I was in a suburban copse, watching a giant grasshopper rub its wings together and orchestrating an orchestra of giant insects.
A black cat arrived on the scene and the orchestra broke up, while the grasshopper managed to somehow acquire a large metal hook which he then used to try to capture the cat. The cat was black, a curiously spindly, attenuated figure, and thus it always escaped.
Bored, I went to the store, where in the parking lot they were having an event; avoid getting shot and you would be allowed to take shelter while the nuke went off. A besuited man was among us and behaving oddly (odder, at least, than the rest of the people, who were busy dodging bullets), looking skyward as though he were seeing something I were missing. The sky was this magnificent cerulean, a terrific dark blue never observed in nature, peopled with gargantuan clouds and I got the impression there was much more going on here than first appearances would allow, the sense of vast forces moving beyond the sky.
He pulled out a protective suit and gave it to me and said I was welcome to take shelter with the two winners, and I ran into the alcove that would serve, putting the suit on on the way. The alcove was just a gap between two protruding walls off the grocery store; it drained into the sewer and was full of dead leaves. I shoved myself in there first, and waited for the other two, who showed up without protective suits. Fat Latina women, they gobbled as we waited for the flash and boom and when it was all over they cackled, "We were right, no need for suits" and they died of radiation poisoning.
I left the alcove and walked back to the suburb. Everything had died, and I looked into the sky down the road and there was a structure there, like a mountain many miles tall, the base actually past the curve of the horizon but so large it was visible, but curved and pointing off to the left with a hollow peak, and it looked patently artificial, like a missile silo for giants. The sheer scale of it was monstrous, galactic, mind-boggling -- and a rocket erupted out of its peak and sailed halfway around the sky and things clouded over and beyond that point, I could see only half-glimpsed hints of enormous machinery behind the sky, above the clouds. A ship here, a missile there, an enormous white strut miles long, sliding behind the clouds and I knew there was war in the heavens.
I guess it all started with a family thing involving my youngest cousin, who my mother was trying to convince to aspire to a life that went beyond simple settling down with children. She used me as an example, saying that I had recently gotten a job as a librarian in Washington, DC.
That reminded me. I drove up to the building where the job was, which looked like a large, red version of the OEOB in the middle of a complicated Victorian-style neighborhood. I finally managed to find parking and went inside the building to check out my new digs. I wasn't to start working until the next day, but managed to get in and find my desk number on a card on the manager's desk. Locating it, I left a book and the framed photo of myself in France standing next to the wall with Sharpie'd graffiti saying "nowhere to go but far ... "
I left it in a drawer and left the building. On coming outside, I was picked up by my grandfather in his old truck, in which were also riding the rest of my family. It was a worrying experience because he kept talking rather than watching where he was going, which grew dangerous as we approached a tunnel topped by a large concrete walls with a pair of pointed arches cut into it, and I had him drop me off in the same place. I looked up, and the sky was full of stars. Giant, bright silvery clusters of them from horizon to horizon and there were multiple meteors going off at once. It was beautiful, but after a while, there were no more meteors and the stars dimmed and the sky looked like a giant television with a dirty screen.
After this, I went back inside the large, old building and decided that I had probably been wrong about where I was to sit -- there was no telling whether the card on which I had found my desk number was outdated. As I entered the annex to the large room where I was to be working, I noticed a small candy dish full of mini-fun-packs of Skittles and some sort of sweet made of peppermint creme covered in chocolate, and stole a few. As I retrieved my book and photo, I noticed a few people already in the room, and asked them where I was to sit. They pointed me at a small vertical desk, where the screen was higher than my head and the keyboard at my lap, and I sat down to noodle around for a few minutes. I checked Google Reader, found nothing new there, and left the building, intending to store my things in my truck until it was actually time to work.
Something else caught my eye: an old-fashioned horseless carriage parked on the side of the cobblestoned street. I went over to check it out and found out it was available to rent or park using free tokens that could be gotten from any number of kiosks or one of the drivers of the local horse-drawn carriages. As it happened, one of those carriages was parked behind the automobile, so I asked the driver if I could have enough tokens to last me through the workday. Instead of responding, he showed me the pipe he was smoking out of and said, "Guess what I'm smoking."
"Tobacco?"
"Nope. Coke."
"Coke as in -- ?"
He nodded. "Historical accuracy, you know, so it's legal for me to smoke it. Go ahead, smell the bowl."
I smelled it, dipped my finger into its crackling blackness, and rubbed the soot across the palm of my right hand and smelled that. Yes, indeed. It was cocaine.
"As for those tokens ... " the carriage-driver said. He smiled nastily and tossed a fistful of golden coins behind me, onto a young boy who was sitting in the backseat of the auto. I had to pick them out of his red shirt, and there were more, many more, than I had thought there were at first, so it took some time. I finally managed to get enough, more than enough, and fed a few through the slot and started it up. It came with a humming rumble, and as I wheeled it out of its spot and into the road over the cobblestones, it began to shake and hum and rumble all at once and it was a strangely pleasant feeling. Once I had circled the block, I began to pull it back into its old spot.
Only to discover a number of small boats cordoning it off. There was a small-boat bazaar happening next to my parking spot and it had taken over the space. The little boats on the road were connected by lengths of monofilament fishing line and were sailing on the road.
Last night, I dreamed that I had had a lot to drink.
I went to Tara's townhouse, where a large group of people were congregating. To escape the crowd, I found a room in which there was a large TV and Guitar Hero. Never having played it before, I gave it a shot in private, curling my hand over the bottom edge of the body in order to reach the buttons, a highly ineffective arrangement. Just after I realized you were supposed to drape your hand over the thing, not come up from underneath, a young black guy came in, and I offered the fake guitar to him. He promptly broke off a white, rectangular button and grew rapidly distraught.
I attempted to comfort him by showing him that the thing could be snapped back on--while finding out that it couldn't--only to be interrupted by Tara's sister, Molly. The floor morphed into a well-landscaped pond surrounded by several large boulders, on which we all perched. Everyone else entered the room and began chattering about going to a bar named "Hotrods," and I was invited along. Already drunk, I was leery, but decided that I probably could not get any more intoxicated, so it ought to be safe. Molly offered to drive everyone, but ended up dropping her keys into the pond, at which point I finally realized that she was fantastically drunk. I thought to myself, She certainly holds her drink pretty well for a thirty-nine-year-old.
Somehow, improbably, she skittered across the boulders and, perching rather precariously in heels on a particularly loose rock, she stuck her hand in the water at random and immediately retrieved an absurdly large keyring, with dozens of brass keys, and we set off.
The dream skipped over the bar and into the next morning, when Tara and I arrived at her townhouse and discovered Molly dozing in the driver's seat of her little green car. I began dancing, sort of a little soft-shoe routine, around the front of the car, and went into Tara's place, while Molly, waking up and wiping the running mascara off her face, followed. We settled down on a large group of beanbags in the living room, looking out through the large glass windows, while I filled both of them in on the details of what had happened last night.
It started with my cat. I was petting her, and found a small glass disk underneath her chest, about two and a half inches wide. It was a very curious object--transparent from only a few angles and milkily opaque the rest of the time. Then I was driving along a shoreline a while before a hurricane was supposed to hit. I was on the east coast of the state, and there were numerous small island nations a mile or so offshore who were evacuating ahead of the storm. I turned the radio on, and it said, "Don't hang around the area. Get out or find some shelter."
I pulled out a map, which was animated and showed the path of the hurricane along the shore, and pulled into a library, where there was a crowd of poeple. It had two stories, but the lobby was full of people waiting their turn to go up to the second story because of fire regulations. I made my way through the stacks on the first floor, pulling out a large sea-green buckram book and hauling it open. Inside, there were two windows on each page, through which text and maps scrolled, and I thought, how useful.
I went home. Home was a large brown stone house with a small courtyard in the back with a garden, in which I came across a tall black man and a couple of Latinos, performing yoga to the music of a television visible inside the house through a pair of French doors. When I arrived, the tall guy kicked the other two out, and sat down with me at the patio table, on which was sitting the remote for the TV, and we talked a little bit. I knew he wasn't exactly from this planet.
"He's dying, isn't he?" I asked, referring to one of the pair of guys that had been yoga-ing with him just previously.
He nodded, then looked at me, and I knew the truth. " ... And so are you."
He nodded again.
I was in the desert with him. He looked regretful. "What the hell?" And I realized I was trapped there, and he didn't say a word. Suddenly the air around me erupted in a loud, pedantic voice, and I realized I still had the book from the library with me. It seemed to have gotten broken, and was skipping like a broken record. Flashing fragments of black and white exploded around me: leaking ink.
Irritated, I shut it and shoved it into a bag, and started walking, pulling the glass disk out of my pocket and experimenting with it. It was resolutely vertical, perpendicular to the ground, and refused to orient itself any other way. It was only with some struggle that I managed to turn it horizontal, and the world skewed, and I twisted it, and it turned into a three-dimensional sphere, and the world spun again, and I realized this object could be used to determine my position and orientation in space independent of local conditions, and also realized that I was in front of Brian Austin Green, who had also arrived in the desert and looked like he had just stepped out of the Sarah Connor Chronicles and was accompanying the tall black man from another world.
He was playing the role of my gardener, and I greeted him gladly and expressed regrets that he had wound up stuck here. Just then, the book spoke up and a dim black-and-white woman walked past, and he jumped. I showed him the book, and he nodded sympathetically: "Ink, huh?"
Just then, I noticed a far-off glint. Curious, the three of us walked over to it, to discover that it was a sheet of glasslike material rotating in a wireframe box, looking for all the world like a piece of unsmoothed computer-generated terrain. It came to me then and there that the glass disk was meant to be a tool, given to me by someone utterly unknown, and that it was meant to be used. I pulled it out and spun it into a sphere again as I strode toward the floating glass hill, in anticipation of something ...
Then I woke up. A few minutes before my alarm. On my day off. Go figure ...
The dream started on a city park beach in the heart of the city where I live. People were gallivanting about in swimwear.
I was walking with someone, and we passed my old supervisor. I wanted to take the chance to let her know that I only missed her wedding because of an unavoidable circumstance, but she was gone before I could say much. She was being held up as she walked by a pair of younger men. I kept walking, and ended up in a little barbershop/salon adjacent to the beach. I asked for a job, and immediately got it, no questions asked. After I turned out a young woman and proved my styling skills were, well, stylin', I hung around and talked with the other barbers, one of whom was my sole male coworker.
A large, older man came in, carrying a pair of clippers, and jokingly, he managed to shave off all the hair in a two-and-a-half-inch wide band on my right wrist, the same size as the one worn into my left wrist by my watch. "Sweet," I said. "I've always wanted to know how to use one of those," and I grabbed it and kept it, turning around to sit in my barber's chair, and the shop changed into someone's living room, full of deaf people who were sitting around on couches up against all the walls and smoking marijuana. The walls had gone gray from all the smoke, and the carpet was a scrubby tan.
They were all very interesting personalities, especially this dreadlocked young woman whose name sign resembled both someone flicking a lighter and the letters G and A. Suddenly, a young black man came in and sat down in the couch next to the recliner where I was sitting, dead center in the living room, and he began telling me that he thought he was being followed. "By who?" I asked. He jerked his chin to another guy sitting on the couch across from me and a girl just behind me to the left. I marveled inwardly at the fact that this young man had no problem with discussing this so blatantly, but realized there were so many conversations in the room that the one occurring in the exact middle of the hubbub, the only one easily visible to everyone else in the room, was being utterly ignored. GA jumped in, and we began to talk as I lit up a small glass pipe. As the drug took effect, the room grew hazy, and I realized there was a cat on the floor. I reached out my hand so the cat could sniff it, which attracted several others, all of whom were orbiting my hand and purring, rubbing against each other and my arm.
Suddenly, I was at the front door of my parents' house, letting myself in. As I walked in, I looked under the piano bench to the right, and saw a pair of eyes. It was my old cat, Punkin, who had died a couple years before. Still, it seemed utterly normal as she emitted one of her typically rusty meows (the only kind of meow I'm capable of hearing) and began twining her fat self around my legs. In the dream, I wondered if this was a sign; I only ever saw her or her brother Mac in a dream before something significant was about to happen, and there was no sign of my current cat anywhere, and I knew she just wasn't there.
I jerked myself awake at 5:39 a.m., thought I had overslept my alarm for some reason (it's set at 5:43), and came out of the shower later, only to find it going off. A wonderful start.
A lot happened before this point, but up until I wade into the river, there's nothing to be remembered.
The river itself is alternately clear and murky. I can see large turtles and fish swim past and through my legs. I turn around and there's a small crowd on the river bank, exhorting me to go on--the village is just around the bend. The ringleader has already warned me that things are strange there, and though modern in every respect, many things are still accessible only by river.
Still, I wade on, the water alternately reaching to my knees or chest. There are massive swirling currents rippling through the river from time to time, but they're oddly gentle, and I wade on around the bend.
Only to be confronted with a fork. To the left, the river goes on through the jungle. To the right, the same, except there are little twinkly lights shining through the trees on the small island that's forking the river. I elect to go right; "Always let the lights guide you," comes unbidden into my mind.
Sure enough, as I continue to wade--and now alternately swim--I'm passing small houses at water level, their back walls utterly flat and featureless except for, always, a single door opening onto the water. Some have docks, but most just have walls, and the darkness of the jungle and the forbidding aspect of the houses give me a distinct impression: don't go around knocking on doors. Better to find a public place.
Suddenly, everything goes dark, and as my eyes adjust, it turns out the darkness is actually illuminated with wall sconces, and I'm in what appears to be a hallway--whose floor is the river. There are multiple doors, and I understand that I'm in something like a shopping center or plaza, and sure enough, I see besuited waiters crossing the river from door to door.
Doubtful that anything useful can be found there, I turn around and continue down the river. I come to a house that looks much friendlier, built much more traditionally, with a deck, so I climb up out of the water and run across Elizabeth, who's sitting there.
"Oh, there you are," she says, and hands me her notebook from class. "You might as well keep this, you scribbled all over it." I take it and open it and she's right--I've filled most of the pages with doodles and strange, jagged scrawlings telling unknown stories.
Finally, we settle down and smoke some weed before I plunge back into the river as night falls, and I swim away in the darkness.
It started, I guess, when I was about to start squatting in an apartment closer to work.
I had a key, so it was ok. Apartment 633. I walked up into the courtyard of the U-shaped apartment building and saw one open door on my left, but something told me to check the right bank. Sure enough, 633 was there, and I looked across the courtyard at the open door--158, the number said. Not my problem.
I walked into 633 and looked around. Tiny. Two rooms; a living room, and a bedroom/kitchen, with a small, three-foot-long bed next to a five-footer tucked away into an alcove opposite the stove to the left of the door. The bathroom was nowhere to be seen. The entire place was decorated in a garish pink, green, and white floral scheme, and I shuddered. "Quite a steal," the real estate agent said. "Not much can be done about the decor, though."
It was time to hold a party in the living room. I was in a group of people that included my dad, an uncle, and a pastor friend of my dad's Bruce. We were talking when my father suddenly winked at me and said, "Remember how you used to get made fun of a lot when you were a kid?" He pointed at my uncle. "Especially from his kid."
"Whoa," I said. "Tad made fun of me?" The uncle had the grace to look embarrassed as I shrugged it off and looked at my dad and found him staring at me, disappointed at my underwhelming response.
A few minutes later, he went wall-eyed, started staggering around as if drunk, and we all laughed. My father, the sot. It wasn't until he collapsed that we all realized there was something wrong, and I sat down in my recliner and rode it back to my real apartment, realizing along the way that my father might have just died, it was the way things went. It was the second floor of a townhouse unit, and the recliner came to a full stop at the foot of the sidewalk leading up to the front door. I sighed, knowing I'd have to trundle the chair back up the stairs and into the living room, and its bottom struts all covered in mud. Still, I persevered, and got the chair back into its proper place before collapsing into bed, tired as hell. Suddenly, a couple opened the screen door on my right, walked through my bedroom, and walked into the large industrial kitchen on my left. There was a bank of windowscreens set into that wall, through which I could see the cooks busily working, and the dream told me that it was a communal kitchen for the residents of the apartment complex.
What kind of complex is this? I asked, and the TV switched on, showing a group of edgy, urban kiddies playing basketball among graffiti-stained buildings. It looked very economically depressed as the voiceover detailed the communal kitchens and other amenities, and the commercial ended with a focus on a wall on which "WESTLAKE APARTMENTS" was spray-painted. Something in the back of my mind took particular note of this, as though I knew, somehow, that I was dreaming and was thereby seeing my future and needed to remember this.
Another pair of people walked through my bedroom. Frustrated, I got up and decided to lock the screen door, but it locked by a very curious mechanism; a chain on the door led to a small white metal stick that melded into an oddly-scrolled end, and next to it was a large brass scrolled vase on a long, black skinny stand. This lock worked very simply: just insert the small white scroll into the large brass scroll, and twist until you feel both pieces interlock.
Once that was done, I decided to look around my apartment. It had the feel of a place where I'd lived for some time, but I somehow had failed to notice the closet door set in the wall behind my bed (this is a common theme in dreams; often large portions of my living space go unexplored), so I slid it open and walked into another room. This one was long and narrow, and in the wall in front of me was a large bank of still more folding closet doors. I had the feeling that there were infinite closets contained within the one in my bedroom--another common theme.
I picked the one on the far right, and entered a large walk-in closet, this one with a white door on the left-hand wall. There were shelves and cabinets on the right-hand wall, full of forgotten shoes and clothing, things the previous tenant had left behind. I opened the new door, and entered still another closet, this one with a shelf and pole on the right-hand wall, and boxes everywhere, topped by various kinds of shoes. There was a small, gloss-painted black wood door on the wall opposite and a dark brown wood one on the left. I opened the little black one first, and a black kid's face stared at me.
I yelped in surprise and leapt back as the kid extricated himself from the enormous amount of junk in his closet, and I looked in there. The closet was tiny, maybe three feet wide by eight feet long, and the floor was occupied by a five-foot tall pile of old blankets and mattresses, while the walls were thickly-covered in shelves full of tiny figurines. One shelf was occupied by a very, very small working TV. This kid was living in my closet!
I wondered aloud how he came and went without my noticing, and he grinned, reached into his home, and pulled out a very large semi-automatic gun. He proudly brandished it at me and showed me a little switch on its side, topped by a small red LED, and told me that it beeped whenever I left the apartment. It was at this moment that I noticed a wall plaque that seemed to detail various principles of life in a humorous manner, and one of them ended in the word "shid": a nickname for a former roommate. Odd. Then I noticed that the closet that served as the entrance to the kid's tiny home was suddenly covered in more figurines of the type found in the next room, mostly small plastic soldiers with an interpretive mien. I wanted to ask the kid about them, but he was busy talking into a small plastic gas mask, in which appeared to be built a walkie-talkie of some sort.
It was then that I noticed, with a requisite amount of horror, that the ceiling was covered in crawling insects of various types. Centipedes, large spiders, what appeared to be bright-yellow wasps a couple of inches long, a veritable army of ants. Spooked, I pulled open the brown wood door, and--
Nothing. The shock from what I saw in that room woke me up. Can't remember what it was. Tsk.
It started off in a laundry room the size of a warehouse, full of gurgling, clunking machines. Someone had left their laundry all over the place, with a very passive-aggressive note that first noted what a shame it was that this individual had to occupy all the machines in order to avoid having someone from the neighborhood wander in and monopolize our ability to do laundry, unlike those of us who had no problem waking up the entire complex with the noise of laundry at 5:00 a.m. This last was a dig at me, because that's what I do on Tuesday mornings, so I scoffed and shrugged it off.
Then I texted Toronto Kim and suggested that we could probably do one more visit with each other before her big one in September. She texted back and said, Sure! Suddenly, I was in an elevator lobby with several other deaf people, some of whom I remembered and others of whom slightly resembled six-foot-tall hydrocephalic children. We piled into an elevator, which went up several floors and disgorged us into a large, lovely rustic cabin, where Kim was living. All the others had vanished, and I examined the view of a tall, lumpy conical mountain, and told her we had time to go to Seattle if she wished. "Really?" Oh, absolutely--I've always wanted to see the mountains there.
What with one thing and another, we joined a group of people who were visiting someone else, and one of them was Courteney Cox. We were chatting for a while and wound up on a lookout tower on top of someone else's cabin, the lumpy mountani barely visible in the twilight, and I asked what had happened to Kim. "Oh, she went off with the Duke," Courteney said. "Who's the Duke?" "Oh, just this guy, you know..."
Typical. This marked the third time I'd visited and been abandoned in favor of some other guy. Fine. I went back downstairs and bumped into an old childhood friend from Brooksville and picked her up shamelessly. She mentioned the Duke's name! What the hell? I told her what the deal with Kim was, and she got mad, saying she was supposed to be with him. It was Thanksgiving, after all.
That was news to me. Thanksgiving? She grabbed my truck and me and took off, roaring down narrow country roads between large grassy fields, turn-offs and doglegs and forks whizzing on by, until we reached a steep Y-Junction and she tore the truck around and went down the other way. I feared for my life, fully expecting the truck to start rolling, but it never quite happened. The road opened out into a farm--the home of the Duke, she said. I began to have second thoughts--wouldn't it be weird to join a family Thanksgiving? She barely took note of my question, and as we rolled into the yard, I noticed row after row after row of cars and school buses parked on the field in front of the house, and saw children milling about the barns, following teachers around in a tour. I realized the "family Thanksgiving" wasn't quite so stringent here, and relaxed.
So my friend parked and we got out and she walked over to a very nice little Lexus and grabbed a purse out of the front seat. "Yours?" I asked. She nodded. "Nice!" Suddenly, the car started up and pulled away and I could see her mother materializing in the driver's seat, barely acknowledging us, looking somewhat discontented.
We turned and began to walk along a sandy shore leading up to the farmhouse, the fine sugar frustrating my feet until I found a sidewalk buried in the sand, and I said, "So I guess your mom's still trying to get your dad to leave her, huh?" She nodded and rolled her eyes. "Why doesn't she just cheat on him then?" "You're kidding me, right?" "Ah...so if she were the one who cheated, she'd get nothing in the divorce?" "Yup."
First, I dreamed my hearing aids were in a baking pan full of water. I swished them around.
Then I woke up at 4:50 a.m. and fell back asleep again.
I was with an old deaf classmate from many years ago, and we were sitting on a minivan's tailgate and making out. It was nice. But I was with my nephew (as yet unborn), and had to feed him this soup that seemed to consist of warm milk, part of which was blocked off by a melted-on layer of pasta (like the cheese on french-onion soup), with more milk poured over it and a bunch of little cavatelli pasta over it like cereal. She and I talked while watching the kid studiously break through the pasta layer with a spoon, and cheered when he finally broke through.
He then proceeded to eat his soup, but had abandoned the spoon in favor of picking the cavatelli out with his fingers, which was decidedly inefficient, so I picked up the spoon and began showing him how to use it. "Spoon," I said. "'Pooooon," he said, and began using it. We then proceeded to carry on a conversation with him.
A short while later, I stood up and said, "I'm going to head to the restaurant. We're meeting my mom and sister there. Wanna meet up down that way?" She said, "Sure, which place?"
I found myself walking among the sidewalk tables and entering an Italian restaurant near my parents' place called Ercolano's, and somehow was simultaneously with her and telling her where else I was at that moment, then dithered for a while over whether or not I should get a table for everyone when they arrived. The place was crowded.
She showed up a few minutes later, and she had become my ex-wife, come to collect the last of her things. Her hair had grown. My perspective shifted outside myself, and I looked back at where I had once been, and it was an older man with a bushy beard, bushy hair, wrinkled face and clear, intense green eyes. He stared at her fanatically and launched into this fantastic speech about her face and stew, and just as he intoned, "In your time among the onions..." I thought of Daniel Day-Lewis, and began questioning whether or not I was in There Will Be Blood. That, at least, woke me up for the day.
There were coyotes in my pool shed last evening. I came across a small pack of them--4 altogether, very diminutive, couldn't have been more than 3 feet high at the shoulder--accompanied by a mastiff pup. They were ripping apart a brown chicken. I thought of the mess and roared at them. They filed out the door but milled about on my pool deck, so I threw a barbecue rib at the far screen door, hoping to lure them to the door and then out. It succeeded beyond my wildest dreams; the door was already ajar, which had probably been what allowed them ingress in the first place. They fell upon the rib in a ravening mass, which slowly migrated out the door. However, as I hurried over to shut and lock the door before any of them got the idea to come back in, the mastiff pup slipped back through, eliciting curses at the stupidity of domesticated mammals.
I woke up, realized I had a half-hour still to sleep before getting up for work, and fell back asleep again.
I had to babysit three brothers, the oldest at 13, youngest at 3. The oldest was fine, and so was the youngest, but the middle child was trouble. He vanished at some point, and I realized he had stolen my cell phone, my favorite magazines (sciency stuff-like), and his parents' old Toyota 4Runner, and had left for a joyride. I got in my truck and tracked him down, cornering him in a driveway, where he had had to remove two flat tires as a result of his terrible, terrible driving. I got out of the truck and ran over to him, seeing that he had my cell phone in my hand and was reading my e-mails.
"That's not yours," I shouted, and he looked at me defiantly, stuck out his tongue, and threw it down on the concrete. It broke apart into three pieces, the screen and the small pane of glass covering it snapping off and scattering. Muttering imprecations against all little boys, I knelt down and began piecing it back together. It seemed to work well. Now to deal with the legal implications of my charge's deeds; at just the right moment, a jeep appeared over the tall-pine-strewn hill on the other side of the driveway, carrying a District Attorney who vaguely resembled Kevin Nealon. Drunk, he staggered over and slurred that I had nothing to worry about, he wouldn't prosecute, this was just a kid, don't worry, no prosecution, it's all good, just a kid, no worries. I knelt back down to the kid, took him by the shoulders, and shook him slightly and explained to him the nature of his misdeeds and how he had done wrong. Great big tears appeared as he began to blubber and promise he'd never do it again and that he'd be good from now on, and I hugged him. Now it was time to head home; I collected all the kids and asked the oldest if he had a ride. He nodded and explained he was going home with a friend, and I figured that the middle child was in no condition to drive his parents' 4Runner back home, especially lacking two tires, so I elected to bring him and the youngest with me; the parents would just have to deal with the car situation when they got home.
As I rounded the kids up and loaded them into the SUV, I felt grateful; the whole situation was just like a sitcom. Twenty-five minutes of crazy and five minutes of resolution, plus a moral to the story.
