Listen to teacher

I’m in an unfamiliar high school. I seem to be the age I am now, but no one notices me walking around. I see Craig Watson and Adam Langston. Adam looks younger than he did in high school. They are wearing Hawaiian shirts and Adam does not acknowledge me. There are photocopied flyers on all the walls. One that is everywhere has a picture of Angie Chambers on it. (A story I read last night called Fishboy in the Oct 2001 issue of Playboy featured a boy with an obsessive crush on a classmate pictured in a flyer for the seafood place she worked at.) At one point, the legs of my gray corduroys (that I wore out last night) were too long and I skated very fast through the empty halls with the leg ends around my feet. I skate across the stage of the auditorium. A play practice of some kind is taking place. I continue sliding into a back room where boxes of doughnuts lay. But they are oversized muffins so I tear off a piece. And a male teacher tells me they are for faculty only. I leave as he tries to kick me out.

I am in a contest with Jim Perez (an art director at Portfolio Center) the object is to place my white objects between his red ones – while he tries to do the same. At least I think that’s the object. It starts very orderly and logically, then things begin to change. There are beads, golf balls and odd shapes stacked in all manner across a long table. Some pieces are different colors and balls are stacked like oranges so it’s impossible to get a piece between them. At one point, I drop marbles (beads?) into a test tube hung in a row of them hanging above a stack. Then I am tearing off bits of white Styrofoam to use as pieces. Have I run out? I feel futile. I don’t know the rules or strategy anymore. All this taking place in front of a classroom of little kids sitting in chairs raised movie theater stadium style. They are staring ahead zombie-like with smiles frozen on their faces. The teacher is praising how well behaved they are and doesn’t care if they are paying attention.