I was on this balcony or deck, on top of a house. It was an outdoor bedroom, facing the backyard. The house was at the top of an escarpment; looking out, you could see the terrain roll off, and an enormous city stretch from one side of the horizon to the other. The night sky was incredible. There was a vivid purple sky glow, but it was cloudless, and absolutely full of bright, bluish stars. It was almost impossible to get around this ‘bedroom,’ because it was densely webbed with blankets that had been strung up like hammocks. It belonged to this person I had a crush on in elementary school, and I watched her go to bed. She knew I was there, and that I was pervertedly watching, but let me do it for a little while, just to be nice. After what felt like an hour, but was really only a few minutes, she politely kicked me out. I stumbled off into the night, clambering up and down downspouts, and over bushes and fences, making my way across driveways, and past trash cans. Somehow, I wound up in the studio apartment of this 6’2” MILF. She could have wrapped her arms around me, and just engulfed me. The room was long and austere, with a blonde hardwood floor, three white walls, and one glass wall looking out at that same incredible view of the city and night sky. There was a sleeping bag on the floor (maybe with an alarm clock next to it), a computer on a desk, and a video projector. She made these extremely elaborate Flash animations, and they would be projected on one of the walls, maybe ten feet high and fifty feet wide. The scenes would just sprawl out, and you couldn’t see everything at once. She showed these to me for a while, and then suddenly, we were riding motorized Razor scooters with loud, shitty little two-stroke engines on the highway. The highway snaked from side to side, on top of the escarpment. There were no high-mast lights, and our scooters didn’t have headlights, so it was dark, and hard to make out the enormous, microwave oven-sized potholes in the road. Despite the fact that there were no clouds in the sky, it was wet and drizzling. We had no protective clothing or gear of any kind, and the cold was making the both of us sick. There was also an 18-wheeler just ten feet behind us. The driver could have easily passed us, but instead, he was hounding us down, and incessantly honking. The scooter felt highly unstable, like it would flip backwards or forwards at any second, and the tiny, unsprung wheels were shaking my bones. At some point, we pulled off to the side of the road. There was a single metal rail that ran alongside the highway, and a Reliant Robin-based railroad speeder appeared on it. My brother was inside, and he stopped to say hello. He was having a nice, relaxing trip, until we showed up and begged him to let us inside the tiny (but dry and warm) cabin, because we were stupid and chose the wrong mode of transport. He sighed (we were clearly cramping his style), and reluctantly let us in.
I cut my own dick off. It eventually grew back, but I was just as disturbed as when it was a bloodless stump. I was driving something like a Ford Fairmont around the suburb where I lived, at night. The grid-planned streets had a normal width, but the blocks were very small, with just four tiny houses each, and there were traffic lights at every intersection. I suddenly went ‘third person,’ controlling the car with a keyboard (in a parallel universe) from a Resident Evil-style fixed camera angle. It was almost impossible to drive, so I hit a bunch of stuff and caused a lot of property damage, and ultimately crashed into this woman’s house. She was gaunt, with a flipped bob and a headband, and only ever wore a silk nightgown. I think I was Tom Hanks at this point, with a mustache. So I’m back at my own house, sitting on a recliner and putting my cut-off dick on the tip of my regrown dick in the hope that they will fuse together. My wife starts yelling at me, saying that I’ve become obsessed with conspiracy theories, and that I’ve become a different, unrecognizable person. She tells me to move in with the woman whose house I crashed into, because apparently, we have a lot in common. Suddenly, I was disembodied, and inside her house, looking at all the things she had written on the walls in tar, and all the Polaroids and newspaper clippings she had pinned to it. The block letters were big and thick, and you could see the brush strokes.
I was with Neil, in New York City. We went to a restaurant and ordered a pizza. At first, it was $71, but then the cashier (the only person working there) recognized me somehow, and discounted the pizza to maybe $10. Neil and I devoured the pizza, distracted by the televisions in the austere, concrete building. Suddenly, I was with A.J. Soprano, in the passenger seat of his Nissan Xterra. He was immensely frustrated, in a convoy of other vehicles, also driven by rich (Middle Eastern?) kids, and being hounded by the police. He wasn’t speeding or anything, he just seemed to keep making trivial mistakes that were somehow illegal. At one point, he pulled into a sort of open-ended, garage-like bay and waited for the heat to die down. We drove out of the city, and suddenly found ourselves in the Eastern European countryside. There were all these beautiful evergreen trees, and the roads were either dirt roads, or paved, but with lots of ruts filled with standing water. There were a lot of houses and power lines everywhere. There was some kind of American space launch startup based there, with a name like “Astronaut Cannon,” or something. We drove out to see an enormous smokestack, so tall that it was actually disturbing and frightening, like it was way taller than any mountain and the top was above the sensible atmosphere. I’m not sure how, but eventually, I was walking through some old building, with this woman about my age. It looked like a high school from the seventies, and it was mostly empty. We passed by this man whose face was red. He was looking at us and retching, and someone came to his aid. We ran down into this basement room full of washing machines, and various other equipment. It was grimy there, and seemed to be covered in paint spatter (like the floor of Jackson Pollock’s studio) from floor to ceiling. She spoke the native language there, and helped me through a decontamination process. We took our clothes off and threw them in a washing machine. She put on fresh clothes, but I missed my opportunity to do so. Next, we all crowded around a strange workstation; it had all sorts of moving parts, and dispensed tubes of a toothpaste-like substance. I squirted some in my mouth and brushed my teeth. The top of this machine was a sort of shallow sink that everyone spat into. After that, I was given a small plastic sheet saddled with a mixture of ‘foods,’ mostly red-brown pellets of a styrofoam-like material that would absorb radionuclides. You had to hold it at the edges, so that it would sag in the middle, and none of the stuff would fall out. I buried my face in it, and ate as fast as I could. Then, a hunchbacked, storybook babushka in a headscarf came up to me, and taped a flimsy paper sign to my bare chest. It said that I was an academic who did experiments on rabbits, who didn’t follow instructions on how to decontaminate myself, and how I set a bad example. Then we went outside, presumably to get on a bus and leave the area.
There was this guy that owned a restaurant, and he was kind of an asshole, but I tried to win him over. The food was very good, and the building was very modern, all white marble, polished steel and glass. Then I was hanging out with this young couple who had a show on the History Channel about how they did aerobatics in Su-27s. Their house looked like a gingerbread house. I climbed onto this gantry they had built outdoors, and tried not to fall off. I never saw them do it, but apparently it was for refueling the planes with methanol while they Cobra Hovered just off the ground. They sprayed me with fuel as a joke, then went to Las Vegas.
Ben was driving me across a highway overpass and took his shirt off to reveal a red T-shirt with the symbol of a cult he was starting. It was raining, and there was an 18-wheeler behind us, and I think the cult worshipped this computer-generated boy from a Dreamcast game. The GPU architecture of the Dreamcast was explained by this Pete Buttigieg-looking dude, and he said that they tried to give this boy a speaking role in a sort of interactive legal drama, but he was at the bottom of the uncanny valley, so it was better if he was the player character and silent protagonist. I remember walking in and out of this courtroom, and constantly worrying about having diarrhea.
I’m wandering through this neighborhood with all these ranch-style houses, chain-link fences, and cracked pavement. Everything I could see on the horizon was very close, like I was on a prominent landform, but the ground was perfectly flat. It was as if the world just ended a few blocks away, but I couldn’t see the edge. There were parked cars, but almost no activity on the roads. The sky was completely clear, and the air was cool and dry. To the west, I see what I think is ‘Manhattan,’ a cluster of three or four ten-story buildings. I walk west, hoping to be able to catch a train back home. For some reason I wander onto somebody’s lot, and see that their house is missing a wall on one side. There, in the basement, is this young woman painting a canvas with cake frosting. I asked her if she could help me get back home, or just to Manhattan. In doing so, I point west. She corrects me, and points south, and lo and behold, there is Manhattan, as it exists in reality, albeit rotated 90° counterclockwise. She seems to think I’m a dork, but when I start to walk there she offers to come with me. We take the train, discussing esoteric aspects of Adobe Illustrator. The track is elevated, and makes a series of extremely sharp, right-angle turns five or so stories above the ground, far above all of the surrounding buildings. Suddenly, I’m on my fixie, rolling down a street on the outskirts of the city at upwards of 35mph. I’m really glad I keep hitting green lights, because Dan did something to the brakes, and I can’t seem to stop. I get to a Denny’s, to meet back up with the woman and a bunch of people she knows. The inside of the Denny’s looks like the inside of the Forbidden City. It’s all red and gold, with high ceilings, and calligraphy and murals everywhere. I ask the hugely muscular owner of the Denny’s franchise if I can park my fixie in their gigantic lobby, and he agrees. We were the only people in the entire restaurant that morning, and we were treated to a lavish banquet. There’s about ten people, and I’m on the end with the woman and her girlfriend. It’s fun, I get to know everyone to a reasonable degree, and get a few laughs. After that, there’s a gap, and I find myself back inside my bedroom at sunset, with the gold sun lighting the gold walls. There’s the woman and her girlfriend, standing in the doorframe. They had followed me back home because I left my debit card back in New York. And we all stand there, smiling for a while. They leave, and I suddenly realize: I forgot to ask her name the entire time.
