I had a strange dream last night. Or rather this morning.

I dreamt I and some other people (Andrew Sullivan, the nursery manager of the Botanical Garden, and my father's godparents) had assembled to pickle Karl Rove's homunculus, and important evidentiary task that had somehow fallen to us.

Karl was in jail and his 12" little man who executed his master's "evil plans" had been found and needed to be preserved. With Karl in jail, the homunculus was inanimate.

We all met at Karl's house (in my dream, Rove was presumed gay and lived alone) and the nursery manager brought the homunculus. I prepared the pickling solution, per label instructions, by diluting muriatic acid with water in a white plastic bucket and dropped in the homunculus.

[I want to say that in the dream, I was oddly insensible to the fact that muriatic acid (itself a dilution of hydrochloric acid, mostly used to wash concrete as I understand it--not really my field) is all wrong for pickling a homunculus. But when I woke up I was really bothered by this. Everyone knows you'd use formalin (aqueous formaldehyde), not acid. Acid would likely dissolve the homunculus.]

Anyhow, most of this process went fine, except for the part where the homunculus strangely filled with helium (either from its own source or from the acid) and floated to the lanai ceiling (we were outdoors--in my dream, Karl Rove lived in California hand had a very nice, very typical ranch house in Palo Alto) during which time I couldn't find it. I didn't tell anyone because this was embarrassing; I was in charge of the pickling process and here I'd let the supposedly inanimate homunculus vanish. "Rove!"

Something off-topic the nursery manager said about plants sometimes filling up with helium to better distribute their seed clued me in that that might have happened to the homunculus. So then I found the homunculus floating near the ceiling and I was like, "oh look" trying to play it cool like of course the homunculus might fill with helium and float to the cieling. So we got it down.

The only other thing I really remember is going to see Karl Rove's greenhouse because Andrew had heard Rove grew a lot of California native plants. We were interested to see if Karl had anything interesting. On the way to the greenhouse in the back of his yard, I had a jealous flash of "Ugh, rich people and their greenhouses!" When we got there, the place was *mysteriously* cleaned out of California native plants, but was otherwise well-stocked. This really piqued Andrew's and my interest. Who cleaned out Karl Rove's greenhouse, and why? It was very suspicious, and we'd have to report it to the independent counsel. (The greenhouse itself was really a lathehouse and it was rather dark.)

After this we had a banal conversation about plants and I woke up before finishing business with the homunculus.

***

I don't know where to go with this one... I don't have any strong personal feelings or ideas about Rove or Sullivan or even politics and of course I've never met Sullivan or Rove (but I have a friend who's met Sullivan on a number of occassions in DC--but that doesn't seem relevant at all) so I don't know where they came from. I'm definitely not sure about the conflation with political shenanigans with my personal but amateur interest in horticulture... My dad's godparents were English gardeners, so that's why they came.

Link.