Stranded in Detroit

I'd met a girl online who lived in the Detroit area and had traveled to see her, but something went horribly awry and I ended up not only all alone in an unfamiliar place but under menacing circumstances, with nothing to my name except the clothes on my back and a few dollars in change in my pockets — and no ID!

After having barely escaped a perilous situation I found myself aimlessly wandering down streets lined with houses in an old peripheral suburb of one of Detroit's satellite cities, hoping to find an arterial before night waxed morning. After nearly an hour of walking I came across what I sought running along the depression of a small valley below me and lined with the fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls ubiquitous to the soulless and uniform materialistic American culture that always strikes me as bleakly alternate-universe Soviet. As I descended toward the busy avenue I saw a crowded bus stop on the other side of the intersection and decided to see if it would take me downtown, hopefully to where I could inquire about shelter for the night, a meal maybe, and certainly at least a blanket since I would most likely be spending the night outside. After we shuffled aboard and sat down a diminutive, stern-looking young black lady stood in the aisle near the front and prattled away in a martial tone about rules, privileges, and expectations of what I soon realized was a residential reintegration program for street people. "Very nice," I thought, "but I want to return home, not settle in this benighted burg."

I deboarded with the other passengers, partly out of curiosity and partly to try to bum a few drags off someone's cigarette, in a large parking lot surrounded by low cinder-block buildings that may have been barracks or an elementary school. Suddenly I found myself back on a bus, squinting through brilliant morning daylight occasionally occluded by freeway ramps threading their way above an industrial sprawl lining the river we traveled adjacent to, making out as my eyes adapted to the glare a massive conglomeration of skyscrapers I took to be downtown Detroit beyond the icy blue water. White clouds raced alongside us in a dark azure sky; a brisk but pleasant spring day seemed to be foretold. I was almost out of money and had gotten nowhere in search of meals, blankets, or even puffs of smoke and my eyes felt gritty like they do when sleep deprivation and undernourishment set in — to be honest, I hadn't tried very hard: the coldness and barely-bridled animosity in this city and its people scared the shit out of me and I avoided speaking to people for fear of advertising the presence of a flailing quail to hungry foxes lurking in the vicinity.

The bus stopped in a parking lot beneath a large freeway ramp and in front of a modern-looking square building in front of us. Most of us deboarded as it was clear this was a stop where drivers may take brief breaks in order to pollute their lungs or relieve their pothole-bludgeoned bladders and bowels. On looking at the building ahead of me I saw "Justice Center" spelled out in crisp brass letters above the glass double doors of its entrance and I cringed inwardly as I saw the miserable traffic in and out of that dismal and sinister institution. "No way in hell am I sleeping outside in this city!" I thought to myself as the patina of prevarication encasing me the past couple days cracked open and fell to the ground. "I'll sooner hazard the perils of the road before I let this awful place have its way with me." The driver returned and started up the engine and I made my way back to the bus with the other passengers.

First Day of Summer Vacation

It was the last day of school for the year and we were having a pot-luck party to celebrate the coming of summer vacation. Something about the atmosphere about it felt like high school but the classroom reminded me more of the Russian class I took at Portland Community college; the air was warm and the sunlight filtering through the pollen felt almost syrupy.

For some reason I slipped out of the room to go to the locker room to take a shower, perhaps because I'd gotten food spilled on me. It was just down the hall and consisted itself of a narrow hallway lined with lockers, the showers small cubicles the size of bathroom stalls branching out of it. it was cramped and there was no room for me to drape my clothing on the towel dispenser, it already being covered with another's clothing. The air was thick with steam and the smell of sweat; I made do somehow and took a quick shower in a tiny stall more suitable for being in a motor home than a school locker room. The football team, or some kind of group of burly ass-grabbers, was out in the locker room filling it with a merry cacophony of accusations of gayness and boasts of athletic and sexual prowess.

When I stepped back into the classroom, fresh from my ablutions, it had turned into a small cafeteria or a quick-service restaurant with a small buffet-like serving counter like in Subway. I was alone with my boss, who was a very attractive woman whose features I can't recall other than she was blond; I was even in a uniform that featured a red polo shirt. We were closing the place, she breaking down and cleaning the steam table as I was cleaning the dining area. People occasionally trickled in individually, causing her considerable consternation because we were already behind schedule yet it wasn't quite closing time and so they must be served. Contrary to my nature I was nonplussed and drifted blissfully and almost vacuously, like I was in a trance or still high from a bowl I'd smoked a couple hours ago.

Suddenly I was standing at a bus stop on the corner of SE Stark and 39th. It was still warm out but the sky was overcast and the wind had started to kick up into breezes that felt like the snorting of an excited horse. A couple guys in their forties or fifties — very white and blue-collar — walked down the street past me and crossed the intersection. The older-looking guy was holding eloquently forth on an amusingly irreverent description of the difference between Christmas and Easter, the particulars of which I can't recall; the younger was chuckling. Just as the older man stepped out onto the street he tossed his half-finished cigarette onto the sidewalk. I walked over and picked it up, still lit, to finish it and told him "Merry Christmas" and winked as he turned around briefly, grinning, then continued down the street with his companion.

The End of the World

I was standing outside my classroom working out the logistics of a drug deal with a chubby, dark-haired acquaintance of mine I'd been trying to find for some time; in this dream I was fifteen and back in school. Acquaintances of mine had all pitched in enough with me to score a bag, so considering how others’ money and expectations were riding on the successful completion of this transaction and how long it had already been taking I was impatient to get it over with. Just come over to her house near the Tigard Fred Meyer after school she said, she'd already bought the weed earlier; the directions she gave me were simple enough, I didn’t feel a need to write them down. That taken care of, I said I’d see her later and entered the classroom — I think it was a biology or chemistry class — to take a test. The room was medium-sized and lit feebly by a single yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling, reluctantly illuminating walls the color of tobacco-stained teeth. I breezed through the test with ease, having had enough time to triple-check my answers, after which I handed both the written exam and a cassette I recorded earlier to my instructor, whose wild sylvan disarray of a coif and the matching brown slacks and sweater reminded me of pictures of Albert Einstein, only there was no spark of life or brilliance to this inert, melancholic figure. Just as I started getting my things together to leave I panicked, thinking for some inexplicable reason that I’d forgotten the cassette; I rushed past my instructor, who was still standing in front of the rows of rapidly emptying desks, a vacuous expression on his face, to search the desk I knew he kept our submissions in. I was relieved to see that I had indeed just lost my mind and it was right there on top of my test, along with thirty-one dollars. That was exactly how much bus fare was, and I looked sidelong at the instructor to see if he’d woken out of his trance, having in mind to steal the money so I could use my fare for something else, though as yet no clear image of a specific desire had formed. Never mind; I closed the drawer, leaving the money behind as I walked away, realizing my instructor could easily misplace my exam or fail it if he suspected I’d stolen from him.

By the time I arrived at the designated Fred Meyer it was already completely dark out, one of those late November evenings I always like; not one of the vicious, chilly sideways deluges you have to hold onto your hat in, but one of the pleasantly cool — mercury just north of brisk — nights speckled with intermittent patches of light rain tossed casually on mild breezes. It was wet enough to soften the sounds and smells of the world, cool enough for me to wear my favorite heavy flannel. As I crossed the parking lot I suddenly stopped short in my second panic attack of the day: I'd completely forgotten the directions to my ad hoc friend-cum-dealer's house! Not only that, but I didn't have change for the pay phone and hadn’t even bothered to write down her number; did she even have a phone? Jesus Christ! I snarled at myself in contempt as I jerked back into brisk motion towards the store, waves of anger resonating at high frequency through my body and evaporating into steam off my clothing. I paced back and forth near the store entrance, wracking my brains trying to remember just one or two of the directions, knowing that once my feet started marching in the right direction my internal pigeon will faithfully guide me the rest of the way to my destination. No dice; my mind felt like gelatin that had started to set, squeezing out even the most elementary thought was like trying to suck molten glass up a ten-foot metal straw. Once my fury had subsided and I accepted the fact that I wasn’t getting any drugs tonight, I stood with my hands in my pocket staring blankly at the butt cans lurking in the corners of the entryway, halfheartedly hoping beyond reason that a dry cigarette would materialize out of those fetid, tar-colored pools. Shaking my head to wrest myself out of my imbecilic reverie, I slowly walked back to the bus stop; best just to give up on the already-failed endeavor and catch the next bus home before my transfer ran out of time and forced me to continue the journey by foot, an hours-long prospect that filled me with no joy and a not a little dread. Besides, I though pursing my lips downward, my acquaintances can deal with disappointment, just as I can deal with their histrionics. Don’t we all do that stuff all the time, anyway?

I must have loitered at Fred Meyer longer than I realized, because the bus arrived just a few minutes after I arrived at the stop. During the half-hour trip home I reflected on the abysmal state of the world I lived in, how civilization had declined so far the half of the dry part of the globe that was still inhabitable to some degree was enmired in a morass of desperation, terror, violence, and despair. We weren't taught much history in school, in fact it was actively encouraged to skirt the subject: school was a half-hearted attempt to keep in motion the creaking wheels of an ancient education, now watered down to reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of business- and agriculture-related subjects. Perhaps it was hoped ignorance could be used to buttress the sagging bulwarks of our species’ morale? Being inquisitive and stubborn, I wasn’t about to go along with that particular program and so did my own research and came up with a reasonably complete picture of what happened. The day of reckoning had been a long time coming for us, the brilliant masters of the earth who couldn’t seem to apply rational cooperative self-interest to our use of the world’s once resources or in living with together; wars fought with terrifying weapons blistered and scarred vast swathes of the surface, so much poison was poured onto the land and into the air and seas that much of the world was a noxiously lethal cesspool, rising temperatures and melting ice caps turned a benign planet into a ball of raging storms of water and ice and fire and dirt. Even the gene pool was scorched and warped: not only had we exterminated millions of plant and animal species, but we in turn have become mostly sterile — less than one birth for every twenty people, with an average life expectancy down to the late twenties, if the more optimistic estimations are anything to go by. Worst of all was the plague that struck out of nowhere, transforming billions of living human beings into the walking dead; or so we called them, but they weren't the zombies from the ancient flat-screen films, but were eerily similar in personality and nearly as intelligent as they were when they were alive, though over years they gradually decayed into mindlessly violent ghouls. Needless to say, these horrors only fanned the flames of war that had already engulfed our dying world, but it was a fool's campaign because the ghouls were smart enough to fight back and with every fallen opponent their ranks swelled by one. Eventually we learned, and now the living and the undead live together in peace for the most part, an uneasy one here in the western hemisphere and revered in the much of Confucian Maoist Asia. To our credit, despite American tendency towards boorishness we gave the ghouls the same constitutional privileges and protections we enjoy, though how much use that unwieldy tome full of contradictions and loopholes is against prejudice is questionable. Not that it mattered, I thought grimly as I stepped down into the small lake that was my stop for three months out of the year: there won’t be a living soul left in a hundred years. Sure, rumors flew about research labs working on a cure for the disease and our infertility, but whatever remained of advanced medical science was dispersed in myriad small drug manufacturing labs. I was living in the End of the World.

I walked up the river of mud our driveway always became during this time of year to find a group of kids on my front lawn, my little brother and his friends were gathered around a very bright young ghoul their age. Despite being wet and it still raining I decided to hang around for a little to see what they were up to; they were discussing their favorite subject, perhaps a favorite subject of pre-teens since the dawn of human history, which was the mystery of sex and birth. The ghoul was asking them all the questions, really, but none of her living peers knew any more about the matter than she did and so the conversation degenerated into outlandish conjecture and coarse humor. My curiosity satisfied I decided to go inside to change out of my wet clothing and relax. On my way down the stairs to my basement room I was met with the spectacle of another ghoul, this one a powerful heavyset man who was almost an idiot, battling one of the monsters that roamed the world, another legacy of our ancestors misguided application of their advanced sciences. In the wake of the relative peace that had descended on the world in the past few decades their numbers had been growing, which terrified us remnants because we long thought that they had been created sterile, ironic considering that their creators now are. He, who was in fact my grandfather, was skewering a large tentacle that had forced its way into the house through the garage set into the hillside with a makeshift spear fashioned from a fireplace poker lashed to a metal pole; I knew immediately it was the dreaded kraken, named after mythical sea monsters that resembled the recently become mythical giant ocean squid. His wife, another ghoul but this one a disembodied and rotting head perched on a thick mass of thin tentacles, was screaming hysterically about how we were all doomed. I knew I lacked the strength to engage in such combat, and honestly the selfish part of me figured that the undead were more fitting disposable front line troopers anyway, so I turned instead to my grandmother and tried as best as I could to console her by cradling her head in my arms.

After a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to calm grandma's hysteria and realizing there would be no peace for me to have in my room for the better part of the evening I climbed back upstairs to grab a bite to eat and see if the TV had anything more entertaining than static to offer, the pangs of hunger beginning to settle desultorily in my stomach. On my way to the kitchen I glanced out the living room picture windows to see the undead girl bent over an oak barrel used as a flower pot, her pants down around her ankles and legs spread out while the living children excitedly stuck their fingers in her ass and vagina, pulling them in and out in a crude parody of the sex act, undoubtedly for her education and their morbid titillation. At one point she seemed to groan and a torrent of some kind of watery fluid gushed out of her ass onto the just withdrawn fingers of my leering little brother, whom I despised. Having been sufficiently repulsed and saddened by the scene to lose my appetite I instead headed out the back door to join my sister, who was desultorily swinging in the bamboo cage that was her playpen. She was a year younger than me, blond, and a perfect gothic Lolita counterpart to Alice Liddell of Through the Looking Glass renown. I had the deepest sympathy for her, for like her bright and colorful alternate self she was caught in a vicious and maddening current, only through a macabre negative of that other impossible world; we all were, but she seemed more powerless than anyone else I knew, and more innocent if such a thing existed or ever did. I always enjoyed reading about Alice's adventures in Wonderland, though much of it was vexingly incomprehensible to me. We talked quietly for a bit — she on the swing and I sitting a few feet in front of her on a wood chair — about things I don't remember. She was confined to that cage for her protection, though against what and how the cage protected her I didn't know and it seemed absurd and unjust, since none of the rest of us were. She was my only real friend in the whole world, and I loved her dearly.

Return to Switzerland

I was back in Switzerland, living there with my aunt and uncle in Wallbach, where we'd first lived before we moved to Brunegg. The how and why was never made clear to me.

In the beginning of the dream we were gathered outside around a patio set of two chairs and a small table, something smoking away in the black Coleman™ barbecue nearby. My aunt was sitting in a chair reading while my uncle was engaged in setting up some strange thing that jutted up into the sky that was being blown about by the wind and resembled the Pod (sculpture) on Burnside near Powell's Books but was probably a dream-distorted covering of some sort, because it was blustery and looked like it was going to rain even though we were in sunlight at the time. In fact, that was the strangest thing I immediately noticed about this dream: the initial environment consisted of us on a rectangular plot of green grass in a nondescript field of gray, and the sky was gray, too, and though where we were was in a brilliant wintry-seeming spot of sunlight, the sky was a nondescript roiling of darker gray. I saddled my large internal-frame mountaineering backpack on and asked my aunt for permission to roam around the village, leading me to conclude we must have just recently arrived, and she said that I would need to be back in one or two hours.

And so I set forth down a gloom-enshrouded street, apprehensive of who I would run into and wondering what my old friends and acquaintances would make of me and my return. I was heading toward a landing on the Rhein I used to go to in summer to wolf down fish and beer in some kind of recurring weekend river festival, meandering aimlessly and looking around. Somehow, at some point I ran into Grenacher, an acquaintance I knew when I lived in Brunegg; only it wasn't the towering poster child of the Third Reich I knew, who used to masturbate on train windows when we went to go drinking or to buy hash in Zürich, but a strange composite of people I can't immediately recognize the components of. I was also in school again, apparently, because I was working on a speech that had to be at least three hundred words long. It was assigned to me earlier in a classroom by a bombshell of a Spanish teacher I had in St. Mary's, and since the subject of the speech was of our choosing I selected to do one about the future of energy production. The speech was going to be the basis for an essay on the chosen subject. I was working on my speech in the car Grenacher was driving, from where and to what destination, neither were clear, but we ended up at what I assume was Grenacher's house.

It was still blustery and the sky was darker and lowering menacingly, as we sat on stone steps leading up from the sidewalk to the back porch on which was piled precariously an assortment of what looked like junk. We must have had somewhere to go, because Grenacher was telling me to hurry. I was starting to bog down toward the end of the essay, and for some inexplicable reason I we both lit up long, thing cigars that burned slowly and fragrantly, more like shisha (hookah tobacco), and I ended up trying to write the last few sentences with the tip of my cigar, which ended up scrawling thick smudgy lines similar to crayons but a bit oily and the text turned out to be illegible. When I bitched about how hard it is to hurry when you're writing with a cigar tip Grenacher found a pen for me, causing a summit of junk to cascade down to the wooden deck. I only had a couple more sentences to go, but time was approaching so we jumped into his car and sped off while I continued working on the speech, getting frustrated with the pressure of a deadline and starting to have a hard time articulating myself in German.

We arrived at the school, meaning our destination must have been there and I was cramming an assignment that was due that day, in fact in a few minutes. The classroom looked more like a dimly lit bridge of a ship, as if the crew of Star Trek's Enterprise had settled on a romantic ambiance for a change of scenery. In the room small groups were scattered around and they seemed to be quietly arguing of fighting, though it was quiet and there were no overt signs of agitation or violence; it was just a feeling in the air. Grenacher had taken off somewhere and I was walking around trying like hell to beat my head through the block that was keeping me from finishing what was so far an excellent speech, counting my words and also counting the people in the room for some reason connected to the words and almost as if they were words in the speech. Andrea, a girl I knew in Wallbach who was a classmate, was there and followed me around interrupting, and though I can't recall what she was saying I kept losing count and she was making it impossible for me to complete my last sentence to my satisfaction. I told her respectfully to please leave me alone until I finished my speech, which she did, and shortly afterward I jotted it down.

Stoner Charlie

Charlie Brown and Linus were leisurely scaling an upward path of rocks protruding out of a shallow pool in a brick-paved plaza towards the large boulder in the center under the bright mid-morning sun. Charlie explained to Linus that earlier he'd found a couple hand-rolled cigarettes in a depression near the top of the boulder, Linus accompanying him presumably because he'd expressed an interest in smoking when Charlie Brown had a pack of Marlboros, that were confiscated by Charlie's mom. They were still there, and when Linus examined one he sniffed it and commented on how funny it smelled, whereupon Charlie Brown lit his and Linus' and inhaled, agreeing that it also tasted a bit odd. Undeterred, the both smoked their cigarettes with much hacking and coughing. Shortly afterward they both started laughing and holding a strangely incoherent and disjointed conversation that wasn't really a conversation at all.

Their friends showed up and asked them what they were doing, but on receiving no reply that made any sense from the giggling and gibbering idiots Lucy asked Charlie what the hell was wrong with them. Anyway, it was time to go to Charlie's house and so Charlie and Linus stumbled down to join their friends in the plaza and off they went. Because Charlie and Linus kept uttering the queerest and nonsensical things and kept giggling and chuckling, Lucy repeatedly scowled at them and the rest exchanged puzzled glances. Upon arrival at Charlie's house everyone gathered into the kitchen, whereupon Linus froze and stared dumbly out into space while Charlie started slowly jerking his head around with his eyes glazed and after sniffing some Comet started tossing it up in shafts of sunlight streaming in from the windows and oohing and awing as the lime-colored clots of heavy dust fell to the floor, commenting on how cool it looked. After a time wherein this and similar such antics occurred Charlie's mother returned home to an apartment that was thoroughly trashed and in the midst of which stood a group of children looking both guilty and worried looks, except for the mute Linus and Comet-covered Charlie, who on noticing her walked up to her grinning and held up to her what looked like a PC tablet that had speakers and proceeded to play a dissonant Ween-like song relating how in 1984 the doggies will get their revenge, rise up and enslave us, the lyrics to which he'd obviously made while in his delirium scrolling down the screen.

"That's nice," his mom replied in a surprisingly offhand manner considering the condition of the apartment and her son, "Now clean this mess up immediately!" Whereat Charlie's friends leave without a word, leading the still-entranced Linus with them by the hand. Time shifts forward into evening and Charlie, appearing to be back to his senses, nervously walks up to his mother sitting on an easy chair and reading a paper and asks her what it means to be high. Not even taking the paper down she replies casually that it depends on the kind of drug you're on.

Dognapping

Night had fallen an indeterminable amount of time ago and a light snow flurry was adding to the already almost ankle-deep sheet of snow covering the ground in a large slightly concave clearing in a forest, where I and around twenty others stood and sat in a large dispersed group around some picnic benches. We were waiting for food; all of us were homeless and it was meal time. When the grub finally arrived there was the usual murmur of complaint at the meagerness of the portions, among which I recall were what appeared to be burger shots. The dogs, however, that my less responsible peers insist on having for security and as panhandling props, didn't complain, though they certainly did beg.

At one point, and this is a section where my recollection of the dream is hazy, a couple dogs got into a rather mild tussle, and in the process one got loose and ran off somewhere. We all felt bad, or acted like we did, but meal time was over by then and it wasn't getting any warmer or earlier and individually and in small groups we dispersed to our respective camps and squats. For some reason I ran a ways, perhaps out of fear for my belongings or because I didn't want anyone to see where I was camping, through another clearing nearby, passing out of view of most of the group behind me and catching up with a solitary figure some score or two yards ahead of me. At some point I ended up eavesdropping on a small camp of about four traveling punk rock kids, which was probably near my camp, and they had the runaway dog there and were discussing eating it — though to their credit the discussion lacked enthusiasm.

The fun part: my awareness existing in two places simultaneously. I could see the owner of the dog, an old bearded man, looking for his dog with three charitable peers near the clearing where dinner was served, looking rather forlorn. The wind had picked up a little and the snowfall was picking up in intensity, promising a rough night for those who don't bed down early enough. He called the dog a couple times, but his voice was feeble, and one man put his hand on his shoulder and recommended that he save his strength and worry about bedding down for the night, on account of the weather. Meanwhile, I walked into the kids' camp and patted my legs and called to the dog by its name (an advantage to not being restricted to just a single point in space-time!), and the dog followed me, surprising the kids but eliciting no overt hostility from them. I jogged ahead of the dog, calling its name repeatedly and it gleefully loped after me; it was one of the most beautiful Malamutes I've seen and I'd fallen in love with it immediately. We ran into the search party on the other side of the clearing we were in, as they were morosely trudging back to the dinner clearing and presumably from their to their camps.

The dog ran up to the old man and licked his hand, wagging its tail slightly and he was overjoyed and thanked me. At that moment in the story a shift in time occurred and a small group of us homeless were sitting near a roaring fire, the man sitting with his dog and I all by myself near one of the punk rock kids, a girl I recall as being the one who expressed the most vehement reluctance to kidnapping the dog and eating it, and who looked miserable with both hunger and guilt. I though of consoling her, suggesting that she take and eat another similar, and apparently masterless dog (where did that one come from?) sitting nearby. I'm not sure if I was serious or if it was a cruel jest on my part, to rub some salt into the wounds in her conscience, but either way I thought better of it.

Deer and Homeless Invasion

It started with a dream inside a dream: I was standing on a hillock in what looked like a windswept moor out of An American Werewolf in London, in a surreal kind of pitch darkness that you can still make things out in like a scene I only vaguely remember seeing once in Our Gang (The Little Rascals). I could barely make out a fawn not too far away and when I moved it made a strange, menacing, rumbling sort of noise, and when I backed up slowly I noticed a large buck standing not too far to my right of the fawn, just looking at me with great brown liquid eyes I could somehow discern clearly in the gloom. It was rather frightening, not only because of the unnatural sense of menace I felt from the deer but due to the darkness of the environment and the eerie silence and loneliness of the place. A large barn-like house also loomed behind me and I recall there being a gravel driveway with what appeared to be a derelict old car in it, which in this aspect also reminds me of The Wizard of Oz, when the tornado was menacing Dorothy's house.

I awoke from that dream into the encapsulating real life dream feeling my fingers being nudged and something pressing down on one side of my bed. It was a fawn, nibbling on my fingertips and trying to climb onto my bed! My bed? I had one of those, apparently, and as such can only conclude I lived in an apartment or house, which I concluded later to be an apartment. I push the fawn off and find myself in a dark room with three or four deer rummaging through it, the fawns trying to almost eat my fingers, and displaying no fear for me whatsoever and acting so domestic as to even allow me to pet pat them like they were big dogs. But, they had to go, and so eventually I led them down the main hall and to do the front door, holding it open as they filed out. As it turns out, the apartment I lived in was laid out in almost the exact same way as a combination of a couple in Southeast Portland I'd lived in before.

I went back to sleep, wondering how in hell deer got into my apartment, when later in the early hours of the morning they came back! This time there certainly was four of them, a doe and a buck and their two fawns with their obnoxious desire to eat my fingertips. Really, I don't know what traumatized a couple healthy-looking fawns with both parents into wanting to eat my fingertips, but it kind of hurt and was getting rather annoying. Ergo, time for you bastards to go again, as cute and playfully dog-like as you are in your behavior, and so as I was leading back down the hallway to escort them out I hear the front door slam and in comes my uncle, who helps get rid of the deer though doesn't seem terribly surprised at their being there. Then again, my surprise was rather understated, too. My uncle was a little out of breath and was dressed as though he'd come back from a long trip. Day was breaking as he put his stuff away and I noticed that the apartment looked like it had been demolished, or like we were moving out. And it looked like my uncle and I were going to go to a store and he said that he was going to be gone for three days and asked me if going to Fry's would be okay and apologized for not being able to give me a ride back home, which I said was fine because I don't mind taking the bus.

I don't recall getting into a car with my uncle, being in the store and what I bought or what was bought for me, or even the bus trip back...but when I returned home it was a sunny early afternoon, my aunt and my little brother were there, and I had a computer on me that was a little larger than a Voyage 200 calculator. And I had a cat! Two of them? My aunt was pissed at Mitzie, a darling little girl kitty, for having been "bad", which since I knew that could mean anything to my aunt I stood up for her and told her that she's just freaked out and she needs to just pay some attention to it, comfort it, which she sneered at and left me to do. Which I did, soothing and petting her until she was purring on my shoulder as I reclined in a chair. I asked her if she was okay and would try to behave and she said "Yes", after which another cat came up and snuggled with me because it was jealous and so I had both cats to give the kitty-lovings to, for a while at least. Until things got interesting, and very muddled again.

Sometime after I attended to my felines' emotional needs I was bringing something out into the garage – meaning suddenly the apartment was a house? – where I stood and watched a homeless couple have a loud, drunken, and rather embarrassing domestic dispute. The woman involved in the dispute stormed off swearing, after having thrown something at the guy, who after swaying for a bit shuffled into my garage and practically collapsed into my aunt and asked her if he could lay down for a bit who by then had appeared in the doorway. he collapsed on a couch in the garage and I returned inside the house to find my little brother spanking Mitzie, my kitty! I broke down into tears as I grabbed her from him and petted her while my aunt went off into an incomprehensible rant about how "bad" the cat had been again.

After putting Mitzie into a room and locking it, to ensure further abuse on my beloved, I wandered into the kitchen, where I saw two homeless-looking men casually eyeballing the stacks of canned and boxed food we had in there, and still being distraught over Mitzie's "spanking" I screamed at them, asking them what the fuck they were doing there, who they were, and telling them they'd better get the fuck out before I started smashing things into them; I was infuriated. The apartment manager showed up in a confusing scene that followed, which involved the strangers leaving, my computer catching fire and me putting it out somehow, and another stranger showing up while I was screaming about who in hell set my computer on fire and trying to power it up to see if it still worked. He was helpful and calm at least, and seemed sympathetic to my plight, by offering me tools to use to dismantle the device in order for me to dry it out piecemeal. He spoke to me, too, and almost seemed familiar, but I don't know who he was or what he said. Or how my computer had caught fire, got soaking wet, or could power on after all that abuse.