From 10-oct-1980

In a strange country, a sinking sort of dream...

I practice my serve with a fancy raquet and no ball. Perhaps it's a sporting goods store. An elaborate serve it is, too, with twists and turns in my motion and the raquet is engraved with names in the handle I don't recognize and no visible results anyway.

The upper quadrant of a shopping center parking lot, that's where I am, and there are splashed in the grass puddles in my day, an Escher woodcut; there is all eternity lurking, openings in the dark ground with no warning to let the unwary through to the lower level many feet below.

I enter a Mexican or European restaurant with my bike. I am known by the proprietors and cooks sitting at a small table on the upper level at the end of the bar. They offer to take me down to the dining area, and their table with one other, that one with a smiling grizzled character still seated, begins to descend before I am aboard the section of floor where the tables sit. It's a massive lift of twenty feet square or more. They just sit, the staff and the raffish one, for a new level to evolve.

At the other end of the bar is a doorway. I take that as just as well; work my bike along tables and feet -