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When good things happened, he took full credit for them. When stuff went the other way, when he crapped out or missed the winning field goal or whatever hackneyed crap, it was like some friggin' Viking funeral vessel rowing against a fijord tide, trying to reach its final resting destination with its Teddy Kennedyesque cargo, but being pushed back the other way by an infinite seismic pull of watery inertia, a lancinating atavistic quease of untidy and unpredictable untidiness. Jim was reminded of his recurrent dream: he was a passenger in a muscle car, and the car was different in every iteration. Sometimes it was a blue Torino, and then, last night it was a yellow-orange Barracuda. It always looked, felt, had that ineffable gestalt of a 70's AMC Javelinesque gas-sucking behemoth, and was always being driven by his father. They were always driving through some desert, and in the dream there were always these huge banded and speckled lizards lurking furtively, furtively lurking, around rocks, and there were these cactuses like that you'd see in some Roadrunner cartoon or something. Anyway, their car was always driving down the highway ribbon into a very, very strong headwind, so strong in fact, that it slowed the car to a crawly crawl, and then it picked up, the wind, its velocity so ferocious now that the car started to slow and then navigte backwards. Then the bridge over this big gorge they had just gone over disappeared, and as they rolled closer and closer to the now-spanless abyss, they, he and his dad, looked at one another with a shared feel of horror and fear and dreadful loathing. He would always wake up then, and the first words that were spoken to him upon awakening were greeted with such a foul, foul response on his part that it made him ashamed to be in his skin and he was chock-filled with self-embarassment. But when things DID go his way, the night never brought this kind of dream.