Lael came over to my house and told me why W.S. Hathaway wasn’t a very good writer lately. Grainger came up the stairs and I threw mixed vegetables at him. Matt, watching all this, decided to leave. I was suddenly was in the old old house (my house of 18 years) in the upstairs master bedroom.

Then I was going to a Kids in the Hall live performance. They had an audience participation portion and it was set up a lot like a political convention mixed with a lecture hall. They walked onstage, did one sketch, and walked off. I thought it was part of the show and I just sat there, expecting them to come back. They sent a tired blond woman to look over everyone’s projects. She told me it was good, but I wrote my name in the wrong corner and so i’ll have to leave. I told her it was a good 10-minute encapsulation of my graduate school experience.

We (I don’t know who I was with) were trying to keep up with Kevin MacDonald, but he ducked into a grocery store or a hardware store. Since we lost him, the guy I was with found this crackhouse lookin’ place that had a warped front door. Written on it was “home of the vocal star of Powerpuff Girls: Episode Nine.” My friend just barged in, knocking on the door while opening it. He immediately began to look at the softcore porn laying around. The vocal star shrieked and took us downstairs. I looked through her books while she and my friend talked. She had three copies of Mother Goose (”One is for the pictures,” she said. “Did you color in yours this pretty? I didn’t think so.”) I also found her pulp fiction collection, featuring Earl Stanley Gardner’s “The Case of the Man who went to the Planets for Cheese-Colored Guns.” A leggy model was on the front, of course.

I told Howard all about Koko from The Cat Who… series. He was somewhat interested, but not very.

I was taking some math and science classes at Collegiate because I was horribly unskilled. A lanky guy wearing a cheerleading outfit came to my house and performed a cheer for me. It was at once both flattering and pathetic. Matt seemed amused and I was embarrassed. At that moment I thought, “What the hell am I doing at Collegiate? I’m 23 years old; I don’t want to take high school classes. I’ve got my master’s, for god’s sake.”

I was watching the Women’s World Cup soccer game. A cloud full of confetti starting showering the goalie with paper. I read her lips as she muttered, “I can deal. I can deal.”

A Japanese woman was walking with me up to her working-class two-bedroom home. She told me to look at the babies, then moved a rock to show me sixteen eggs buried in the dirt.

I was moving out of my parents’ house. I found a bag with stale cheese garlic bread and a purple bathtowel. I threw it all away because it stank.

I was stirring mixed vegetables and steak strips together in the microwave, but as I stirred it, it disappeared.

There were a bunch of weird ones last night. In one scene, I dreamed I had nails in my legs. They were one-inch long acupuncture-type pins.

I was also living in a historic place. Howard had printed up postcards of it for the historical society. I woke up one morning and Barbara A. was leading a tour through our house. Dad was sitting in his chair staring at a wood stove instead of the TV. I went through the postcards and discovered that my room used to be “the demolition room.”

I don’t think it was officially a high school reunion, but Jon, Priya, and a bunch of other people were there. Jon said, “I just thought we all should be together when they announced the Mideast peace treaty. It’s a historic time, you know.” I just couldn’t understand why it was so important that we be together.

There was something about small children in a bank.

There was also something about a naval espionage scene. I was wandering around a giant boat with a flashlight, trying to get somewhere before the bomb went off. The bomb was located in a locked room, and I couldn’t find the keys (which were located on my keyring) because someone had borrowed them.

I was crawling on the floor thinking about a new theory. I was going to write a paper about one syllable boys’ names. I was going to use the example Margaret told me about her husband and hunting dogs who only have one syllable names. I also was going to write about nicknames and about a girl named Jazz whose real name was Jasmine.

I was listening to NPR. Click and Clack were crying to each other; they were getting sued for a parody gone wrong. As Clack sobbed, Click said “Let’s run that Cartoon Network ad.” Then my dead cat Amy jumped on the bed. I knew it was her by the tilt of her head. She laid on my chest and kneaded her feet on my lips.

Then I think she turned into poundcake. She had a New Jersey license plate that said “theft deterrent” and “Poundcake good, Coney Island bad.”

Dad and I fought about something.

There was a picture of the famous Japanese prints, one of the samurai ones, screen-printed on concrete. I think it was in front of a graveyard. I was going there with my mom and my grandmother.

I got a big hug from a dog. It was a huge dog, like a German shepherd or something. And the dog really was hugging me. I am not just anthropomorphisizing the event.

On TV, Barb and I watched a semi slam into a parked car while the man was sitting in his parked car. They then showed a map of where the accident was, so Barb and I went there. Once we got there, we found out Caryn was hosting a murder-mystery party. There were a bunch of weird people there, like the woman who kept repeating “My husband’s at an Avon conference in Bolivia.” Another girl laid on a couch and kept chanting “Brian, come here.” There was an African-American homeless man wearing an apron. Another girl said, “He was homeless, but they gave him an apron. I’m going there.” We all were invited to the murder-mystery game, so we were taken to a rental house. There I went into the closet to hide. Some guys were escaping through the bathroom window. One of them turned to me and said, “There’s no screen; it’s okay.”