I can hear some music from the other room, and I can tell it's Marumari playing his new guitar-based stuff. It's great. I tell someone near me what it is and that I like it.

A short older guy who i've seen around town but never taken seriously shows up at my house unexpectedly with a retinue of grinning gangsters. They tell me they heard i move midlevel weight and they want to help me get into highlevel dealing. Its obviously a weird intimidation/extortion thing, but i don't tell them im not a dealer and i kinda play along with them when they talk about me paying them $800 for my first shipment. The short guy doesn't really address me, and a japanese guy with long curly hair enthusiastically does most of the talking. At one point he pulls out a little derringer, and when i glance at it he points it right at me. I flinch. He laughs and points it at my bed and pulls the trigger, and a tiny blast of white powder covers my green sheets. He explains its a military-made substance that will kill anybody who inhales it and that i ought to mop my bed thoroughly then put the sheets in the washer. I do my best to pretend like i believe him, wondering if its flour or clorox or what. One of the gangsters leaves the house and reappears at the second story window in my bedroom, leaving a note on the sill, then climbing a sketchy tree branch back down. They all leave and i get the note then lock the window. The note is written in awful handwriting.

I drive a car through crowded city streets. Its raining. My windows are up. At every stop light, some dismal looking person tries to get me to roll down the window and they all derisively call me " tough guy" when i don't.

I'm playing a set at this large version of America that kind of seems situated just north of where I used to live in Pilsen. There's a huge room with a concrete trench full of shallow water in the middle of it, and my set somehow clears the room. With the laptop still running I go outside to see everyone smoking in a little lot between two garages, and I get a smoke from Creature who hugs me and begins to explain that she stepped out for a smoke and everyone else in the room followed, but as she's telling me this I see a narrow beam of light shoot out of the far garage and hear the sounds of cops putting handcuffs on someone. As soon as I see a bulky uniform appear I grab Creature's hand and we run.

A show in a fabulous apartment complex, where all the apartments are on the first floor and linked by little patios which in turn give way to cobbled paths around tiny gardens. There are multiple sliding-glass doors which open out onto the patios in every apartment, but no windows at all above the first floor that are bigger than little slits, and the building looms large with smooth, undecorated concrete. It feels like a swank prison that people would voluntarily enter. Everyone around is in a great mood. I am, too, even though I keep pulling tiny stiff sharp wires from between my teeth. It's almost as if someone sewed my trap shut with a guitar string, weaving it in between my choppers, then snipped the string so I could open my mouth again. Also, I can jump at least 9 feet in the air and float down gracefully, so I do. I bounce around the twisting internal courtyard of this building until I finally find a set of short, fat Classical-looking columns that seem to open up into whatever exists outside of this building. Policemen shine flashlights in my direction from out there, and talk to one another in serious tones. I bounce back towards the show. Also, I saw Waz try to kiss Lexie and succeed.

At a college. I enter a building that has about five feet of water on the floor. There are some inflatable rafts around, I float on one and a girl I know floats on another one and Melvyn has one, too. Later, we leave and go to a different building where we have to wait in a line to strap on a little harness attached to a small indoor crane that then lifts you up over a railing to the second floor.

I found a silver dollar in my room and couldn't remember where it came from. Later, IRL, a girl at Spro who invited me to share her table (it was full up) paid with a silver dollar.

Leaving a little cafe with some group of people I barely know, trying to get to another destination on time, but it’s unclear if this will happen. I don’t seem to care too much, though, about that— I’m with this group more out of some external compulsion than free choice. We step outside into a bustling downtown, on a street that posts up skyscrapers just a few blocks down the road. Above them, there are green fireworks exploding. I smile at them. This city seems kind of Japanese-looking to me.

Fireworks continue. I can see hot ashes sprinkling down on the road two blocks up. And then I can see huge panicking throngs of people running in every direction just a little further past that. Someone next to me points out the helicopters that can be seen over the area. “They’re bombing!” the stranger shouts. They? A foreign country could never put helis in our airspace…
It becomes increasingly clear that a chaotic massacre is taking place close by. I am drawn to it, weaving through the fleeing people to eventually come to the eye of the storm. It’s a boy with messy hair and a black army jacket. He looks about 13 and he’s followed by a girl who is at least five or six years older than that. She carriers a duffle bag and very casually loads guns for the boy. As he runs out of ammo in one gun, he passes it to her and she gives him the new one. She looks amused, almost delighted— he seems pretty dispassionate. Somehow it is understood that whatever is going on with bombs and explosions and flying debris all originates right here, with this kid.

I follow him for a short time watching him methodically shoot people. Then I clock him in the back of the head with candelabra. He goes unconscious. I look around for his female companion but she has vanished. I pick the shooter up in my arms and carry him back to the cafe I had just been at. There are no more fireworks, but the streets are full of ragged and bloody people moving wounding bodies and wailing. On the way, I try and tell a few people that it’s OK, that I have the perpetrator in my arms, but they all seem too preoccupied. Before I can get all the way back, he seems to be coming to, so I take off his jacket and wrap it around us both, tying it in front, making a little sack to wrap my arms around. I can feel him try to flex his legs but there’s not enough room in the sack.

I get to the cafe and explain to the parents and police there that I have the kid who did it. When I untie the jacket, though, there’s nobody in there. I’m completely confused, try to retrace my steps and where he might have escaped, but can’t figure out how it happened. They make me a junior police anyway.

I work on a case with Lester Freeman and Geoff, an old friend from high school. We are trying to capture some drug tycoon. It takes too long, though, for us to get all the evidence we want, so the case is closed and we get assigned to a new one, a pretty weak one. Geoff and I are able to finish our work on it very quickly and I decide to visit my parents’ old house in Baldwin and chill out for a while. My parents are living there again. I poke around the place and feel actually pretty relieved to see it again, and ready to enjoy that yard like never before. It’s nice out, pleasantly warm. The picnic table is set up next to the driveway. I decide to bike up to Jacksonville and rent a video game, and while I’m up there my dad calls me on a cellphone to ask if I really know this old black guy who showed up at the house. I tell him that the guy is a detective and he’s a little gruff but that they would definitely get along if he just talked to him a little. My dad starts choke up and tells me some things about Ronald Reagan I’ve never heard him say before in a tone I’ve never heard him use.

I go back home to find Geoff and Freeman at the picnic table. Freeman looks so bummed. He asks me what I’m up to and I tell him I felt like I could relax for the first time in a long, long while, so I was going to take advantage of it. Geoff tells him something similar about his own plans, then I ask him what he’s going to do. “Try and put a stop to some evil,” he says, picking up a manilla folder full of papers off the table and standing up. It’s obvious he’s going to use all his time off to go back to work on our old case.

“OK,” I say, “Let’s do it.”

I go inside and tell my parents I’m taking off. My mom has two kittens now, two playful little white and grey twins, and Melvyn is in there cautiously checking them out. When I leave I start running.

I run through all the neighbors' yards and keep going, until I’m on a farm. The ground seems like it was recently frozen, all kinds of hard, twisted little crags sticking up in the dirt. I keep running full-bore until I realize I’ve somehow entered a fenced-in field. There’s a balance-beam like construction in the middle, and I go jump up on it and look around me for the first time in a while. There are four animals in this pen with me, grey animals, and at first I think they’re donkeys until I realize at least one of them has huge horns. The horned one notices me, too. I try to remember what Roby told me about being in a pen with bulls— you’re not supposed to look at them, I think. And if you move slow— or is it moving slowly in a zig-zag pattern? Or is it moving sideways? You’re supposed to be able to move some way and they can’t see you. I think. The horned one takes a run in my direction, but he passes under the balance beam. The fence closest to me is high, I’m not sure if I could get to it and up before one of these bulldonkeys fucks me up. The next closest fence has barbed wire at the top. The other bulldonkeys have notice me, too, now.