Last night I dreamed my wife and I were walking along a South African beach at twilight, the sky streaked with salmon and violet, the horizon shimmering as if we had stumbled into a myth rather than a place on any map.
The coastline was no ordinary shore. Instead, a massive conveyor belt rattled along the sand, carrying an endless parade of women from every corner of the globe. Each time one of them reached my wife, the belt shuddered to a halt. The woman—frumpy, froggy, apologetic, swaddled in baggy safari khakis and hats that looked like they had been flattened in a suitcase—would plead for my wife’s opinion on her outfit.
With gentle authority, my wife made her adjustments—a tuck here, a trim there—and declared the woman presentable. At once, the supplicant would bow effusively, glowing with gratitude, before the conveyor belt whisked her off into the twilight. This was my wife’s destiny, her sacred vocation, and she bore it with effortless grace.
Behind us, the ocean brooded. From the waves, leviathan shapes drifted in the gloom, colossal witnesses to this human pageant of absurdity. Their eyes glowed with the cold contempt of ancient gods, as if to say: This is what civilization amounts to—hats and hemlines, endlessly corrected.
The dream inspired me to write a song this morning, “The Sadness of Summer Fashion”:
Cinemorphosis 
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