I arrive at the foot of the mountain to work in the operations center of a large campaign. Base camp is so busy that my presence is barely appreciated.

We ride through the badlands in an army surplus vehicle with tinted windows, wearing tinted sunglasses and braided hair falling over our hard bodies. We are there to trespass, which we do, and to accomplish an elaborate series of armed robberies which somehow never come to pass. Hot on our trail is the crew of a made-for-TV movie about our short careers, filming a reenactment of each leg of our rebel odyssey just as it happens, or sometimes slightly before because of a tight production schedule.

Their overhead shot of our arrival in a small mestizo village in Arizona creates a buzz that is subsiding just as we get there. I dismount and flag down an old friend who was once a built butch dyke but is now a fresh-faced young man. I start in on a long and disingenuous speech about how brave he is to have made a new life for himself as a man. He tells me that lately he has been camping out with a male-to-female transvestite from Alberta who is constantly nagging but really knows how to dance.

A few days later, our vehicle breaks down on the highway and the only path down to the town goes through the stucco stairwell and back patio of a small family away on vacation. The next time we break down we track dust and pine needles through the same stairwell and patio. The third time the family lets my posse pass but stands there to greet me, and I understand that they have been stationed there to extract my debt to society.

There are five bell jars on the kitchen counter, each with a headless chicken that is half alive but subdued. It is my job to chop these chickens into very small pieces and place them into thin plastic bags that will later be donated to a Chinese restaurant. Finding a knife sharp enough for the job, I start with the claws and the beaks but soon am forced to kill and to keep killing. There is no blood. Once, though, I glance down among the feathers and bones to see a tiny black embryonic crow, with a cute little oversize beak like a Japanese cartoon rendering, which I must also cut in half.

Finding myself in a garden of unwanted male attention, I flee to the streets where a thin and stoic girl from work passes by, protected by a cadre of girlfriends. "I am nothing," I try to tell her, "but what you want me to be." She walks on. In desolation I stumble into a steamy tunnel where I wait and wait, stooped. After wandering home to an empty room I find that it was myself that had been hungry, so I have a quesadilla and a hot shower.

Cutting a checkerboard pattern out out of a jumbo cantaloupe and then slotting little squares of alternately dark green and orange honeydew varietal in the negative space.

Intimations of pansexuality.

It is 2010, and I have been enrolled to compete in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The sport—"pisking"—involves a series of physical and mental obstacles along a track that winds around a large house made of packed snow and driftwood. The sole referee and announcer is Penn Jillette. He gathers the competitors, many of whom are equipped with crampons and leather-lined parkas, to lay out the rules of the game. Naked, I creep off to find a towel. The whistle is blown and there is a flurry of activity but I am not sure what to do. When I raise my hand to ask a question, I am called on by Alan Colmes, who appears to be Penn's assistant. And so I wonder: Will it be Hannity and Teller tonight?

I am taken out to a large field where my eyes are covered and I am shown the essence of the color blue.

Called upon to invent the cocktail party. I arrive forty minutes late to find my early childhood friends already grown up and socializing. They might be shooting a radio documentary at my apartment across the river so I leave early. Passing through the UMass campus at Amherst, I pick up a complimentary refurbished iPod from a kiosk. It is loaded with only three songs, one of which is the jingle for a hygienic product. When I arrive at home we sit through the whole rough cut of the radio documentary with the sound off. Then I go to my room to fiddle with the connections between the speakers and the pickups lodged into the chests of the documentary's subjects, who are each four inches tall and illuminated from within. We try again.

Heavy dreamless sweat with objects falling out of my pockets.

On a mission to collect the little white bags that contain the six frozen berries of Christ. There are too many to fit in our pockets. And then, almost without noticing it, we come upon the valley of the other white bags, which have six other berries—or five berries with kiwi chunks, to be precise—all profane.

At an orphanage, I share a bed with a quiet Russian boy about my age. One morning he slits his throat while staring at me; there is no blood. A few hours later I am told that he will survive. Flushed with relief that I will not be accused of his murder, I tell him how much I love him. And immediately I feel hot with my own insincerity.

I am unaware that I have been chosen to assassinate the mayor of Providence. Under the impression that I am a local reporter assigned to cover a speech, I approach the podium of the local Hilton with a microphone in hand. The janitor rushes over to plug in the microphone, but instead pulls off the top to reveal a 35mm pistol which is now aimed at the mayor. On closer inspection it seems that the part of the mayor is being played by someone else—someone willing to put me in a wrist lock with one hand and to pull the pin of a grenade with the other.

A summer potluck at the house in New England where I will be born. My parents have just been married but some of their friends have already had their first babies. It is my job to check the newborns at the door and to plant them like cabbages throughout the front lawn. I come back from a break to find that they have all disappeared. My mother panics. My father reasons that they must have been kidnaped and will be returned unharmed once we pay the ransom, which I know will come out of my allowance.

Det det det det. Det det det det. Suffer the consequences.

Jealous that two friends have locked themselves into my room for dinner, I decide to take a walk, making a note to myself to remember who exactly these people are when I wake. A few minutes later I discover the workshop where that dream was made. It is a round-the-clock affair that involves several of my closest male friends who get together to improvise vocal music. Someone has brought The Collected Works of Sandy Jencks: Ragtime Composer and the feeling is that we should play through it on a bank of four back-to-back upright pianos. But before that I lead the guys in a rousing 14-hand version of "I Got Rhythm," playing the melody with my forefingers two octaves apart. Blanking on the bridge, I slot in the B section from the Flintsones theme song and no one is the wiser.

In a small fiction workshop run by my father, I have been asked to write a thriller. The story I produce, typed out in single-spaced Courier font on a bundle of typewriter paper, makes me proud. But as I compare it to his, I find dozens of typos and a crippling tendency toward the abstract and the prolix. He had started by describing the quality of the light pouring out from a crack in the door of the backroom in the House of Commons where the two protagonists seal their own fates; I started with a plot summary. To atone, I get a haircut. The hotel salon is short-staffed so they have to call in that girl from astronomy class. Her scissorwork on my scalp I can only describe as "soigneuse." As I tip her five dollars—quite generous, I think to myself—I am overcome with a wave of unspeakable desire.

Going through a large-format magazine containing several short films by a queer Asian auteur. They are part of a series of morality tales, each exposing some kind of injustice, called "A Dictionary of Inequality." My boss is alongside me and he is deeply moved.