Apparently, I can’t handle the truth.

Once upon a time in wakey-world, I cadged a place to sleep in the extraordinarily expensive kingdom of San Francisco with someone called Fredo whom I had met and befriended on LiveJournal. This was oh my! back when I met and befriended people, so 20 years ago maybe. I really liked him; he was also really pretty. In his personal history, as I recall, he had been a corpulent child and had carried a world of fat into his adulthood, shedding it only a few years before we met; it was my distinct impression that his self-image was still adjusting to the change of having recently become a strapping, athletic, naked yoga-doing, and beautiful young gay man in—well, paradise.

Told ya that to tell ya this: The guy that came to my room in my dream this morning was very much built out of Fredo: because historically there are precious few strapping, athletic, naked yoga-doing, and beautiful young gay men who have wanted me unrequitedly. But that’s what’s happening here: even while I appreciate how attractive he is, I am uninterested. I pretend to be sleeping when he comes in. I know he knows it’s pretend but I pretend anyway. We are in my library but it very much resembles a dorm room. One with bunk beds. He gets up and lies in the top bunk, flipping through an old magazine and joking, ‘I wish there was something to read here.’ Finally I engage him and offer him a more recent and/or more interesting magazine. I somehow blank on the name of a British new weekly, which is bland enough to excuse forgetting it—World News Report, I think—and list a couple others. Now that I’m actively interacting with him, however, he wants to eat. I offer him some leftover pasta, which seems really to be a fancy macaroni and cheese. He does not want this because he just had macaroni and cheese earlier in the day. I tell him I can make some other sort of pasta in some other sort of sauce. He suggests manicotti; I tell him I have neither manicotti nor anything to fill them with; but suggest I could run out and buy some groceries. He prefers restaurant manicotti, which is fine by me.

By the time we are leaving, however, he is no longer this Fredo-based NCP but Paul, who has suggested we grab a bite before—I’m not sure but let’s just assume based on historical data that we’re going to see naked men. (June 20, IRL, is the 24^th anniversary of the night we met, in a Baltimore joint whither we each had gone to see naked men.) So we head downstairs toward the main egress of the apartment building. Mabel, the doorwoman, is issuing residents out and she has a unique word for each—including admonishing one of them for some recent and questionably ethical act. She is an Edna Garrett sort of character, everybody’s moral mainstay, affectionate with everyone but never stinting to correct a grievous failing or misstep. Anyway, once a half dozen other residents filter out, Paul approaches Mabel with spritely step to return her affection. But she points out that the elevator has just come and we should run for it. Only we’re heading out the front door. For the sake of sense, then, let’s assume the front door has just arrived and we need to scoot through it before it goes away again. We scoot.

Oh wait, maybe it was an elevator. I’m so confused. We come out not on the street but in a large public hall—a ballroom or larger meeting room in a convention center or hotel—where many small tables are set up in a grid with breakfast foods on them. I think: I thought we were going out for breakfast but I stand corrected without saying anything to Paul. Anyway, I'm hungry and there’s plenty of food here.

Except the big room and the many tables inexplicable morph into six or seven tables comprising three sides of a rectangular buffet against a wall. Originally the rectangle was closed and one could peruse only the exterior in search of one’s food; more recently, however, one of the tables was removed, allowing the hungry to enter the interior and browse from there. This modification to the buffet arrangement is explicitly labeled as a GAMECHANGER. In a typical dream frustration, however, I find nothing in particular that I want to eat; and when I finally do spot something that looks appetizing, I can’t get to it because Jack Nicholson is in the way.

This goes on way too long. Paul notices I am close to losing my shit and ushers me outside where I eat some plastic.

‘What was that?’ he says.

‘Random bit of plastic wrap,’ I say.

‘You don’t know where that’s been,’ he says.

‘It’s still prolly safer than sucking a random cock,’ I say.