I call this girl and apologize for not having returned her call before.

It's the morning and I just woke up. I ask this different girl, one that I woke up beside, if I should wear flip-flops for the second day in a row. She says that she really wants me to wear them today.

I'm supposed to play two shows in a row in this shitty dive bar. The ceiling is really low. I'm first of three, opening for some band that I really admire. A lot. And that I'm kind of friends with (it's not anybody I've actually toured with before, though, I don't think.) The first night, for some reason, I start abusing the crowd, calling them names and making fun of them, and after three songs I'm taken off the stage by the guy who runs the club and told I can't play there the next night. Some other stuff happens, I guess, then the next night I come back and my friend Height has been tapped to replace me. I feel kind of bummed that he didn't tell me that they asked him to replace me, then when I watch his set he starts totally ripping into me, on the mic, during the songs, pointing at me and totally dissing the shit out of me. After like 3 instances of this, I walk out, while he continues to berate me.

The club is next to a lot of abandoned cars, refrigerators, rusty construction equipment, and a small crashed plane. I walk across this gravel lot and go into the woods. Back deep in the woods I become a part of this group of kids that is in possession of a totally bloody, ripped up rabbit. It belongs to some little girl whose house we are next to. We have to get into the house to steal something, but if anybody sees us we will be killed. It's just this nice, suburban-family house in the woods, but apparently there are multiple dudes on watch for us. Luckily, we have this trick that we can do (there are maybe 8 of us, and we're all pretty young)--- we can fold ourselves up into our hair. Like, my whole body fits underneath of my hair, and then my hair gets greyer and thicker, and looks like some kind of head-less vague animal quivering on the dead-leafs-and-sticks-ridden ground. We have to hum while we do it, though, because apparently this makes us seem more like furry animals and less suspicious. We do it once when we see some dudes, then I pop up and go into the house. It's just a regular, suburban-family house with nice mahogany tables with knick-knacks on them, but it scares me. I know that somewhere in the house is the little girl whose destroyed rabbit we have (real rabbit, like a pet, not a toy) and if she sees me I am very afraid of what she might do.

I'm trying to slap this girl that I know on her stomach but she's not letting me. I'm really mad at her. She keeps pushing my hands away, and I see that she's knotted her shirt so it stays up about halfway up her stomach. I can't get the knot out, and in the midst of my anger I start wondering why she would wear her shirt this way---- it's not like her at all.

This guy shows me this art book. It's high-quality --- looks like a bunch of ads from Vice Magazine or some fashion douche rag like that. He says that every girl on these pages is a girl he dated and then decapitated. I tell him that that's gross and that I don't believe it. He tells me that no one believes him either, that's why he gets away with it, and every expensive-looking book he publishes like this gets him completely out of the woods in the investigation of the girls within's' missing-person/homicide cases. I'm not sure if I believe him but I don't want to talk to him anymore.

There's this old teacher with a beard and glasses and a plaid button-down shirt, and I'm in an empty department store after-hours where he's got his desk with all his papers and stuff and empty coffee cups strewn about right in the middle of the store, mixed in with the displays. So there's beds around and chairs and stuff that's for sale, and a bunch of desks, and this one desk has all his stuff on it. I'm really winded, and I sit down at his desk and start poking around the papers. This teacher is walking around, maybe getting more coffee?

Before I know it, there's a drumset in front of me, and I'm holding drum sticks. Ryan Shelkett is playing a guitar and this young version of that same teacher (who I've never actually seen before) has an electric bass slung around his shoulders and he's holding a microphone and making up lyrics to this thing tune that we're improvising. There's no stage, it's like an old gymnasium with wooden floors, and just a little bit of light from a single lamp that allows me to see Ryan and the bassist. I know there's an audience in the shadows but I decide not to look at them-- I'd rather not know how many people are there. I play some dumb stuff on the drums before the bassist/teacher asks me to switch with him. He's not feeling the stuff that he's singing and wants to hear me improvise some words. I take a long time getting up from the drum stool before I pass him the drumsticks and grab the mic.

After a school assembly lets out, I find a friend of mine standing still in the hallway, facing me. She obviously did not go to the assembly like everybody else. She says, "I think we should do it."

"Do what?" I ask, feigning complete ignorance/innocence. I don't think we should do it, but I am afraid to tell her this.

She takes my hand and leads me through a series of small-ish box-shaped rooms that have some futuristic-looking furniture in them, but easily ignorable furniture. The walls are grey and probably made of metal. The ceilings are maybe 14 feet high. Each room looks basically like all the others.

I’m at a party, it’s really late, and I don’t actually think I drink anything, or see myself drinking anything, but I’m completely wasted. It’s really late. The people at this house party are all strangers to me, and I feel outside of all of them, alien—alien enough that they don’t think anything about me, they just look, don’t have an immediate instinct as to where to put it, then they move on, it gets no more thought. For some reason, though, I am here and I am trying to go to sleep. There aren’t many people and most of them seem to be trying to go to sleep, too, everyone sleeping on beds in different rooms and all of us lying down in our clothes. I lie down with this girl but I can’t fall asleep, so I go into the hallway and lean against her sister. Her sister is a little younger. I wonder if anyone thinks it is sketchy that I was in bed with the first girl and then leaning on her sister, I wonder if anybody thought that “something happened” in the bed. I am pretty sure nothing happened but I begin to doubt myself. Nobody talks to me but nobody seems weirded out that I’m there—like I said, there’s no reason to think about it, everyone has plenty of other things to occupy their brain. Somebody decides that we should all go to the movies.

It’s a really fancy theater lobby. I’m still wasted. I approach the concession stand and space out looking at the menu, which I cannot read, and space out when the overweight girl working the register asks me for what I want. The person in line in front of me, who is waiting to receive the food she has ordered and paid for, says something about my spacing out but I don’t catch the gist of it—whether it was a little harsh or light-hearted, I don’t know, and I find myself talking in that voice I usually use when I’m around a lot of people I don’t know and trying to act totally unafraid—a little extra-friendly, wordy version of my best impression of Richie Molyneux’s party-speech. As I start talking, I find I can’t really maintain my balance, and as I start tilting forward, I lose control of my mouth and all these words keep coming out of me, ending with, “There’s not a problem, is there? Everything’s cool, right?” in a tone that is way more confrontational than I want. Internally, I panic—I am not used to losing control of my mouth like that. The girl behind the counter couldn’t care less, though, and my panic, at least for the moment, seems unnecessary. I try to order some food by basically guessing and agreeing with the girl behind the counter, but I don’t pay any attention to the exchange because I’m too busy in my own head trying to figure out why my brain is unable to do multiple things at once anymore.

I think I order a small bag of popcorn and some kind of orange drink. I move to the left to wait for these things. There is a guy on a barstool sitting with a drink at that end of the concession counter, I didn’t notice him before. I start talking to him but I have no control over what I’m saying. I start rambling on and on in a drunk-guy-on-the-train type of way and I am sure that I have never been this guy before. All the kids from the party who I came with are out of the lobby now, either in one of the theaters or gone. I can’t stop the words that are coming out to this guy who clearly doesn’t care. I can tell he’s getting annoyed. My words and voice make me sound completely oblivious to the fact that he’s annoyed but inside my head, I know exactly what is going on. I don’t understand why it is going on. I feel tired and wish I hadn’t come to the movies, wishing I was in a bed somewhere.