It’s all in how you say it

This is a transcript of an actual conversation between me and Spiderman this morning:

Me: I had the strangest dream last night.

SM: You? Have strange dreams? Never!

Me: Shut up! Seriously. It was all about a new form of art called basing.

SM: This basing wouldn’t be free, perchance?

Me: Yes, I’m getting to that. We were a family and we had discovered a fun new activity to do with the kids called basing.

SM: By kids you mean the spiders?

Me: No...proper kids.

SM: (leaning over the spider tanks) Don’t listen to Mummy, girls. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Me: You know what I mean. Human children. Anyway, we were into basing. Which was some sort of metal-work activity that produced a sculpture. You take pieces of base metal (hence the name basing) and blow torch them and the heat makes the metal turn different colours--each base metal made a different colour. Then you did something manually and created a sculpture. I never could quite see what we were doing--all the “camera angles” of the dream were the backs of our heads sitting in a circle around the table.

SM: Right….

Me: Anyway, basing is a very expensive hobby (the price of scrap metal is very high--why do you think thieves are always stealing lead off of roofs and such?) and we were very excited that we found a bunch of materials on FREECYCLE and so all we had to do was go over to the house where they were giving it away and pick it up! We had to borrow a truck because there was  so much metal. They even gave us the blow torch! Think of all the basing we could do for free!

SM: Skip to the end.

Me: I’m getting there. Our kids went to school after half term and told their teacher that they had been freebasing with their parents and so the school called Child Protective Services on us.

Strange narrator appearing out of nowhere to say:

We interupt your regularly scheduled blog to bring you this. Freebasing, for those of you who don’t know is (according to Urban Dictionary)

A method of inhaling drugs by holding a flame under a metal spoon filled with cocaine or any crushed pill. One holds a flame under the spoon and collects the fumes from the crushed pills in an empty bottle and the inhales these fumes by taking a hit off the bottle You may now return to your regularly scheduled blog.

SM: (laughing)

Me: Because the kids were quite young they couldn’t explain it properly so all they kept saying was, “After you heat it up, you can see all the colours” which clearly did not show us in a favourable light. Then I woke up before I found out if the children were removed into protective custody because of modern art.

SM: you are so weird, but I love you.