After a few bong hits with B, featuring the usual giggles and some comically false assumptions regarding the placement of a door and the functioning of a light switch, I fell asleep and dreamed I was a cannibal and a manager. I also dreamed about Conrad Overion, which is odd because Conrad Overion is an anagrammatic alter ego of mine who lived for only a day or two last year, or so I assumed. I thought about Veronica Rondo a lot more than I ever thought about Conrad Overion, frankly. I like to think of both of them as longtime psychiatric patients of Dr. Neva Orinoco. In my dream Conrad Overion resembled the actor Martin Balsam, which is strange because Martin Balsam plays a character named Harry Walden in an obscure film with Joanne Woodward, of which all I remember is that her character wears a mink coat a lot and has a gay son. You remember Martin Balsam, he got knifed and pushed down the stairs by Norman Bates. Martin Balsam was also in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three if I remember correctly. Anyway, Harry Walden is important because that was the name of my first writer alter ego or nom de plume or whatever you want to call it, back in junior high school, which is probably why I made the Martin Balsam connection with Conrad Overion in my dream, see? I might've gotten the name Harry Walden from this Joanne Woodward movie, Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, but I doubt it. So where did Harry Walden come from? After I woke up I remembered that the narrator of the title story in the Hemingway collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a writer and is also named Harry Walden, so there you have it, except for the fact that I don't remember ever reading "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" or any of the stories in The Snows of Kilimanjaro for that matter, although I did know that this collection also contains the story "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," from which the notable independent bookstore in San Francisco got its name, and also "The Killers," which was made into a Don Siegel movie with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson and I think Ronald Reagan as a mobster, in which Lee Marvin suffers one of the best deaths ever, and which come to think of it is actually a loose remake of a much better movie with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, and I remember the Hemingway connection in the earlier version because Nick Adams is in it, in the coffee shop scene. Anyway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was made into a film as well, which I might have seen on television when I was in junior high school, and furthermore the protagonist, played by Gregory Peck, is a writer dying of gangrene and searing remorse in the African bush who reflects on his personal and professional failures while Susan Hayward looks at him. Aha, one thinks, a writer consumed with regret over all the stories he never wrote, well there you have it, except that in the movie his name isn't Harry Walden it's Harry Street, so there goes that theory. The Conrad Overion/Martin Balsam/Harry Walden connection therefore remains murky and possibly not very interesting at all. Anyway, I'm thinking of having Conrad Overion write a series of "housekeeping mysteries" the solutions for which all turn on the subtlest alterations to a room, things only an OCD-plagued shut-in cat lady spinster would notice, and the first book is called The Case of the Very, Very Lightly Soiled Antimacassar. Further plots hinge on the minutely disheveled contents of a cut glass dish of inedible hard candies and the number of finger impressions in a tub of pomade. I don't plan on writing these myself, and don't hold your breath waiting for Conrad Overion. I also need to flesh out Conrad Overion's autobiography (The Vivid But Mistaken Recollections of Conrad Overion) with some piquant details, like for instance his various texture fetishes and the time he belligerently refused to share a cab uptown with Cornell Woolrich after they'd gotten into a drunken argument over Veronica Rondo.