Here Comes the Thud

Thanks to the hubby I've been watching a bodacious amount of The Good Wife lately. I missed most or all of Season 1 but got drawn in early in Season 2. I really enjoyed the second and third seasons, despite the tendency of the show to hang far too much emotional and dramatic weight on the ridiculous, universal sin of infidelity. "Fer chrissake shut up and litigate," I found myself saying.

But then... last night... Season 4 Episode 8, "Here Comes the Judge". Or maybe "Here Comes the Judd".

By far the worst episode I've seen so far. In terms of plotting and dialog, it's hard to fathom a more likely explanation than that the writers all decided to try bath salts on the same day.

First we have a judge who is advertised as "playing it by the book"—this is coming from Kalinda, an investigator whose time in court is limited, so this judge must have a seriously loud reputation for being straitlaced—but who nonetheless engages in a drunken tirade in a public bar, hollering before witnesses that Will Gardner is going to lose the case he, Judge Straitlace, is currently adjudicating. Also that Mr. Gardner is a liar and a thief who doesn't deserve to practice law ever again. Ok, we learn later that Judge Straitlace just got divorced and fell off the wagon, so now it's a free-for-all.

We have Mr. Gardner and co-counsel planning and calling for an independent judicial review of that judge's obvious bias—without once considering that it might aid their case to call the main witness to the judge's tirade, a woman, incidentally, with whom Mr. Gardner was once involved. (Are there any women in the legal profession in Chicago with whom Mr. Gardner was not once involved?) We have Mr. Gardner finally—after a courtroom reversal makes everybody go "duh!"—approaching that witness... and having sex with her before mentioning he and Justice both need her help.

We have the universally idiotic walking contrivance of "tow-truck magnate Nick Savarese" a.k.a. "Mr, Kalinda" a.k.a. "Hey let's remake Clockwork Orange!", obsessing on Cary Agos, absolutely dead certain Mr. Agos is sleeping with his wife.

And we have insipid side-plots involving each of the Florrick teens:

(1) Zach successfully lies about his identity to take a volunteer IT job at his dad's campaign headquarters—and nobody recognizes him as the candidate's son. The newly hired IT boss pleads with Eli Gold because she really, really needs this one specific high-school kid IT volunteer to, I dunno, hack the Pentagon or some shit—but he won't stay. Of course, once Mr. Gold finds out it is Zach, now Zach really, really wants to stay, but he's afraid to even ask his mom about helping out at Dad's HQ. Because for some reason both parents treat the campaign trail with the same child-protective horror as an opium den, alligator pit, or witness box at an organized crime trial.

(2) For no reason and with no convincing in-show rationale, Grace obsesses on a boy at school whose girlfriend, also called Grace, just killed herself. "It's sad but I'm good," she tells her mom on the phone—a typical utterance, as if this wildly privileged, coddled, and engaged private school teen has never learned any polysyllabic adjectives. Even if we concede the moronic premise that this human child of normal(ish) intelligence is worrying, "Hey, my name is Grace too! That could have been me!", the sequitur is ridiculous: in the space of a few days she stalks the boy, accosts him, befriends him, BFFs him, SWFs him, invites him to her house, asks him about the sex he used to have with Dead Grace in the bushes and whether that's what he intends with her (Live Grace). And possibly takes up smoking cigarettes.

And through all this insulting rubbish there is not a bit of acting required of the luminous Ms. Julianna Margulies to relieve the painful stupidity of the episode.

The Way of the World (not Congreve) at Folger

Let's get this out of the way up front: At no point in its first act does The Way of the World—"A new comedy adapted from the play by William Congreve" playing at Folger Theatre through February 11—threaten to turn into a good play. Its satire is broad and obvious—if it even is satire; the word "whinging" seems more apt. Its characters (seven filthy rich persons summering in the Hamptons) seem types—or perhaps price tags—rather than persons. Its observations on class seem tired and rote, as if the playwright, Theresa Rebeck, admitted defeat at the outset on that particular windmill duel. Its appeals to social media for zeitgeist hipness have pretty much the same effect on the comedy as Botox has on the face. Its attempts at pathos—largely in the eighth character, an unnamed "Waitress" who serially addresses the audience as a sort of tour guide to income inequality—might as well have the character reciting the words "I really want your empathy, please." A little later, there's a deus ex machina involving that same waitress, a casual hook-up with Henry, and stolen baubles that is just insultingly, inexcusably sophomoric.

(Oh, and its costuming is ostentatiously weird. Not the play's fault.)

At more than one moment in act one the flagstone cast member, Kristine Nielsen as "Aunt Renée", appears to be "doing" Charlotte Rae as Edna Garrett in The Facts of Life. This is certainly not to cast shade at Ms. Rae (who still treads the Earth with us, BTW) or the much-beloved television program she helmed, which managed to transcend pablum on numerous occasions. But to be blunt, there is nothing in Aunt Renée's attempts to avoid certain abhorred words for her increasing age and weight that hasn't run rampant through popular entertainments since at least 1979 when The Facts of Life first aired—and more likely 1879. Sure, there are some genuine laughs peppered throughout; it's just that, at opening night Tuesday, it felt oddly like all the laughs had been laughed before.

The play concerns Mae, an incongruously principled heiress who wants to donate her $600 million trust toward the salvation of Haiti; her bonne vivante but pathologically insecure aunt; and Henry, the amoral young Lothario who has recently boinked them both. Throughout most of the play, as they used to say, "She'll none of him" for both values of "she"; and the central conflict is clearly about getting Mae to have at least some of him. This entails Henry deputizing the handsome and dashing (and gay) Lyle to "distract" Aunt Renée, leaving Mae ripe for recapture.

The problem with this central conflict is that who gives a fuck. It is unclear whether Rebeck intends to endow Henry with any more redeeming quality than the capacity to have a crush on somebody. If she does, it doesn't quite work: he's pretty unambiguously a shitheel. If she does not, I have to wonder why we're watching a play about his woes. Honestly, does a redemption story even count if the redeeming quality is "not being the biggest shitheel on stage"?

Anyway. Meanwhile, a gaggle of technically adult humans—Charles, Reg, Katrina, and the aforementioned Lyle—spend their idle hours (that is, their only hours) in gossip and backbiting, little of which is particularly clever. 

Of these, Charles in particular borders on stereotype: he is forthrightly a fashion queen—which is fine. There lies within all things a grain of truth. Who doesn't know a fashion queen or two? But he is also "gay man hopelessly in love with his straight friend". We know he is the latter because people in his circle will keep telling him this is the case—not, alas, because we are ever presented with textual or emotional evidence of his tortured, unrequited mooning. "I got drunk and let you suck me off once," Henry chides him, at which point any self-respecting gay man ought to have replied, "...That you remember" or "Oh, that was you?" or "You and 418 other straightbois" or "Yeah, and you're the one who insists on talking about it. What, are you waiting for a Yelp review?"

This tired predicament might broach iconoclasm if the character of Charles went anywhere, learned anything, or even—call me crazy—took a militantly "Yes I fucking am in love with Henry. My emotional train wreck is performance art. Fucking deal with it" position. Nope. Poor widdle sad faggot Charles just stands there as friend after friend explains how pathetic he is. Well, so he is. So, in fact, are all these people.

Even worse, given a and b above, is c = Rebeck allowing her Henry to upbraid Charles for his invisible torch without mocking or even noting the fact that he, Henry, spends most of the play energetically pursuing someone who similarly deigned just once to fuck him and now wants him not just gone but gone gone.

Now I warrant you: in this sort of piece the modern playwright is up against the shadows not only of Congreve but of Wilde and Moliere and Albee and Guare, and them's some fierce fucking shadows to measure up to. Nonetheless, I sat there disappointed that scene after scene failed to measure up to the wit or emotional depth of Sex and the City.

Imagine my surprise when, most of the way through the second act, the play—and the character of Renée—abruptly grew up. In the space of a single scene, a confrontation between Renée and Henry that starts and ends quietly but contains all the screams of the damned, Ms. Rebeck goes all in—and wins the pot. It is breathtaking to watch. No offense to Luigi Sottile, who plays Henry, but apart from the author it is Ms. Nielsen who really pulls off this coup: with this scene—and then again in the play's final scene—she complicates her character, and the play's character, tenfold. One minute she is a near-cartoon who, in attempting to seduce a gay man, misuses the phrase amuse bouche; the next she is a woman of immense dignity, anger, passion, self-doubt, joy, regret, and survival instinct. The shift in tone is palpable. It is almost but not quite violent enough to capsize the play—it certainly casts some shame on the hour and a half of blithely caustic bitchery that preceded it. But that really salvages the whole from mediocrity. The play ends in uncomfortable ambiguity, its lackluster comedy dragged back from Hades by a glint of deadly serious drama.

Goodbye, Columbus

I am at work before leaving for Columbus, Ohio, for an extended weekend or even longer a "vacation"—as if such things existed anymore. My office is completely unlike my waking office but resembles the bowels of a House of Representatives office building I once tempted at. The last thing I need to do before going is to contact V—. (I swear his name changes 418 times throughout the following, but on waking I can't remember anything about the main one except it began with 'v'. So this dream guest stars Tom Pynchon.) For some reason the preferred method of contacting V— is fax. So I fax him a thing.

Like the office, Dream Columbus has little to do with real Columbus. In this case there is an old town that functions much like Colonial Williamsburg as a "living history" attraction; indeed, I peruse a map that shows a main entry gate with access via tram from parking lots. The attraction area is a vast semi-open plaza, maybe a city block wide and three blocks long, with small permanent or semi-permanent structures dotted throughout, like concessions, "in this historic building" buildings, and so forth. The city has its regular residents as well, and they are very much in evidence—the commerce here is surprisingly universal, not "tourist shopping" versus "resident shopping".

I am sure I enjoyed myself in Columbus but that's not the point of this story. The fun begins when I make to leave. I say goodbye to the acquaintances I have made and depart the general store to head out to the airport. On the way to the "metro", I mentally say goodbye to all the sights I have grown to love. It occurs to me: I really want to move to Columbus! The architecture Brain provides is aggressively quirky: here's a bright blue 5-story building with stylized (non-functional) flying buttresses; right next door is a slightly shorter library with a terra cotta rotunda. The cityscapes and vistas are just gorgeous. It's like the majority of public and commercial buildings were designed to be eye candy! I realize just how familiar all these wildly decorative buildings have become: I used to admire them every day but now I realize they are just background. I make myself stop and appreciate them anew.

Like an idiot, I miss my stop on the rail line; unfortunately, that means I end up crossing the river. (Here Cbus bears a slight resemblance to Dream San Francisco, with its vast network of high-speed freeways looping around the Bay approach, 200 feet in the air.) Now I'm going to be late for the flight home and probably miss it. Dammit.

I get off at the next rail station and immediately attempt to get from the eastbound to the westbound platform. It is impossible to do so. On the westbound side to get from ground level to the platform one must climb a series of concrete abutments protruding from one wall; but the abutments get wider and closer to the opposite wall the higher up one gets, and at a certain point my ribcage is too wide to go further. I go back down and start asking people how in the hell one is meant to get to the westbound platform—obviously I am missing something. I can also see not one but two lines of humans, scores or hundreds of them, queued up as if waiting for the platform to be accessible.

Absolutely no one can explain how one boards a westbound train at this station. One guy emphatically insists the only way up is the climb that proved too narrow.

While I am contemplating my problem, a woman in one of the queues starts to sing. Some folky traditional tune, possibly an outback campfire song because she sounds either Aussie or Kiwi. We exchange pleasantries and talk about folk music. Somehow she turns into a Brit by the end of the scene, and I realize very belatedly her companion is actually an American. Are they even traveling together? Possibly they have just made each other's acquaintance. I ask him how long they have "been over here" then realize the question likely doesn't make sense.

My phone squeaks at me asking whether I want to check in for my flight.

I'm still at the rail station and looking for assistance or information. There are some young savage-as-fuck punks hanging around; some have skateboards, but the one who engages me does not. He is in his early 20s, blond, large frame, wearing a skirt and looking a little gladiatorial. He looks like William Seed.

And he is an asshole whose entire purpose in engaging me it to point out that he has no intention of helping me or providing any information. I try an extra gambit or two to get him to help because (a) I need help and (b) his physical presence is commanding and pleasant; but finally I am frustrated by his pointed dick-being and I call him a cunt. Repeatedly. As I depart the station, which now appears to be St. Pancras in London, I'm still hollering at him that he's a cunt. But he appears not to have even noticed; he was too busy mocking me himself to hear me calling him a cunt. So I go back to the station so I can call him a cunt some more.

This time he hears me and it is clear he means to punish me for it. I think he means to pound me, but instead he pulls a weird doodad out of malletspace, puts it to his lips, and begins singing darts at me. The first one hits just inside my right eye and sticks there, near the bridge of my nose. It is needle-thin and merely stings a bit. The possibility of poison doesn't even occur to me. Dude sings several more darts my way but I manage to duck most of them. I flee.

I find another west-bound conveyance and I board it, thinking it is a train. It is not. It is a bus. I am not sure I have cash for the fare, but driver does not ask for fare anyway. The bus travels scary-fast through wild mountainous countryside (Cbus is nowhere in sight throughout), into and out of tiny tunnels that look like they couldn't possibly fit the bus; and it finally drops me in a sci-fi landscape in which various huge machines moving around through fields and hills. Some of them look vaguely like this:


The entire time I've been in Cbus I cannot find any contact information for V— and it is stressing me out. I believe I am supposed to deliver a revised version of the thing I faxed him before I left but I can't find the fax number or any other datum. I check everything I can think of on my phone: recent incoming and outgoing calls, texts, social media, even my photos.

A guy who is almost but not quite Mark McKinney is looking at my photos and videos over my shoulder. I have some recently shot videos of a street performance in the "living history" area, with performers dancing in elaborate costumes and headdresses (also puppets). NotMark says, "Those are great shots. Who's the terrific animator?" I scour his face for several seconds to see if he's kidding, but he's perfectly deadpan. I tell him, "Actually, these are all live action" and he immediately "No duhs" me. I hate humans.

Somewhat later and without any context, I am exploring a garage or workshop alone. I am under some obligation to do what I am doing, which is climb (again through narrow spaces) up onto a platform in the center of the room where lies some crucial machinery. It looks like a carnival ride and a mad scientist's laboratory had a love child. At the last stage of my climb, I knock a large glass jar to the floor; it breaks and I decide to leave it. I realize this is at least the second time I have caused property damage in my travels through Cbus. (Cannot remember exactly what the first time was, but.)

I exit through a heretofore untried door and into an alley. I know that the broken jar matters to somebody—but nobody will know it was me. The back alley is unfamiliar to me; it is the space between a dozen or more domiciles, many of the residents of which are hanging out in their backyards. I aim to look like I belong there, and like I know where I'm going. I do not. I head the wrong way. Will I have to make a conspicuous about-face? Or is there a narrow alley to the street? Never mind, because en route I encounter a woman I know and she sets me up on some sort of repair work. She has a sort of spider or snarl made out of old TV antennae, and she tells me it is completely in the wrong shape and can I fix it for her? I mess around with the contraption on the hood of her car for a while. I never really get anywhere with it.

I go back to the hotel. I have missed my flight, which was actually last night, so I am definitely staying an extra day at least. I realize it's almost a day since Paul expected me home and I haven't called him. I need to do that first! Also I have not alerted the front desk I'm staying an extra day—but they haven't kicked me out. I expect this incoming call on the hotel phone is the front desk hollering at me, but it is only a cold marketing call.

If it's not apparent, my failure to make my flight and, worse, to contact V— about work stuff hangs like a sword of Damocles throughout everything described above. It was a stressful night. Holidays, I guess.

Moving Picture Shows

It's the morning I am to start my fill-in job as the acting principal of some public school or other; so of course I wake up at 4:30 a.m.—which is too early—and then not again until 8:15, which is too late. Even worse: when I get there I am asked by the administrative staff to sign off on three copies of two forms—as is always the case in movies, she flips through pages and points to lines to be signed, and I trust she knows what she is doing. Alack! Flash-forward to later in the day, and here's  my boss (presumably the Superintendent of Schools or some shit, but he's really a combination of my Chisanbop boss, Dizzy Warnacek, and Clarence Fendley (the wondrous Anton Lesser) from The Hour, Series 1) calling me out for signing all those forms that had been prepared wrong. He is profoundly and vocally disappointed that I didn't even bother to check the information on them before affixing my

Then there is the added stress that this same preliminary day of my school gig is also the day of the Best-Picture Nominee Marathon at the AMC Theater. I have a ticket and I'll be damned if I'm going to let it go to waste. I walk into the darkened theater, heading up to the nosebleed seats, running over in my mind how I can possibly make this work—juggling movie watching and my principalnik duties. My phone is already lighting up.

It is a phenomenally dumb idea. Hhow did I think it would work?

Anyway, a movie comes on, one I've been looking forward to. It's a Coen Bros flick in which two men kidnap an old(ish) woman and hang her upside down "until she talks"; though what she's supposed to talk about I can't remember. Where she hid the gold, say, or who actually Killed the Great Chefs of Europe. The movie is rife with American roots music, as was O Brother Where Art Thou and, to a less exuberant extent, True Grit. The woman is the hero, of course: she is smarter, more honest, and more moral than her captors—but she is also a world-class dick and her verbal vitriol is breathtaking.

Much later, Paul & I are attending a play, which turns out to be Hello, Dolly! But since I have never actually seen Hello, Dolly! I don't even realize this until some old guy's recitative late in the show leading into the title song. The show runs longer than we expected and we have another obligation after. Paul needs to go, and for some reason he needs to talk about going, but he talks way too loud while the show is still onstage, which is egregious behavior and so I try to shush him and we end up arguing way, way the fuck too audibly. And he leaves alone in a huff.

I wait for the show to end and I try to leave—but I have to wait for the concessions counter to reconfigure or transform into egress stairs. I had just glimpsed an elderly woman with limited mobility being helped down one set of special "assistive" stairs, but then the whole thing gets set back to its concession-counter configuration and I have to wait until the next drawbridge. Meanwhile the cast are now milling about and hobnobbing with the audience; I worry that I will be pegged as "that asshole talking loudly during the show".

When I finally get out of the theater I go back to the cinema for another movie: this one is a grim drama about a middle-aged couple in trouble: Frances MacDormand and some guy she's been with forever. All through the movie we see little bits of evidence that the relationship is moribund; each sour retort and miscommunication stings a little bit more and lingers longer, like a birthday paddling. Late in the picture Frances's character sings (yes, it's a grim drama with music; surely you've heard of Sondheim) a solid, affecting aria on the couple's symptoms of malaise, including a pun on the French word 'tous' in which the order of vowels—tous, tuos; perhaps quibbling on 'duos'?—somehow, jibing with the aforegone plot, indicates guilt shared among both parties. Toward the end of the song she manifests anger and selfishness as literal monsters, drawing them on a store front window with greasepaint crayon while singing about their Godjiran destructiveness.

Later that afternoon, I am hanging around the shop (not the school, BTW) and in the back of my mind is the fact that I have to go home to fetch the library book that must be returned today. Fortunately John Furbush (who in real life I haven't seen in 30 years) arrives to deliver my new convertible. It is a tiny thing, probably lighter than a lot of motorcycles, the "interior" just big enough to fit a single person in, like a go-cart; only it is crazy-fast and just gorgeously maneuverable. I immediately take it out for a spin on the downtown city streets; and I am having such a great time driving around, weaving effortlessly among larger, stodgier traffic, that I forget the hour and my library obligation. When I remember, it is too late; the library will have already closed.

Back at the shop, a coworker clues me in—too late this time, I guess, but next time I'll know better—that the library actually has a mobile pick-up service. He uses it all the time, he tells me, while I peruse the collection of books he himself has out on loan from the library. He is a polymath the likes of which I've never known. He is the Professor on Gilligan's Island, except he knows more: he would never, even for an episode, get relegated to "and the rest".

My perusal of his current collection expands and diffuses until I am wandering around the shop, looking curiously at everything. The place is dimly lit and filled with wonderful treasures of, well, near antiquity. Mostly the stuff seems to be authentic versions of crap that would eventually inspire gimcrack steampunk gimcrack. My survey of these wondrous wares gets stuck looking at a Shakespeare play in progress in the middle of the shop, which is now done up to look like the interior of a rustic cabin (think Rubeus Hagrid's place). 

The play is called This Day and Age (no relation to the Cecil B DeMille epic of 1933). The protagonist, a rural gentleman, is attempting to extract information regarding his wife—presumably an indiscretion thereof—from his manservant. The latter is a clown character whose attention wanders pathologically: he does not appear to be cravenly evading the question of his master's wife's fidelity; rather he seems earnestly incapable of keeping on topic when something else occurs to him. This makes for a very funny scene, toward the end of which the protagonist manages, with dire warnings, to keep his servant on topic for several Socratic questions running, and just as the latter is about to spill the real dirt on the lady of the house, with the master on the edge of his seat, the servant suddenly apologizes profusely for not considering how hungry his master must be and would he like some mutton? The master collapses into exasperation; and our stories collapse into an actual Sunday morning.

Home Movie Marathon

The first movie, which seems so long ago now, was an adventure story. It was about two men escaping from a deep underground cave: one is the antagonist, whose treachery and cruelty are matched only by his breathtaking physical presence;

the other man is at least sometimes me, even though I am also the audience. In the climactic reel, the two men are climbing up through a narrow passageway toward the surface. Despite my knowing the story, having seen this movie before, this time through the reel it is snowing heavily in the cave, obscuring all view of what is going on. Stupid projectionist!

What must happen in the story, eventually, is that the cruel man betrays his companion and leaves him to die. It is never made clear why he does this; perhaps he is just a psychopath. I know that the cruel man, leading the ascent to the surface, pisses on the other man from above, which, in certain company and certain context, is considered an impolite thing to do—though not usually fatal. The climactic betrayal may actually entail the antagonist suffocating his companion with his penis, but my memory may be faulty. In either case, though, Brain came up with it, so. Murder by blow job.

The next movie is a 1970s drama about disaffected rich folk: hints of Tennessee Williams here. In this one I am the sullen, alcoholic daughter of a bitterly dissatisfied, alcoholic mother. I want to say she is played by Karen Black but that is probably wishful thinking. 

In any case, Mother and I have a major cinematic fight—no recollection what it's about, but that hardly matters; the point is pathological unhappiness eating itself. Our fight ends with me unloading a devastatingly harsh zinger and storming out. Or rather, trying to storm out: it seems our mansion in this movie is a ridiculously dream-pomo split-level affair. There are broad-rising, white-carpeted "stairs" between any given pair of rooms. I stumble on these risers as I make my exit, which ruins an otherwise perfectly good flounce.

Shortly thereafter, Mother decides to commit suicide. I decide to let her. She has OD'ed on something—doubtless an elixir from amidst her vast array of designer mood scripts—or has otherwise laid herself out [I want to say on a day bed but she's really kinda sprawled on an awning of some kind—indoor-outdoor are mixed up here]. 

I discover her, still alive but not long for this world. I have just begun to slip away discreetly, never to hear from her again when I hear a maintenance man nearby, one of the familiar grounds crew; and sure enough he spies Mother and yells for me to stop and come back. I worry here that he had observed me observing Mother in her distressed state—that he knows I fully intended to passively assist her suicide. But I don't worry about it that much; he is, after all, the help and so can be dealt with.

Segue is very vague and we may be in a completely different movie, but in the next scene I am cleaning up improbable objects. It is evening and the store [a sort of old-fashioned, log-framed general store] is about to close; I worry that I am taking too long and the old woman in charge will be angry. She is ill-tempered in general, but tonight she does not give me grief as I go about my indecipherable cleanup business. I am carrying cylindrical canisters of some sort, perhaps once containing oxygen; now they are empty and must be recycled. I should know but cannot remember where the recycling is. I head out a back door to a kind of loading dock or maintenance area, and indeed there are bins here for refuse and recycling. 

There are also a few exterior doors, at one of which two other humans, probably store employees, are carrying a heavy load outside. They need to run out and come right back in once they've deposited their whatever-it-is; but they cannot figure out how to unlock the door or prop it open, so I offer to stand there momentarily and let them back in. 

Another of the exterior doors is a garage-door-size portal: it is open now and bright light and bustling sound come through. I walk over to see what is going on out there and I see a vast warehouse-type space (indoor-outdoor are mixed up here) that has been portioned off with ropes and canvases like a flea market; only the main purpose of the individualized spaces here appears to be social, not commercial: families and friend groups are set up and, it seems, tailgating. I am not sure there is a particular occasion being celebrated—probably this is a typical Friday night.

The whole concept of partitioning spaces off like this gives the OCD and/or autism spectrum aspect of Brain a hard-on. I want to rent a huge space and make a huge blanket fort, with tunnels and secret entrances. Also, part of me wants to get in a tarped-off space and have ironic, barren, species-disdainful sex, with oblivious humans partying on all sides, just a few feet away.

I wander some more. It now appears to be several hours earlier than it was a while ago: the sun is lowering but still offers plenty of light. The west lawn adjacent to the store (First Baptist Church, Egg Harbor City, N.J./Merritt Square Mall, Cocoa, Fla./Colonial Williamsburg Governors Palace kitchen gardens) currently hosts an enormous vehicle of some sort: it is basically a carnival big-top on wheels, with mesh or otherwise transparent walls. There are groups of people partying inside, so similar to the warehouse space I just examined that I have to check whether it's not the same space; whether a trick of perspective has fooled me into thinking this space is different. But no, the geometry of my recent footsteps convinces me this is a different party after all. And I see now it is a decidedly smaller space. This party is bound in its own weird and glorious vehicle for a folkfest of some kind.

It is a new movie. I am out with Fomo and two other friends; perhaps we are wassailing. We visit a house that is at least partly 94 Wilbur Street in Newark, but none of us live here. The residents here are all women, and we are having a fun time visiting; spirits are bright and we are all joking and laughing—until a particularly vindictive resident shows up. She clearly despises us, every one, and she turns her attention on each of us sequentially, running through each's litanies of sins, all of which appear to be based in sexism, toxic masculinity, and sexual microviolence. I parry her verbal attack with what I think is a decent comeback (now lost), but obviously none of us are to be permitted any further cordiality in this house, so let's go let's go to Benares.

We head down the stairs; Dorothy and Dan are on the lower landing; they have heard the preceding vituperation and offer a modicum of sympathy. Full-voice I address the assemblage at large: "It's so great visiting a house where people I love live with people who hate me." Somebody, possibly Dodo, asks "Why do they hate you, though?" and the implication is they have every right to. The implication is that I am a rapist, and of course I worry that I might actually be.

A buzzed-cut platinum blond punk rock chick comes up the stairs giving me so much similar shit as her housemate had, moments ago. Fuck this fucking shit. I tell her she is an asshole and shove her, lightly, at the top of her chest: it is minimal violence but it is still violence; and it's wholly non-sexual yet I still fear it promotes the general sexual accusation. Since rape has nothing to do with sex anyway.

I leave the house alone, heading down several long flights of wood plank stairs. The later ones are in crazy disrepair: most of them are turned completely at right angles so I have to step gingerly on each with the balls of my feet. Brain often sets these Wacky-Shack obstacle courses for me to run, and I run them joyfully.

Onto the street. It is night now.

For some reason, Maury Levy from The Wire is driving me around to look at real estate. At one point I recognize a house on a hill on the corner and think that we and the house are all in Wharton Park. "No," Maury says, "But you already made that connection, just a little while ago, and you sang a rhapsody and hailed a storm about it." I vaguely remember. In any case, this is not my beautiful house.

Maury lets me out and I have to go get my own car. These are city streets now and I am retracing my path to the historic guardhouse/one room schoolhouse-looking structure where Renee Hayes used to work. I know I left my car, legally parked, in front of this building. As I'm approaching my car, however, I see someone is getting into it and preparing to drive it away: this is Sharon Church from Chisanbop. I wonder what the hell she is doing. But as I head around the car to confront her at the driver door, I see now she is merely driving a transparent plastic conveyance that might have contained my car at some point, but not now. At present I can see my car (which is now a little kid's big wheel-looking toy) through her transparent buslike vehicle. It is Sunday night, so I ask her whether she is starting a route now or just taking it for a school bus route in the morning.

Lastly and most alarmingly, I am in the D.C. Metrorail system with a lot of strangers. We have all gotten off trains but are being held on the platform for unclear reasons. No one is giving us any information; indeed, no Metro employees or authorities are visible, nor have they been for a disturbingly long time. We are being held in the station with locked steel grates. At length I decide to raise a ruckus: I stand at the grate and holler "HEY!" as loud as I can. After a few iterations this gets somebody's attention, because someone hollers back, "Keep it down!"

I decide I need to keep hollering "HEY!" until someone actually shows up. And if they show up and refuse to let us out I will keep hollering "HEY!" in their face until they do. This actually seems like a fine idea! Why didn't 900,000 Jews at Treblinka think of it?

Unfortunately I'm really only hollering "HEY!" at Paul.

How long has it been, anyway?

This is a large, sprawling, maze-like house (Brain really has no interest in simple architecture) and it has been repurposed as an antique store. The displays are both commercial and artistic, with lots of places where the shopper may rearrange large quantities of things—tiles, books, etc.—in decorative ways.

I am engaged in just such rearranging, at a shelf of tiny hardcover books, when somehow—perhaps by no more elaborate means than promotion or externalization of an interior monologue—I am now being questioned in Socratic dialog. The questioner is an attractive and authoritative middle-aged male who is at least in part a Fisher-Price Little Person. He is asking my opinions about socio-ethical stuff. Just now the dialog has come to: "So why do we teach our children [to share—toys, parental affection, etc.] in this fashion?"

The questioner is sitting behind a counter and across a large room, much larger than the cited house could accommodate; this space is more like a public accommodation, a bank or retail space or library. Despite the line of questioning, and despite the several other figures surrounding the questioner who are closely attending the exchange, there is no sense that the space is a courtroom or that this is in any way a civil or official proceeding.

My response to the childhood sharing question is an explicit confirmation of what my previous dialog (now lost) had suggested: We teach children to share so they don't end up killing each other. This response causes a real or imagined stir among the questioner's group, and I wonder, in quick succession, (1) whether my answer will convince the panel I am a sociopath; and (2) whether I am a sociopath. But hereupon the session peters out and the panel behind the counter disperse chaotically (think Alice mentioning Dinah to the caucus animals). I wander thither curiously—after all, it has not been explained why I was being questioned in the first place—but only a couple people remain and no one seems to remember I was being interviewed. In fact, they appear to be staffing a desk or counter in Morris Library, on the Lower Level, approximately where Government Documents used to begin.

So I wander the Lower Level, which here is mostly an office-and-cubicle maze resembling every newsroom ever depicted in the movies. I wander back through the T stacks (or where the T stacks were in the '90s). I see, and possibly exchange small talk with, some strangers. At one point I pass through a space I had already come through in the other direction, with a doorway whose door opens only maybe a foot wide, and I wonder, "How do large people even fit through here?" It didn't seem this narrow the first time through.

A short while later I am talking with the woman who has hired me back. We try to work out when I first left UD employ. How long has it been, anyway? Unfortunately it is not clear what year it is now or what year I left. Memory is tumultuous and unreliable. I consider it might be 10 years, or 13 years, or 17 years. (Note: IRL it has been 21 years and 1 month since I left my job in Hugh M. Morris Library at University of Delaware.) She notes the library contained a lot of physical books back then—much different than today.

Wandering the "stacks" morphs into wandering through a vast department store. Here I am scheduled to meet up with an old friend, possible Nathan Seney. I haven't seen him since he moved away and I've never met his two children, whom he's bringing along. He appears on cue—but 3 seconds before he does, another old friend shows up, and I am stuck acting out another reunion—this one with J.W., or possibly his son who is magically the same person his father was at his age (way more so than Yahweh and Jesus ever were), or possible Specimen (Aaron Michael Adams)—in any case, somebody with bleach-tipped hair with whom I was infatuated circa 1988. This guy is immediately physical—reunion means a lot of kissing—and he thus usurps the reunion I had been waiting for. By the time I can pause or cut short his reunion and turn my attention to [Nathan], the latter's sons have grown completely bored with waiting and have run off to play elsewhere in the store. Ok, fine, I don't get to meet them, but I have a nice reunion with their father anyway. 

Throughout this scene the identities of the two guys I'm reuniting with are slippery. Facial recognition is tumultuous and unreliable.

Some footage has been lost, but in the next surviving scene I am hanging out with two other guys [the social vibe is vaguely Matt Esterly and Dave Onuschak, but it's not really they]. Brain is still playing out a "since I left Newark" theme. We pause at a table on the sidewalk in front of a café–cum–party house. NotMatt goes into the café and NotDave sits down with me. He is agitated or anxious for reasons unknown. I pull out my pack of cigarettes and fetch out one for each of us; in the process of which, an unfiltered stub—not an extinguished butt, just a weird 1-inch-long tobacco fatty of unknown origin—falls out and into NotDave's lap. NotDave doesn't smoke much, but this is not the first time I've lit a cigarette for him. It may not even be the first time I've lit this cigarette for him. Time is tumultuous and unreliable.

After much more socializing and camaraderie, I'm left momentarily alone on a suburban lawn at dusk. It is almost but not quite Aunt Arlene's front lawn. Over by the house, I grab a (the?) decoratively etched metal disk—like a manhole cover but wider and nowhere near as heavy; I set it down on as flat a space in the lawn as I can find, sit down on it, and spin. (It feels much like spinning the car I had to myself on my recent twirl on the "Octopus" a.k.a. "Monster" a.k.a. "Spider" ride at Cedar Point, once the ride had stopped and my car was still up in the air.)

The guy I was most recently hanging out with comes back over: this one is apparently an ex-boyfriend. Brain appears to have modeled him on Chris, the beautiful Mediterranean-looking guy I waited tables with at Peppers and who later bartended at J.R.'s. He is cheerful and sweet. He tells me: "Don't wear that thing out, I'm gonna need to be spinning on it for years." We settle in to lounging together on the metal disk, in the process of which his short leather centurion's skirt opens, affording me ample space to rim him. He tells me he really missed me when I left town—how long has it been, anyway?—and that I definitely could have come back and "done that" to him at any time after my departure occasioned our breakup.

I had not suspected as much, and now that he tells me, I truly rue the missed opportunity. I do so while flitting through some sort of hippy bazaar in Newark—lots of beads and baubles and batiked scarves, incense burning everywhere—and through the Imaginary Deer Park—the one with a mall entrance on one side and a haunted house queue on the other side where the hostess table should be (just now empty)—and all the while, Brain is improvising a mid-tempo sugar-pop song whose refrain is "If it's not too late..."

Just now... well, before the hard-boiled eggs.

I am at a beach location, clearly a busy tourist area, but it doesn't feel like Florida. I think I remember somebody saying Texas. I wouldn't know what that feels like since I've never been to a beach in Texas. But here I am; I've been here a while, combining work and leisure, because despite being here to work on a proposal, there just hasn't been much to do. Something is funky about the proposal; we all think it's moribund or unwinnable or both but until something definitive happens we are bound to work it.

Walter and Don both dropped acid some time ago. At some point I hear Walter talking to someone he's just met about having "committed suicide" last year. I consider the oddness of using that phrase to mean an unsuccessful attempt—but he certainly committed an act, whether it was completed or not, so I decide the usage is fine. Walter appears to have been saved by a natural display of beauty that convinced him to live instead of die. The display was a sort of "aurora oceanis", an orange or salmon-colored show of lights dancing above the shoreline, caused by krill (Walter doesn't use this word and I don't think of it at the time, but it's clear from the color) that are borne on a cycle of subterranean water currents (as if the ocean continues under the land) and expressed into the air through evaporation of water near the shore. This phenomenon (doo doooo de doo doo) is not happening right now, but I either remember or imagine it happening, over yonder on that beach. Right behind the mountain range.

Geology is not Brain's strong suit.

I am aware of a group of young folk nearby talking about having had to repair an old junker, er, classic car, twice—seemingly just today. I am in something like an all-purpose room—church hall?—or waiting room, just eavesdropping. I don't think it is the put-upon car owners but some other group (including Darrius from NOLA) who are talking reverently about a "The Wire"-like television show with a popular but unofficial surname after a main character, something like "The Travels of Bobby Burma Shave". It's not that, but neither is it "The Travels of Jimmy McNutty". Whatever the show is, I *love* it and, hearing others gushing, now I want to binge re-watch, availing myself of all ephemera. I tell myself I need to shop online for "definitive companion" books, compendia of trivia, criticism and analysis.

I see Don walking past, heading down a side-arcade in a retail complex, and I call his name. It is the first time I've caught up to him since he dosed early in the day. I have conflicting feelings about Don (who is not quite Don Gordon, my deeply ill-advised unrequited love from Newark in the '90s). Mostly I cannot help finding him beautiful as a complete package: pretty, hippified, WSYWIG, even-keeled, thoughtful, mindful. If there ever was an argument for the existence of the human soul, it was Don. (Spoiler: there's not.)

After checking each other's wellness, he tells me with a hint of embarrassment that he'd like to consult the local papers for places to live—it's his first visit here and he already wants to move here. He tells me he has had a really nice trip but doesn't attempt to describe it. "I'm glad you got a chance to drop today," I tell him. (I myself did not dose.) "It was a gorgeous day." Indeed, it still is, with the light just beginning to dim. I'm still thinking about those salmon-colored lights and I wonder if Don has ever seen them. It would be great to see them while peaking.

Don mentions he was with or peripheral to the folks who needed to get the car fixed (just one of the two times). Then he wonders aloud how Bill (the boss) feels about the current solicitation. Does he just want it to be canceled by the customer so everyone can stop working on a losing bid? Yeah, Bill totally does want cancellation, I tell Don as we stroll around a green beachfront dorm-style building. That's what we all want, I tell him. Cancellation.