To the Horsefly

I once had a dream where I was a billionaire. Many, but not all billionaires own something very public. They’re known, of course, for being billionaires, but also for owning that specific thing. A lot of the time, that marquee asset is a sports team, but it can be something else, like a huge boat or a series of islands. In my dream, I owned a stadium. 

I owned a stadium, and that was the big thing that everyone knew me for owning. I like to imagine that if I were the kind of billionaire who owned a stadium, I would be this sort of egalitarian patron who wore blue jeans and waited in line with the proletariat to get into the stadium I owned. I’m not sure, however, that this would in actuality be the case. 

I think dreams are weird, but I don’t think we can reasonably call them predictive of anything other than our own feelings. If they are predictive, it’s probably in this sort of meta way. If you dream that you’re about to have a blowout argument with your girlfriend, and then it does happen, it’s not because you saw the future. The greatest detective in the world lives in your subconscious, and he’s made an astute deduction based on the facts available. It’s not just bad things either. If you dreamed that you aced an exam, it could just be that you know you did the work, even if you can’t admit it to yourself. 

I never understood this desire to own public works or any of the sorts of things that the mega-rich seem to go for. You often hear from the business-minded, temporarily impoverished billionaires of our day that there’s actually a good reason to own a sports team. You see, people will want to do business with you if you own the Mets because you can, uh…bring them to games? Meet the players? I get the feeling you can probably swing that without the whole kit and caboodle. 

I left out a key detail earlier when recounting my dream of tremendous wealth: in that dream, my name was not Mikey Light. It was Connecticut Name. 

Not to harp on nominative determinism, but it’s difficult to imagine someone with an eponym like that as this sort of imagined for-the-people, uber-wealthy magnate. When I first started learning about the law, I could never get past this guy named Learned Hand. Mr. Hand was a very famous jurist, and I can only imagine that when he first sprang from his parents' loins, his father held him in his arms and said, “You are going to be a judge.” 

Connecticut Name does not sound like the kind of guy who would give a man in need the shirt off his back. He’s not going to teach a man to fish– he’s going to corner the market on fish. He’s going to put a lien on that man’s boat and drive him into poverty for even deigning to think he could pull food out of my ocean. If Connecticut Name were to own a stadium, a generally accessible place for mass assembly and entertainment, it would be to fill it with water and stage naval battles, or for a mass sacrifice in an effort to summon a demon. 

Now it could be that there’s a little bit of this character in the pauper Mikey Light. I do have some proclivity toward becoming drunk with power; just last week, I was jumping rope in the park and sliced a horsefly in twain. My first thought was that I had become the Randy Johnson of the hobby. I and I alone was to be the black-hearted sultan of working out on the vulcanized rubber flooring in that obscure corner of John Jay Park. And to a poor fly, what am I if not at least a billionaire? 

This is who I think Connecticut Name is, and so it must be the person I imagine I would become if I achieved otherworldly wealth. The thing about dreams is that no matter what meaning we choose to ascribe to them, we’re in there.