Late last night and earleye this morning

I am playing hearts with four other people, two men and two women—don't ask me how five people play hearts; it's not real hearts anyway, as the deck we're dealing from contains at least three regular poker decks, maybe four, and shuffling is a shared ordeal each time. It is obviously impossible to shoot the moon when you don't even know how many hearts exist in a hand. Nobody seems bothered by this.

The two men are almost certainly Tonys DiNozzo Junior and Senior;

the women are NPCs—I knew them slightly last night but don't know them now. Everyone is dressed up fancily for nightlife and while we're at our card table we appear to be in a jazz club. Between hands, however, I have to make a toilet run. I push the table slightly forward and it rolls or skids fractiously into Robert Wagner's ribcage, threatening to spill all our drinks. He is only slightly huffy about this; still, I do not like making Robert Wagner huffy. I make a note to be careful of the overly touchy table when I return, then head across the club to the Men's room...

...which is on the other side of the garden center, or perhaps public banquet facility, with "outdoor" garden areas for wedding rentals and such—though "outdoor" and "indoor" are hardly meaningful since the change from one to the other happens much more gently and organically than the usual business of traversing doors.  While I am on a broad wooden deck strewn with autumn leaves and dappled with late sunlight, horses idling in my brain if not elsewhere, I remember that Renée asked me to pick a song to sing with her, just one, for the upcoming occasion we're both invited to. In real life this would almost certainly be "Babes in the Wood"...

...which Renée and I have known since 1987 or '88; here, however, the song we've decided upon appears to be something different. Moreover it is represented as a physical object—a tote bag, folded and stowed among many tote bags, presumably all representing songs. I pull out the not-quite-Babes in the Wood bag, unfold it, and examine it. Yes, this will do.

Returning from the bathroom to the card game is a longer affair as I must circumnavigate the enormous amphitheater, which is simultaneously a dramatic stage and a water park show tank, the sort of place humans line up to get splashed by a fellow mammalian predator almost as deadly as they. The seating area is correspondingly a mélange of staid, plush theater seats and outsize resin half-shell thingies, looking like nothing so much as rows of upturned contact lenses and painted a garish aquamarine.

I fear I have dawdled, with my song-bag reverie, and so now I sprint back toward the card table, spameloping deftly up and down sets of steps and around discrete sections of contact lenses; I take this auditorium like a known and practiced obstacle course—though my brain registers a warning: "You sha'n't be doing THIS sort of thing for long, Methuselah!"—all the way over to the back corner, where my company has hiked their card table up enormously high on a hydraulic rig. I'm not even certain it is my table; I need to get up that high to make sure it's my party; so I start to climb... and what do you know, we have a Fear of Heights Dream™—like inane stories about "chosen ones," they just never stop making these. I eventually persuade my company to come back down to a reasonable altitude, but it is no matter. The card game is over.

Much later, after many forgotten adventures, I have gotten extensively tattooed, across my entire (ventral) thorax and both arms—not exactly sleeves, but pretty crowded. I have buyer's remorse. It was apparently Marya who convinced me to decorate myself so—it is not clear to what extent the ink is her design, but it's certainly not all her original drawing—and while looking around the bedroom for lost garments—an Herculean labor given that the bedroom is strewn knee-deep with discarded garments—I contemplate making a public statement. It was of course my decision to have myself tattooed but I blame Marya anyway, loftily, in public, before all our friends. To her credit, she is having none of that bullshit; yet it's clear she is personally upset that I do not like the results of her art direction.

James approaches me shortly thereafter with helpful information about the shipping lines of tattoo ink and how—though the tattoos I already have a permanent—how I might prevent further tattooing by disrupting the ink shipments. He has a box of spent ink canisters, like oversize fountain pen cartridges; there is perhaps a scheme to substitute these for new cartridges, a great train robbery sort of caper. It seems sensible; James is always a font of useful information and good ideas.

And then we have wakeys.