Someone is sitting out in our back yard. A stranger.

It is eerie. The yard is small and she sits casually at our picnic table. We must investigate.

When we do, we discover our home, which is my grandma's house on Chestnut back home, with major revisions due to my lack of visual memory and dreamland's eternal compensation, is jointly occupied by a swarm of strangers.

They are affable enough, if teeming, they go about unconcerned as if they belong among us, and we begin to accept that they must. We move hither and yon, Niki J and I, and so do they, like in a bus station.

I must go to the bathroom, and the new provision for that means the fridge offers privacy if you open the door, and the lady of the other grouping is addressing me from the hall, so I do not continue.

I must go to school. I have missed the morning classes. It's high school, and I'm an undedicated stoont. I have two problems. I do not know what my class will be in the afternoon. I somehow cannot remember what class I have after lunch. It's fifth period, right? Then what is it? I can know when I have been there all morning because it's just the next one. Only, now I don't know.

Maybe it's like jumprope. You can continue if you begin standing over a limp rope, but it's harder if they are swishing it in a hard loop and you have to gauge the right moment to run in while it's up before it slaps down. Maybe it's like that. A day of school half gone is like a swishing rope.

And my second problem is, I'm afraid of what might happen if anybody learns I do not know what class I have first in the afternoon. Maybe they will put me away. I cannot run the risk. I cannot just show up on campus, not knowing where to go. I'm expected to know that, above all. But I don't know even that, not at all.

I must skip the afternoon classes as well. There's no help for it. The only remedy for being caught not knowing where you are supposed to be is not to even be there. That should fix it.

Of course, there's tomorrow, but that's not today's worry. I go downtown. I have other occupations.

Like...waking up.

I sit in front of an office worker in a hospital insurance office. Joey is with me, behind me and to one side, and he insults my worker somehow. She is not pleased.

I have something wrong, though not dreadfully. I am given documents and pills which she makes no attempt to concern herself with the problem of transporting. Joey has insulted her, I guess, in his inimitable cynical impatience.

I use envelopes for forms to scrape pills into. I move off. I sit in another seat in front of yet another desk, but do not speak to anyone. Joey says, I'm going on ahead. He does. I never see Joey in this dream; he's behind or gone.

So I'm told the next office is through the large open double doors and right next door. It isn't, of course.

I don't know how to find Joey now, which seems most important. I wander far and wide. I understand somehow there's no use in asking anyone. They will probably all say, it's right next door, and it never is.

Here is a large yard, like where they rent backhoes. I am walking from the back grounds when a worker on stand-on forklift approaches the boss, says, "The one number two in the lot was here last year, and took two shovels." It's a warning to do no business with that one.

I happen to be carrying two implements. I'm glad to see one of them is not a shovel. I only mean to deposit them at the front door, and do so. I have found them lying around. I'm just helping.

Why did I not remember when I was near home the address book. It has Joey's cell phone number. I must go back there.

But I'm now in the corridors of the hospital. What is wrong with me is serious, though I do not know what it is. Some specialist has shown me ducts of conduit through my innards, and here is shading which might better be clear. That's all.

A politician from the land where I live now is just ahead of me along the hallway, and he, too, heads into the john. (This is the part of the dream just before waking. Or, just before the time when I'd better awaken.) He sees ahead of me the room is full, and turns away, as do I, as though it's only a habit or inclination moving us to that room.


Me 'n Reloj, the NerdNosh Seat, Soda Canyon, Mesa Verde, CO, 1995


At the old house on 719 E 4th St, remodeled as are all my settings with shadow and murky light, I am home again after an absence...and all is not well.

There is a proceeding happening. Strangers (to me, but I assume familiar to one another) mill about. Nothing is actually happening, which means an administrative action of some sort.

I learn the cause is pollution. There is tin in the ground of the community of Bonham, and what's more, my mother or our family is responsible. I see old cans brought as evidence. My mother has them to show our landfill is not the cause, as these cans and labels show they have silver lining, or tungsten.

I wait to one side. Finally, I say to one guy seated (dark and sinister if smiley, or because of that) my name, and he says, "You don't want my name. It's like meeting in a wood with shotguns." Ah, okay. I wait.

There is in the bathroom fixture, and filling a tube beside it the size of a waterheater but of clear material, sludge. I understand the sewage, maybe because of all the tin in the ground, no longer runs. Like desolate folk everywhere, my Mom moves about without panic in the gathering crisis.

We all ebb from the 4th St room and now we're on an unfamiliar street, and entering a building. This is a courtroom, I'm thinking. I don't ask any questions, probably because of the earlier rebuff. I don't seem to be able to speak with Mom.

This is a tin-in-the-ground, crap-on-the-surface sort of dream.