I’m always one to say “Follow your dreams.”
Well. Strike that. I never actually say, “Follow your dreams.” I typically say things like, “Be wonderful, amazing you.” And such.
There’s something about the phrase, “Follow your dreams,” that always bothers me somehow. Maybe I take things too literally. I mean, heck, if I followed my dreams, one of two things would happen. I’d either be arrested or committed somewhere.
Dreams, to me, seem like those things we have at night when you’re sitting on an empty neon-colored bus, traveling through a rain-slicked parking lot at the speed of sound, and it feels more like some kind of super fun speed ride, with the wheels lifting off the ground at every slight turn, but really, you are just taking the shuttle across the very big lot to your office, where you find three people sitting, talking to the guru. She tells each one their horoscopes, and the things she is saying will happen exactly how she says it will happen. She gets to you, which would be me, and she tells me to get busy running that dart tournament. Of course, the rest of the dream follows the logistics of sharpening darts, hanging boards, arranging brackets.
But.
But what I’m saying is that I don’t really want to follow those dreams. And I’m not dense. I know that when Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream” in his most famous speech, he wasn’t talking about the cross-legged horoscope guru eating the cheeseburger as she doled out age-old wisdoms.
For all those reasons, I’d just rather avoid the phrase altogether and remove any chances for ambiguity in the matter.
I’ll tell you what happens as a result of this. The news headlines turn into something like this:
Joey Chestnut wins 14th Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest with record 76 franks.
That’s right. That guy followed his dreams and became a Member of Major League Eating, an organization dedicated to the stuffing of food down one’s throat for trophies and big belts that look like they came from Pro Wrestler’s bellies.
And you read that headline correctly. This guy, Joey Chestnut, competed with a whole bunch of other world-class bingers to win the Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island. The guy stuffed those 76 hot dogs down his throat in ten minutes.
There is a whole industry around this “sport.” In the article describing the competition, they said that Chestnut, who goes by “Jaws,” outperformed — or out-ate — second-place finisher Geoffrey Esper, who shoved down 50 hotdogs.
These folks have a website and everything with statistics and records. They list upcoming and past competitions. It’s a whole thing.
For instance, in a recent SPAM eating competition, Richard “The Locust” LeFevre ate 6 pounds of SPAM from the can in 12 minutes. I can’t imagine.
They even have “Eater Rankings,” which lists both men and women alike, all fighting for that number one spot of Super Eater.
All I have to say is that I doubt — seriously doubt — that I’ve eaten 76 hotdogs in my entire life. But. It has never been in my dreams, either.
And, I also should not judge what people aspire to in life, be it eating 325 cocktail weenies in 10 minutes, to climbing Mt. Everest, only to have to turn around and come right back down again, freezing the hockey pucks right off your sticks.
Instead, I shall sing your praises for following your heart and your soul, in whatever it is you do, no matter how large or how small. Today, I say, “Be you. Wonderful, amazing, incredible you. The only one of you in this world. In all the time in history. You. Fabulous You.
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“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
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“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
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“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
― Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy
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You are such a hot dog. With the works.
