DREAMLAND IN WINTER
by Rob Kristofferson
They're just seven words that have adorned my wall for twenty five years, printed on frail paper, now yellowed by time. The letters are bold at the top, to stand out, and every word is capitalized: DREAMLAND IS OUT OF THIS WORLD. These words are important to me, to the point that I'd love to see them emblazoned on my tombstone, by a wife I'm not currently wed to. It would make a unique addition to any cemetery, but unfortunately, I am not old and I am not dying.
Newspapers are one of the finest examples of time's ability to be robust, unmovable, and fragile all at once. Paper, weathered by age, especially newsprint, becomes brittle, jaundiced, ultimately turning to dust, until time itself fades away.
The ultra-comfortable desk chair that pairs with my desk, a frugal investment I now realize considering the condition of my failing museum, has never been out of sight of these seven words. They appear on page seven of a 1992 edition of the local gazette, two towns over from our location in Hope, New Mexico, a town with a population of 105 people. I arrogantly thought if I opened a UFO museum here it would be a big attraction, and make it the new boom town for magazines like People and US Weekly to talk about. My ego hadn't taken into account that a UFO museum already existed in Roswell and was doing quite well for itself.
After the first month, my first wife called it the greatest monument to ego she'd ever seen. "Even bigger than the pyramids?" I asked.
"Bigger!" She said.
"Bigger than the Napoleonic monuments?"
"So much bigger." she said.
She left the next day, thinking I'd failed to invade and conquer the Russian Empire.
It wasn't until the gazette called us "out of this world" that things began to change, people began to notice. I bought ten copies of the paper the day it came out. I framed one for my office, one for home, and one for my mom, though I never saw it displayed in her house. The rest have made their way into scrap book(s), plural, of which I still have one left. My second wife threw most of them in a trash can, and lit them on fire. She left one of them, the one I'd worked hardest on, devoted entirely to the museum. With it a note that said, "Love goes to buildings on fire." It took me years to realize that was the title of a really shitty Talking Heads song. It's probably a great song, I just can't stand it for obvious reasons. I never married again after that. I didn't want the heartache.
