.99 (as if being one cent under $1300 made it so much less expensive), and I can’t even pay off my medical bills unless I do it $100 at a time for the next foreseeable.
Then my husband, mad with the heat, began grumbling that all he is is a moneymaking machine, and he ought to quit his job and maybe things would be better. Of course, the problem is the high heat and humidity, not the job. He’s on vacation, anyway, but he really doesn’t ever realize how much of a good thing that is, to be able to take the whole summer off.
So he keeps on about wishing his parents would die off and leave him his inheritance, and then he wouldn’t have to worry about anything. He’s a smart guy, and I know he either has a blind spot, or he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying. In the past, I’ve told him he had better expect whatever “inheritance” he is looking forward to in the future to be gone when the time comes. I decide to go easy on it this time. So I just mentioned the “UR Dreamin” license plate, and he just looked at me and said, “Poke a hole in my fantasy then, go on!”
He was obviously unhappy, like he so often is. He has ceased to be in on God’s joke by his own choice, I think. He has espoused what he calls the theory of “malevolent design” (as opposed to intelligent design), wherein God created the universe specifically to torture him and make him miserable. Where other people simply become angry and irritable at the heat without fully realizing why it is happening in the way it is, my husband creates a grand-scale evil mythology around his suffering. I think this perpetuates his problem though. But who listens to me? Not him.

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