I wasn’t the biggest Blind Melon fan when they were around, but I didn’t have a problem with them. It was a tragedy when their lead singer Shannon Hoon died of an overdose, as I think the band still had years of good work ahead of them.
A little treasure of a song they recorded for the “Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks!” tribute album was “Three is a Magic Number,” which has been played in my home since the day we brought our daughter home from the hospital. There are lots of ear hooks in this song, but for me, it’s the drums that get stuck in my head.
It would be easy to say that the day got ahead of me, but that would be incorrect. Today was a financial planning day with the wife, and I had a feeling it would take up most of my time… and I was correct in that estimation.
We have a kid that we’ll need to send to college, most likely, and we need to come up with a plan to pay for it all.
So if anyone out there is feeling charitable, please feel free to drop me a line, and let me know how much you would like to donate. We’re looking at $34,000 a year, so any amount of donations would help.
(The short story “The Dreamdrive” by Weike Wang appeared in the May 25th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Chris Harnan
Reading “The Dreamdrive” was like watching my favorite basketball player miss an unobstructed layup.
First, there was the tone of the piece, which was attempting to be lighter, easy, and humorous. The effect of this was that the story never achieved a depth. Everything was presented at arm’s length, making the story feel like nothing was at risk, or truly important. Also, in an attempt at humor, one character was described as “his then girlfriend,” implying her eventual fate. This cliched trick of description can work if it is partnered with irony, but in this setting, the attempt was to humorously build sympathy for our sad sack of a protagonist. Unfortunately, I did not see the reason why we needed to have this information presented in such a manner.
Second, the revelation of the dream fell out of the sky and crashed like dishes on the floor. It was as if the narrator decided that the story needed to end now, and we were quickly given the relevance of what had been happening. But without any foreshadowing, or even a climatic build up, the revelation doesn’t achieve any resonance. Such as, now that the protagonist understands where his reoccurring dream is coming from, how does that help him move forward? It’s implied that he can sleep again, but is there nothing deeper here? How is the hero changed, other than being able to sleep? It felt to me that an emotional plot point was missing.
Third, with the tone and lack of resonance in this story, it made the narrator sound condescending to the protagonist. The narrator treats the protagonist as a person to ridicule and kick around. Multiple times the hero is shown as a person no one takes seriously. And honestly, if the narrator doesn’t care about the protagonist, then why should the reader?
