the hunt

I walk into a garage with stacks of keys on all three or four sides. Three of them are connected. I turn them off and they all slow. I turn them off and the ones behind me come on. I turn those off and the first three come on. It is very weird.

I am in an antique store looking at square shaped hot air balloon ornaments that look like frames. I say that I wanted to buy them for mom before but they were too expensive. The price is marked 25 dollars marked down to 6.99, marked down to 5.99. Brooke’s mom is in the store and I tell her about it. She says I must have been here before and gestures with the object she is holding. It is a hot air balloon figure that has a chip on the side. I wonder why she is implying that chipped it the last time I was in the store. I wonder if I did chip it, but don’t think so. She was joking, but I take it seriously.

Then I am doing a scavenger hunt and have to find numbered clues. One is on a set of clothes hanging and says something about being hung like a person. It is outside the corner of my apartment. And then the last clue is something about a dress that is hanging from a tree outside my apartment. But I realize that the tree doesn’t actually exist there. So I can’t find the last clue. I am looking around the ground for it. And then someone says something to me, she is sitting above me on a large branch of the tree. It is either Brooke or Mel.

Move

I’m in a house, people are outside lying by the pool. And then I am peddling a mountain bike through deserted city streets. It becomes night and I ride around trying to find a place to stay. I swerve around a homeless guy lying in the middle of the street under a blanket. Suddenly it is morning and I am riding through another part of the city, perhaps towards the outskirts of downtown. It is a barren and poor area of town. There are vacant lots or empty parking lots around and a run down store ahead of me. Then I enter a more populated area and I look for people I know in New York in the faces of the crowds I see through store windows. I get off the bike and walk into a food court. As I see Danny, someone yells to me. The person I though was Danny isn’t him, but I turn around and see a big group of girls that I know at a table. Then I turn to a third table and Danny is sitting there. The girls and Danny are talking about lying at the pool while I was inside.

Reunion

On vacation, I meet up with one of my old roommates from my first summer at Disney. I know who he is but I do not actually recognize him. I am driving to a bar and a truck pulls into the parking lot in front of me. At first I am nervous that someone is following or threatening me, but then I recognize my old roommate. We had no plans to meet but continue on together. We walk in together and upstairs to a bar. Maybe it is in a house or we go to a house later. More people meet up with us.

bad sign

I’m in a house with Dave. He is somehow terrorizing me. I go into a bedroom to find him. He tells me to strike or saw through a metal pipe with a metal object with a serrated edge. I run to find such an object and come back with a leatherman multi-tool and a round tube-like thing. I ask Dave if either is ok, but he is not there. As I go to strike the pipe, I realize the pipe is part of a bomb and the spark or impact will set off an explosion.

Crash

I am riding in a hot air balloon with Ester. I don’t know who is piloting the balloon but I assume someone else is there doing so. I lean out of the basket as rise higher above the field we must have very recently taken off from. I try to take a picture of the chase vehicle and Brooke standing next to it. I can’t tell if she is in focus or even in the frame of the shot. Then we fly over a quaint, little town. I look down on the cobblestone streets and squares. On one street that circles around a fountain, I see mom step out of a red English style phone booth on the sidewalk. She is wearing a full riding outfit like a proper lady would wear to go horseback riding. She has on the rounded cap with the short bill, the jodhpur pants that billow out to one side at the ankle. But her entire outfit is not the usual brown hue, she is wearing bright white from head to toe. I cannot see if see is holding a whip. I wave at her and try to take her picture. But again I cannot tell if I get her in the spot properly. It almost feels like the balloon is spinning although I don’t think it is.

I am sitting at kitchen table with Crutch and another guy. Crutch is making a smoothie, whipping chunks of pineapple in a blender. Then I start to make one but add in lots more pineapple. Or do I try to take Crutch’s off the base of the blender? The pitcher of the blender has no lid on it. And as I lift it off the base, it feels like the entire picture is wobbling under the centrifugal force of the pineapples whipped by the blades. The force pulls the pitcher out of my hand and the pitcher bounce around the room. But nothing spills out of it until the pitcher lands in the other guy’s lap. Then little chucks of pineapple fly in an arch above the table and across the room. The arch extends from his lap, up over the table and towards the far wall.

I am standing outside across the street is an old house. There are all sizes of window frames leaning against or hanging from the front (or is it the side?) of the house. All the frames hold panes of stained glass. Not little random shards of different colors that form a picture like in church. No, these windows just have a few panes of different colors large squares or rectangles each the entire space of that pane within the frame. Some frames sit on the ground and are tall enough to almost reach the room. Some hang covering the windows of the second floor. Some just sit on the ground barely reaching up to the porch rail. Off the right, an old woman pushes a shopping cart. The cart is almost or completely empty. The road slopes away from her and gets steeper as she goes on. The cart handle seems to slip from her fingers and glide away almost as if she pushed it. The cart rolls quickly down the hill of the road, but the old woman keeps up right behind it. Her feet shuffle along without extra and she keeps her arms in the position as when she let go of the cart. It looks like she is still pushing it expect that the cart is a mere inches in front of her. I turn around and my grandfather is standing in the gravel driveway with the strip of straggly grass down the middle besides my other grandmother’s yellow house. I see my red blazer from high school parked in her garage in the backyard. Grandfather tells me, “There is no way your getting that door.” I look behind him into the backyard and see a wooden door with stained glass in the upper half leaning against a wooden fence.

Look to the land

I’m riding in a helicopter over a city and a river of brown water snaking between the city, highways and trees. Then I am walking down an empty riverbed. I keep seeing clumps of weeds and moss that looks like seaweed. The clumps are stuck in bushes on the ground, tree branches higher up and even way up hanging from the steel beams of a high voltage power line tower. The grass and ground all around is still damp or soggy. I take these all as signs that the river has recently flooded and quickly dried up.

No outhouse?

Driving through a neighborhood of rich houses. At the end of a cul-de-sac, there are three huge, fancy houses that look abandoned with scruffy, slightly overgrown lawns. It all looks deserted. I enter the next house to the left with mom and dad. I assume it is the Standring’s house even though I don’t see them or recognize anything. I walk through the living room and sit down in the kitchen. I eat a bowl of cereal or something. In front of me on the table is a tall earthen vase. I pick it up and it is full of what looks like milk. I ask Mom where the bathroom is and she tells me to use the vase because there is no plumbing. She explains that I should wrap my turds in toilet paper so that the vase is easier to clean. When I tell her that my vase is full, she takes it to dump it out. I wait for her to return and really need to use the bathroom but think that I am now too disgusted to try.

Stunt marketing

An old man and a fat man run a ferris wheel on a boardwalk by the sea. There is a sign that advertises it as the best view of the ocean. But the top of the wheel is only about a hundred feet higher than the end of the boardwalk. They advertise or just draw attention by faking accidents on the wheel. One man goes up and pretends to fall from the top of the wheel, but he throws off a dummy instead. The fat man goes up, pretends to fall, but grabs a hold of the edge of the basket and is dangling, hanging over the edge. He swings down and I see the ground from his perspective rolling up to greet him. He glides down above and then really close to the people standing below. He almost hits a man there wearing a straw round hat.

Must not be a river nearby

I was washing clothes in my shower. When I went to add soap, the box of detergent filled with water from the spray of the showerhead. I try to pour out the water and a big clump of the wet powered soap falls into the tub and begins a barrage of big soapy bubbles.

Get your money's worth

I walk into a convenience store and then begin working behind the counter.

In an ice cream parlor, I flirt with a girl while my mom devours a cone for the free refill.

Can't go

I walk into some type of complex, like a mall or cheap amusement park, with Mom and maybe Dad and Grandfather. We are looking to meet up with Stacy. But then I am alone. I see a bathroom down a few wide steps in the corner. The entrance is a hall open at both ends with the door to the actual bathroom hidden from public view on the inner wall. Then I am sitting on a toilet. But it is not in a stall or even surrounded by walls at all. It is exposed in the middle of the room in front of the row of sinks with the long mirror above. PJ walks in looking for me.

Travel light

In a hotel lobby trying to get someone to take or buy my luggage. I go into the hotel bar to sell drinks.

Moderizta

Driving in a car with Dad. We are looking for a restaurant. Each time we approach one, we slow down to look it over. We finally walk into a place that looks more like a market or upscale grocery store. We stand just inside the entryway looking at the wicker baskets full of cheese nestled in beds of straw and bottles of wine in black wire racks. There is music playing and a French voice comes on. I can’t tell if it is singing or talking. The labels of products on the shelf are in French also. One bottle of wine and a silver bag of something that reads Moderizta. Mom and Stacy pull into the parking lot. I see the back of their heads through the store window and the back window of the car as they pull into a parking space across the small lot.

I am leaving a cafe in a mall. As I walk up to pay, the cashier begins playing the register like a piano. His fingers flow across the plastic keys of number pad and piano music fills the room. He looks like David Letterman. Across from his counter is another register where an old woman begins playing along. An old man stands besides her rocking to the music, awaiting his turn to play.

I walk into an industrial kitchen where a giant hunk of meat 3 or 4 feet high is sitting simmering on a wide flat steel grill. A chef in a stained white apron and coat comes in and grabs the meat off the grill with giant tongs. He lifts it to a nearby table and sets it in a large tray. He slices into the meat, cutting it open into the center. He intends to cut out the parts of the meat that are still good. But the outer edges don’t look that burnt to me. The chef says that he must save it. I look to the right behind a rack or a glass door of a cooler I see what looks like faces like cows pressing against glass trying to look in. The meat on the tray throbs and pumps like a giant heart.

distracted

Two detectives are at a dinner party taking place in a mansion. One detective sits at the head of the table. There is an attractive blond in an evening gown seated to the left down the table. Several chairs at the table are empty although there are places set for them. The mansion belongs to two brothers. One is retarded and one is extremely smart although he acts of just normal intelligence. They are not seated at the table and neither is their father. Way down a hall and several large open rooms away, the detective seated at the table sees one man leading another man across the hall. It is the brothers, the dumb one being lead by the other. The assumption is that the smart brother has to lead the other because he is retarded. The dumb one has his arms outstretched and is covered in something red, so much that from this distance is looks like a red sweatshirt. Then return from the same direction. The detective gets a glint in his eye and tries to stare them down. The dumb brother is freshly showered (with the help of the older brother?) with a towel around his neck. The detective jumps up, knowing that the father has been butchered by the retarded brother. The second detective enters the room, talking about getting back to dinner and asks the first what he is doing. He replies, “I’m about to solve a murder, where have you been? You moron.” But it turns out that the older brother has killed a woman at the dinner party. Is it his wife or sister? He is trying to frame his brother or cause a distraction.

I’m in the hallway of a house, it feel like a vacation home on the beach. I look out a side window and see the older brother and the daughter from the TV show Different Strokes. I turn to my buddy in the house and say, “You have to see this.” Meanwhile, Kimberly and Willis have stopped are looking in the window from the outside. My buddy comes down the hall, he is Gary Coleman who played Arnold, the younger brother on the show. But I have no awareness of this and am surprise when they all react warmly and are happy to see each other again. I think I’ve got to get a picture of this, but I don’t have a camera. I run down the hall thinking that Fred has a camera. I go into his room and BP is there. And BP starts going through Fred’s stuff looking for Fred’s camera rather than going to get his own camera.

I’m in a mansion, there is a party going on. I wake up after the party and go to work. I am wearing a tie, it is black. And I go to my office on the upper story of an office skyscraper. I get to my office, no one else is at there yet. I am feeling very hungover and assume everyone else is too. I walk down the hall to another office and it is a bedroom of the mansion I was just in. Fred is sleeping in one room. I walk back out into the hall and there are two girls from the party helping a bunch of kids get ready for school. I pass a fireplace and take a poker and stir up the almost completely burnt up logs in the grate. A maid is standing there, she was ready to tend the dying embers of the fire before I grabbed the poker. As I poke around in the fireplace, bunch of ashes blow out of the fireplace and onto a man’s black leather dress shoes. I drop to my knees and wipe the ashes off his shoes with my hands. He owns the mansion. I hear people signing like it all part of a musical or is someone just listening to a musical in another room?

Let's get cooking

I am walking on a sidewalk at night. I approach a church of community arts center. There are several posters or cardboard signs on the ground promoting different musical acts. On the back of some of them are messages like “Will work for food” that homeless people would hold up on the corners of major intersections. I don’t know where I am going to sleep. I see a TV set on in the window of a brownstone across the street. I cross the street and walk around the corner of the building. I walk inside and go into the living room. I put something down or I’m trying to take something. I hear a noise in another room and make my way back to the front door. I see someone in the back room, I try to sneak out the door before they see me. It is a woman, she walks out of the kitchen towards the front door right as I reach it. I apologize and say that the door was open and that I was just returning the DVD I found in the street. We chat for a minute and she ends up giving me her business card and asks if I would be available to baby sit. I assume she means this as some kind of double entendre since I see no signs of kids around. Another woman walks in the front door, her roommate maybe. The second woman gives me a sexy look over her shoulder as she walks into the kitchen.