Woken by a screech, I crane down out the 10th floor window to see a car crash in miniature from above. A sedan veers onto the sidewalk and crushes at least three people flat. An SUV sideswipes a motorcycle then bursts into flames, causing two parked trucks to burst into flames. A school bus bursts into flames, causing each child to scatter onto the asphalt and burst into flames. Later, buying soup in as Asian mall, we are late for the one-man show about traffic safety which I understand to be a covert counterterrorist training camp.

Instead of an understated three-person playlet we are treated to one of those nausea-inducing centrifugal fairground rides. Back in the field office we are astonished to learn we are no longer needed; our leader has learned to type for himself.

A tornado, a thick cold shoulder, and a toxic stream.

At early morning fire drill my family is sluggish. I leave the home and trudge up the hill to a circle of friends playing a set of homemade cellos built for the occasion. They are tuned strangely, in the pattern C G C G, but I soon learn to pluck a few open jazz chords and even quote Stevie Wonder's Superstition once. There is no fire.

There's a piano on the far bank of the river, and someone is playing it who doesn't know how.

As part of the game I follow a series of white corridors to a room where a bear in a gorilla suit is unleashed. We lure him into the down escalator and take the stairs ourselves; at the bottom just a few bloody scraps of hide get caught in the grate. In the second trial a pale man with a long pointy head looms over me but is subdued by conversation. The third trial is the most elaborate: two friends from school have stocked a full mock convenience store in the basement according to a principle which I and another friend must guess. Doubles? No. Insides? No. But wait, I realize suddenly, half expecting a wall to flip up and offer me a new car. Everything here is a Hybrid.

On a cross-country flight the stewardess explains that passengers have the right to jump at any time from exits located at either side of the cabin, but that the captain expects us to provide our own parachutes and landing equipment. A bespectacled man asks a rather practical question about the civil war which requires a long answer; when he goes to the lavatory the pilot prints in chalk on an old blackboard, slowly, "Impudent Cunard."

In one stroke I untwine the little plastic tubes that had stood upon the table.

Shiftless dreams of blogging without content.

I wake under a pile of cold blankets to stagger out onto a narrow street where the rays of the sun are just beginning to fall on buildings built before the war. Awed as I am at the sight of the sky, and assuming myself among the recently undeceived, I don't even consider the possibility that this is a false dawn.

Reacting badly to a drug meant to improve her short-term memory, my grandmother is seized by a strong memory from thirty years ago when she was living in Long Island and visiting her dying parents in nursing home.

As I rise from the bath I hear the squeal of tires, a muffled thud, a louder crash, then the peal of a car alarm. Someone else's nightmare, I think, and pull on my sleeping mask.

From inside a circle of oversize Balinese gamelan gongs, a give a soulful rendition of "Ain't Too Proud to Beg." But Sarah Darling's straightedge friends don't want to go to Burning Man, even though it's only a short drive and would do them good.

My editor at the Times plays a twelve-string lute and, as I see from a video projected onto the far wall of the cottage behind her house, she sings a mean Welsh ballad. She wants me to write only the last sentence of a book review I haven't read.

Taking the uptown 4 train to an awards ceremony for work. The bathrooms are a fifteen minute walk through the Upper Eastern Gardens so I sit on the inner rim of a large outdoor auditorium. Zoo animals roam the crowd—a mongrel puppy, a baboon-seal, a giant loon covered in yellow Tyvek—each playing its own version of fetch. I wonder out loud how they could possibly have fitted a 30-foot bird with a full-body space suit; as I say this I realize it must be nothing more than a prehensile balloon animal. Over the course of a four-hour ceremony, the host is promoting eight books with oversize inflatable book jackets that velcro to the belt of his jumpsuit. He shows us the cover of Norman Mailer's posthumous soul album. "Looks like Frank Zappa," I whisper to the delight of the two teenage girls on my left. On my right, Nate says, "This is why I started my own label."

Instead of making a smoothie, I jam my right hand into the blender.

Marian is putting sparrows into slingshots.

Clipping my fingernails and revising a single paragraph.

Muslim chocolate.

I have a recurring dream. I pull the mask off my face and drink something red. I get on the train at 7th Ave and stare out the window over the bridge. I get off at 7th Ave and walk up hundreds of stairs. I pass by an open-air cafe with an awning with a pattern of dots that spells DREAM. I walk into a cold tower and take the elevator to the fifth floor, telling myself, "If I can love my dreams, I can love my life." Then I wake up.

On the subway I sit next to a girl with gaping abrasions on her nose, knuckles, and left forearm. Everyone is ignoring me so I feel it's safe to ignore her. She begins to flip through her diary.

My birthday is a Jewish holiday so the gospel choir from college filters into my two-level ranch apartment. Someone brought sweet potato kugel. I kiss a skinny girl because no one is looking and I'm lonely. Out on the street there is a siege: three white police SUVs are stopping a dozen black girls on the corner with a galaxy of red white and blue flashers. But the cops are black women too and they're trading jokes I don't understand. Back at the house the choir is in full song. When the skinny girl smiles at me I look away. Around the corner at the bar I meet a man in a velcro vest who says he is the editorial director of a magazine called Tikkun. Thinking that means "repentance" not "repair" I ask him if he can help me.

On a chill dawn after a dim night, a series of good omens. Little Baby Simon at the airport engages me in an imitative game: his mouth emits a series of pure tones and red, blue and greenish glows, and it's my job to keep up. My first recording vanishes from the shelves of Amoeba music and into the homes of unsuspecting listeners. When I awake my sleeping bag is gone and my pillow is at my feet.