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.