CEX SUB CON

I’m at school, in a math class that I have been skipping for the past few months. My speech teacher, Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is-with-the-white-hair comes in to get something. She doesn’t say anything to me, or really even look at me, which bums me out because I have been skipping her class for at least two or three months now, too, and I have no intention of going back there. I wonder in my head how I’m able to pull this off, to skip these classes all the time and not get totally fucked up for it.

There’s a show, though, that I have to play. The sound-girl is wearing a white shirt and she has long, dark hair and glasses and she’s overweight. Another guy is playing keyboard and laptop for me (not Cale, though—this is some jocko dude) and I’m playing laptop and we’re supposed to do a total Stars of the Lid ripoff set. I don’t know what the venue is but it looks like a slightly smaller version of the room 606 & I played at ATP. There’s not that many kids in the room because we’re the opening band. The sound in the monitors keeps getting quieter and quieter and I try to compensate by turning things up on my mixer but it doesn’t seem to help. We’re sorta line-checking but all these kids start standing around looking at us and things are running late so we just kinda keep going and just figure we’re doing our set now. Which is a terrible idea, especially since we’re doing Stars of the Lid ripoff material. At some point during this first song, I walk out into the audience and hear that the music in the house is really, really quiet. The sound girl keeps getting up and leaving the desk and I keep asking her to turn up the sound, but every time she does it gradually gets quieter and quieter again in the monitors. I don’t remember how the show ends, but it does.

A little later, I get into an altercation of some sort with a trio of boho-hip-hop-at-the-height-of-boho-hip-hop looking folks—two dudes and a chick. One of the dudes has a kind of thugged-out do rag on, though. The chick looks just like an angrier Lauryn Hill. I don’t remember what the altercation was about, though. I deftly avoid getting my ass kicked by do-rag.

I have to go to a banquet, though. I don’t know if it’s a banquet about my dad, but he’s got something to do with it and that’s why I’m there. My sister and mom are there, too. There’s a lot of fancy-looking people seated on one side of a long banquet table with a white tablecloth-- so many that I can’t see t hem all. Most of them look old and rich, though. We eat good food and I act quiet and a little aloof, like I would at any type of event like this, family-related function. Then these stewardess/waiter-type people start pushing carts down on the other side of the banquet table, handing out these prizes or gifts to most of the people at the table. My sister gets some kind of weird toy bunny that’s still in the packaging. My dad gets some kind of really specific computer or printer adapter that I look at and wonder why this company or hospital or college or whatever organization is in charge of this gathering, why would they get something so weirdly specific? Like, it’s an adapter for a very specific type of printer. Most of these gifts are like this—consumer electronics seemingly randomly grabbed off the rack at Circuit City. A photographer is following behind the two or three cart-pushing waitress/steward gift-distributors, taking pictures of some people happily holding their prizes. He stops and tries to take a picture of my sister smiling with her eyes squinted shut holding this bunny in front of her face, but this older, white trash woman waddles behind her holding some giant stuffed animal—some grey Pokemon-looking thing. She’s trying to get in the picture and the photographer is holding off on taking it because he doesn’t want her in it, but she seems to be pretty oblivious to this. An old lady is washing her hands at a sink behind me and saying something about it, making disparaging remarks about my father. He is being himself, friendly and laughing, and I don’t understand why he doesn’t do something about this bitchy old woman. The old woman is wearing a pink old-lady suit, and muttering about my dad. I get really pissed. Then I hear the people to my right talking shit about my dad, too. I turn and realize that sitting one person away from me is the boho-hip-hop trio. I look at them for a second then put both of my middle fingers in their faces and say, “Fuck you, you shit-talkers. You don’t know my dad.” They get livid and insinuate that violence might happen but they get up and leave without doing anything.

I get up and run to the end of the banquet table, where there are stairs going down. There’s 3 railings in the stairway, and I hop on top of them and slide down the railings on my feet, sometimes having to jump to avoid breaks in the railings or switch my feet between different banisters. It’s a long, long stairway and people are going up and down it but I avoid them easily. I’m sliding down the rail so fast. There’s windows above my head and sunlight coming down on me. When I finally get to the bottom, I’m back in school and I run right towards this red school-door that’s in front of me. I push it open and there’s a little tiny paved path for janitorial vehicles that’s going across the side of the school, and then a grassy hill that’s really steep, then the curb and a real road. A black limo –a classy one, like a Rolls Royce, if they make limos—is sitting at the curb. The door opens from the inside. My dad is the one opening it. He tells me to get in, that we’ve got to get to the airport and get on our flight to go home. I get in.