I'm at some fancy mansion in DC. It's kind of a fluke that I'm here, I don't feel worried about getting thrown out but I also don't really know what's going on except that there's some kind of social function and the D-Plan guys are here. I haven't seen them in years. I go into a room where I see Eric, say hi to him, he's kind of in the middle of talking to somebody else so I pretty much just slap his back and let him know I'm there and we should catch up. Julia Garner is also in this room and I'm surprised to find myself remembering we hooked up sometime in the past? I make a mental note to see what awards that one other famous actress I know I hooked up with has won. Julia is friendly but it's clear she's stressed out about something personal and I don't remember anything personal about her so I kinda just leave her to it after saying Hi. I poke my head into another room and see Jason talking to Henry Kissinger and another guy at a table. I remember what Ronski said in the Group Chat about some article Kissinger just wrote talking about how it's nuts to send billions of dollars to Ukraine and sabotage peace talks. I try to find the article really quick on my phone but I can't. When Jason notices me and interrupts their conversation to say Hi, I compliment Henry Kissinger on his article even though I haven't read it.

At some kind of day-camp place, a big long stretch of green with a hill in the center, walled off in the middle of some other city. Evan is here, turns out, with a big group of bohemian-looking mostly early-to-mid 20somethings, although Ronski is here, too, and a few other older people I recognize from Baltimore. Clearly, a play is going to be made with this group, and for a moment I wonder, "Do I really want to get involved with a play right now? Especially since I don't even know the script?" but I feel inside that I will probably get involved, why not, it's been awhile. It takes me a moment, after I've more or less accepted that I'm probably going to do a play with these people, to realize this is a church group-- I vaguely remember Evan mentioning that his parents were Catholic, although he grew up in PA so I can't be sure of this, so I make a joke to test the waters and the response seems to indicate that these are not Catholics, but some kind of evangelicals. Some bands play, I think. Eventually it becomes clear that some kind of battle royale is going to happen today. Nobody seems to think this is weird. I have already been lugging around some kind of long metal pole, just a little thicker around than my own arm, and about as tall as me, and I jokingly indicate I will use this as a weapon in the battle royale, hoping that someone will explain that foam weapons will distributed, or something. No one does. Everybody seems excited about the battle. I can't possibly believe that we're really going to be fighting each other physically, but I see other kids preparing various weapons. Everybody is arbitrarily split into two teams. On top of the hill in the middle of this place is a group of attached buildings with various snack vendors in them, like on the boardwalk. I walk around there. Most of the places seem to be closing, and the uniformed employees are excitedly getting ready to watch the battle. I'm no longer carrying around the metal pole. I hear a group of cute girls chanting together, like at a protest, and when I decipher that their chant is an intentionally-silly chant about how school sucks, I get kind of excited. They're dressed like they go to the Maryland College Institute of Arts and I think, "Maybe the MICA kids are on some kinda cool shit again this year?" I come into possession of a very strange weapon-- it appears to be a plastic reusable coffee cup, but when you take the top off and pull a string inside of it, a large spiked ball (bigger than a 16 pound bowling ball, much too large to fit inside the fake cup) drops out. It's attached to a frayed old rope which I can use to swing the ball around. The spikes on it are weird and wiry, more like razor wire than you'd see on like a classic D&D morning-star. It looks terrifying. Dina sees it and gives me a thumbs up, although I can't tell if she thinks the weapon is cool, or that it's likely to hurt me in a funny way. I start to wonder if I should supplement it with something small and fast-- if someone rushes in close too quick, I may not be able to swing the big ball around to get them with it, right? I start to wonder if I should find the pole again...

For a while I was in the bed of a pickup truck, lying on my back on an inflatable raft, head towards the cab, and the end of the raft under my feet kept blowing up into the air and I tried to make myself heavy enough to hold it down, so it wouldn't obscure the driver's line of sight behind.

I'm part of some superhero team. It feels neither real nor completely fake. It's not scripted, as far as I can tell. We're supposed to fight The Avengers, whose costumes are not very expensive or complicated. Iceman, for instance, looks like a puffy cornflower blue Ben Grimm costume made out of thin material that puffs out like a Party City Pikachu costume. I'm happy to learn that my power is teleportation but I'm a little unclear as to how it's supposed to work. Somebody tells me I probably just have to say "Bamf" or "Kackus". I say both, trying to visualize the world going all blurry and swishy around me, like when Elijah Wood puts on the One Ring, but it seems I'm not doing it right. The Avengers drop off the side of a chain-store box building like Target or something, and come running towards my team. I duck behind a car wishing I could figure out how to teleport behind them. Later on, I'm a girl and a guy is trying to strangle me. I have a medium-handled scythe, though, which I am pushing cross-ways against his stomach. It turns out I have four arms, as well, because I'm pulling his hands off my throat simultaneously, and even though we're struggling, I'm pretty sure I could slice him open if that's really what I want to do.

A big house with a spacious finished basement. I'm supposed to work a shift at Golden West tonight and I'm worried I overslept. I go into the basement and there's a whole bunch of people sitting on one side of a very long, very low table, the kind where you have to sit cross-legged on a pillow to sit at it. To my surprise, everybody is watching a live performance of The Cure on some kind of monitor. I'm not sure where the actual band is but it seems to be nearby. I am also surprised to see that the poet Lindsay Raspi is playing drums for them. She seems out of breath but she's not messing up or anything. Everyone at the table is engrossed in the show and pays me no heed; I watch along with them. In the middle of the next song, the poet bails on the drums and somebody else takes over, and it's unclear to me whether this is a big deal or not. I don't see them but it feels safe to assume that the person taking over is somebody associated with Lake Trout. I ask somebody about the time-- it turns out that I am off by 12 hours, and there's plenty of time for me to get to the shift at the restaurant. I realize for the first time, though, that it probably starts much earlier than 10pm, the time I start my shifts at The Club, and I start to feel stressed again and wonder why the hell I'm going to do shifts at Golden West again.

There's a strange kind of show at a supermarket. Not many kids are there. For some reason I have to do a presentation with a political theme: I use an absurd amount of shopping carts to represent different categories of people. [At the time I had a clear idea of what I meant, but I no longer remember the details. I think I was trying to demonstrate how hard it is to manage people, because of/in spite of the categories we try to force them into?] Later on, a tall local rapper approaches me and says he didn't agree with my presentation, but as I talk to him it becomes clear he had a totally different interpretation of the symbolism of the shopping carts. I repeated most of what I had said about the shopping carts during the presentation, and it seemed to clear things up for him, although I was confused as to why it seemed like he was hearing it all for the first time. Later, my dad's handsomest cousin has died and I have to transport the body to Echodale Avenue on a public bus. I'm on the bus when I find this out, and so is the body, upright but inside a body-bag like the kind you see on television. We are several stops past Echodale on Harford Road, so I nervously get off the bus and prepare to haul a large dead man to the house where I'm supposed to take him.

Everybody but The Angel has moved out of her house, although it’s no longer a 3-story house but an apartment with a single floor, from the same era as most of the rowhomes/apartments in Charles Village, where you can feel the age in the subtle bulges in the walls and the wainscotting and the designs in tin around the ceiling. I wander through the curling hallway to the rooms I’d never been in before, eventually coming to a fourth bedroom that seems to be much farther from the rest of the bedrooms than it could possibly be. I tell The Angel there’s so many bedrooms, their ought to be four roommates, and if we took this central bedroom we’d have a ton of privacy because the hallway doesn’t go anywhere else and I doubt we could even hear anybody else or vice versa. She seems into the idea. I go to a high school on the west side of Baltimore with the idea of observing some classes. I notice that The Soldier has arrived at the same time, although I stop to find an office to check in with while she goes straight on in. I soon see a long counter in the hallway, with glass across it, like what you might see in an old bank or telegraph office in a movie. I step to the counter and a group of old and wealthy-looking white people arrive behind me. A very tall old woman in a dark pink dress steps around me and straight to the counter to start talking to one of the school staff working behind it, a young man who seems like he could have been a student here quite recently. I give her some guff for cutting in line, she dismissively says she didn’t see me, and I tell her she stepped right around me without even so much as an “excuse me.” The other elderly people, who I assumed to be with her, take my side, although it isn’t much of a drama because neither of us really care. When I get to the young man, I realize I don’t know how strange my desire to just come to this school I have no connection to and sit in on classes might be, and I have trouble finding the right way to word my request, but I say I’d be especially interested in a music class, particularly a music tech class if there is one. He doesn’t seem to think my request is strange at all and prints me out a schedule. He says that period I is about the start, which is strange because it’s not the beginning of the school day– period III is the first class, and I have trouble understanding the strange order of the schedule. He points out a music class about to happen– it’s Marching Band, and under each class there seems to be a small italicized list of subjects that are to be covered. The second item on Marching Band’s list is “Disney Chants,” and I don’t remember the rest but suddenly my plan to observe here seems weird and all my enthusiasm for it vanishes. I go outside to the parking lot where there are a bunch of tall trees– much more Wyman Dell than Westside– and there’s no one out there but The Soldier and her little dog, Sam. I’m surprised to see them. She doesn’t seem particularly moved one way or the other about seeing me, but offers me a ride home in her car. Her car is pretty full of random objects and somehow it’s understand that I will drive. We get in the car, I put the seat way back, and almost immediately a guy comes up to my window. He seems to think I know him, and when I don’t, he says he’s “the guy with the big wallet” and that he was meeting a guy and a younger girl here. I tell him it’s not us. We drive down the road until we hit a bit of traffic, and I see an elderly asian couple pleading with a man who is walking against traffic in the middle of the road, clearly pleading for him to get out of the road. He ignores them and his unhurried but determined pace and the look in his eye make me think he’s “not all there,” the kind of guy who talks to himself loudly outside of the bar. After passing him we very quickly come upon a whole slew of shirtless, shoeless middle-aged men walking in the middle of the road (with traffic, this group, in the same direction we’re traveling) whose pants don’t seem quite shabby enough to make them homeless guys or mental hospital inmates, but whose spacey, fixated demeanor is similar to the first guy. I pull over into what is apparently some kind of pre-season or AAA baseball training place. There’s no stadium, just outdoor diamonds and big chain backstops. A few young uniformed players are coming out of a little one-story brick building with flags bearing the Orioles logo on it. I can’t get the car to come to a complete stop and almost hit another car before throwing on the emergency brake. The Soldier gets out and starts off with Sam. A guy and a younger girl– evidently a father and his teenage daughter– approach me and tell me they are looking for somebody. I ask if it’s “the guy with the big wallet” and they say yes, he’s the one. I tell them I’d just been approached by him back at the school, but they seem to think he won’t be there anymore, so I offer to drive them around in The Soldier’s car to find this guy. We don’t drive for very long before we turn into a large strip-mall and pull up in front of a strange little house next to a muffler place. It’s incongruous in this location. There’s a very shallow glass display window in the front with no display and a fly trapped inside it, buzzing around. I watch it for a moment when an image appears of the head and shoulders of a small, green-skinned fairy, who invites us into the shop. I gather it’s a recording intended to seem like the fly (which is actually a small, green-skinned fairy) has noticed us and is meant to draw us into the house which doesn’t quite seem like a store. But we see upon entering that it is– a very large, Target or Best Buy-esque store with a very large selection of Chinese movies.