On a walk in the park we see fuselage and tail of a commercial jetliner, moved chaotically by currents and gusts, severely close to the ground, with a team of engineers stationed on its surface to keep it from crashing by holding on to some improvised rigging. Clearly many have already died, and many more will soon. We keep walking.

Started off innocent enough, but the end is not worth repeating.

Inviting my grandma to a party across town but we can't get her past the door to her apartment. Later Rafe's new Slovenian girl explains the difference between commitment and a bicycle.

A wall-to-wall collage of film festivals.

Down the cliffside in a crowded Brazilian gondola, it occurs to me that flip-flops would have been a better choice than the rubber flippers I am wearing. Later, President-elect Will Smith leads us in battle against the insurgents.

A black-hat Jew teaches me how to imitate the brass-band music emanating from a tiny, tinny Victrola.

A platform that sweeps me up into the grassy hills and out over the bay, where it deposits a narrow wooden buoy among the waves. So this is reality television.

Stepping off a long dirt road, I am forced to tell a nymph to buzz off before stepping onto the subway, which is actually a railcar going the wrong way. She is not pleased.

I forget to rent a car for my brother's wedding, and it's pouring, so I wait for an elevated light rail through the Berkely hills, but since it doesn't come, I take another train from the same platform, which lets me off in the hills of Kensington, where I wander for a while, drenched, until I find my cousins Anna and Jesse, both younger than I remember them, and reversed in birth order, but very understanding, and dry.

Buying a third baguette for Grandma at the bread counter. She greets a train labelled SPENCER in green lights.

Steve is expecting me but I put off the trip so long I have to wait for morning. Once there, after nibbling my own finger clippings in his kitchen, I lop off my own thumbs, painlessly. But then, for fear of disturbing him in his deicate state, I cover the tiny cold thumbs with starch white paper.

Inkjet drafts of unfinished poems on the Girls in Trouble table.

Dad is sure we'll be rained out, but Mom knows it will take the pressure down.

The jeu de paume court is taken by my brother, so I browse the foreign language aisle and get distracted by the work of a pair of surreal Turkish cartoonists, brothers, each one trying to outdo the other.

Just before bed, I decide to order in for some hard drugs. They are are shaped like fountain pen cartridges with acupuncture quills at the end. My lover asks me to cancel the order, but I remain calm. She leaves.

The flight to the Holy Land is full--and they have no idea where they're going.

Off a cliff in a chair and down to the sea below.

At the fair, some woman has filled a set of giant Coke bottles with plastic straws in different numbers and arrangements, making for a kind of bottleneck pan orchestra.

From the high cliff we see the whole school swimming out to sea. My brother leaves for the airport with a cassette mix I made him, grumpy. Earlier, grandma doesn't grasp that the hotel banquet is her own 90th birthday.

A traveling love affair with Audrey, from which I wake to tell the betrayal to my ex, who takes it hard, from which I wake again to a hillside bus with Alicia, with whom I must perform in an hour, after the driver takes my coin on exit, with no preparation, only a setlist and a settling calm.

We cannot pack our baby wallabee, I am told, although on inspection he looks more like a baby lemur. So myself and my brother, and my best friend and his brother, we prepare to roll out in a rented minivan. I invite crazy Andrew but it is clear he is scared to leave home. Earlier, restless sleep beside the father as the brother waits outside.

I will my way through a sequence of book covers, each with misspellings more egregious than the last.

My lover dreams that, in the deli aisle, we see a die-cut hash mark made of beef, shrink-wrapped. "Meat trivet," she tells me urgently. Then she seems to wake and tell me, once again, "Meat trivet". When she really wakes up, she decides to tell me everything.

Through an old-fashioned front-loading washing machine's glass door there stretched TIDE-like capitals pronouncing: DETERGENT JOURNALISM. Just another foul-mouthed anthology from the folks at Harper's, I assume.

A gaunt Nordic man pulls me aside in a strange mix of begging and robbery. Later, my lover tells me she is trying to be tender now because it will hurt less later.

Woken by a wash of light, I squint my way to the underwear drawer to dig out a red sleeping mask, then stoop back to bed. Woken by light, and realizing I had been dreaming, I dig out a red sleeping mask and fall asleep. Woken by light, dig the mask, fall asleep. Light, mask, sleep. Light, mask, sleep. Until finally I just bury my head under the pillow and try not to dream.

At my Sunday School class, which is now all grown up, I have forgotten how to plug in my keyboard, and don't know the songs, so I never start the set.

A sea voyage in fragments.

My mother tells me that her father died. "When?" I ask. Twenty minutes ago. She didn't know she was supposed to tell me. Later, I notice that the fall issue of the New York Review of Books has a full-page ad for candy on the cover. "I know exactly how this happened," I announce. No one asks.

My father convinces me to postpone my trip to travel with him on Sunday. This allows me to put on a fashion preview for my grandmother.

I wake to a Siamese kitten on the windowsill, five stories above a Brazilian slum, hissing at a little tropical bird.

We huddle in pairs on the floor. The next morning there are stiff corpses on the deck, lined up head-to-toe with twine. They have been killed by the gentle whip that tickles. We could have spoken up to save them. Instead we lie to the investigators and tell them our parents did it.

He jumps up with red bands along his stretchy yellow legs. It turns out my brother was right.

The tiniest studio apartment in purgatory, which is essentially a toy kitchen covered by a loft bed, belongs to the same woman who offered to give me a voice lesson.

Chasing a gelatinous black toad through the house where I grew up, until I trap it between two hats and proudly present it to Loren, who points out correctly that it is actually a venomous scorpion. He scolds me for not killing it immediately, which I then do. My father lives upstairs.

Late, at the wrong track, at the wrong station, with the wrong ticket, to the wrong city of Boston, but I persist in search of the right train.

Down in the goathouse.

At the sanatorium of dreams, no one has insurance. I'm told that the line marked "Nightmares Only" will be shorter. When my turn comes, I shout up to an unseen woman on the mezzanine. She tells me to keep on dreaming and come back next week.

Test tube poured on the rest room floor.

I notice that the new issue of Wired magazine comes bagged with collectors' edition of the new Adrian Tomine novel, in sizes ranging from two inches to fourteen inches across, with cover price varying accordingly; a brilliant fundraiser. Later, we are seated directly to the side of the stage where we can see nothing. Waiting for the curtain to rise, I conceive a new instrument: half autoharp, half accordion. Its chord buttons mute some strings and also push air from bellows through metal reeds. The result is a bright sweeping plucking, or a sonorous wheezing, or both at the same time.

In an apology for the practice of self-delusion, I lead a tour of the dorms. At first the crowd seems sympathetic to my explanation that in even the most rational society, harmless misperceptions will accrue to large-scale fantasies. To restrict naive lying would be to curtail basic rights, I say. A man who looks like Alan Dershowitz is not convinced: establish a system of incentives that will guide us toward the truth, he says. All else would be mere chicanery.

Mistakenly fertilized by a coworker, I quit and consider my options.

After a border collie knocks a slow softball pitch out of the park, we are forced to look for a designated hitter. Cut to an aerial pan over a row of bodies at the morgue that settles on the bloodied face of former president Richard Cheney.

The whole extended family tames and then swims with a benevolent swarm of amphibious dinosaurs as I look on from a vertiginous overpass.

My elder cousin tells my grandfather that her newborn son will be a rabbi. As he takes in the news, his face grows flush with a kind of chubby eagerness, and I assume he will live forever.

At the beach, which is more like a desert, we have left unattended on our blanket a pile of three manuscripts, the topmost of which is an unpublished essay by Garry Wills with a title something like, "VIOLENT CRIME: WHY WE CANNOT KNOW WHAT WE KNOW, BUT WE DO KNOW THAT WHAT WE KNOW IS EITHER HARD TO KNOW OR UNKNOWABLE." While we are busy chatting, a wiry Algerian nonchalantly walks over out blanket and takes the pile of manuscripts to his extended family a few feet away. When I walk over to confront him, he returns with one silent finger extended like a gun.

Full-fledged patent-ready business concept, vanished. Later, a canal-based performance of King Lear suspended several stories over a fresh-water reservoir. I miss most of the rehearsals but crawl on just in time for opening night.

Duped into sharing a hotel room on the 18th floor with the editor in chief, I have to pretend not only that I've read the article on Lincoln and Obama, but that I understood it, and beyond this, that I LIKED what I understood. Exhausted, I take a van ride with friends to an oceanfront fountain. Later I call for our annual air-conditioning and heating duct cleaning, but I've been put through to a Greek restaurant, whose waitress says she'll send one of the busboys anyway to see what he can do. Dina just barely waits for me to finish before heading out the door: after all, I'm twenty minutes late again.

Green, actual, point-blank Guatemala.

Harry has devised a new life system, and I have accepted it. The first thing I must do is lie down on a cot and allow him to needle me twice in the chest, then run two tubes down to my belly: one running from a vein to an artery, the other running from an artery to a vein. It is only by mixing oxygenated and non-oxygenated blood, Harry says, that the body can nurse itself back to health. The second thing is to climb under the pier down a tall metal staircase with a steel mesh box in my arms and my father in front of me, as huge and irregular waves crash against us. This is dangerous, I think, as I put down the box and do it anyway.

No room at the screening of Warren Buffet's biopic.

At night school we pair off for some kind of high stakes musical theater game. In the elevator I run into Andrew, who is singing with a lute, and a curly haired kid with a tambourine tucked under his recorder. Knowing they will win, I slip down to the in-house movie theater which is almost empty. Ji is watching a video-game-like movie about a woman trapped in a grayish apartment building that must be purgatory. After much sorrow she wanders out into the street and finds whole living people there, only to discover, as they fade, that she is on the altar of her own funeral. Later a take a rolly cart across town with David, who has hired me as bodyguard and accompanist. After a few blocks underground, which is safe but cumbersome, we decide to risk the streets. And it's waiting to cross under an overpass that our ears are boxed while at the same instant the back of our necks are slashed. Some kind of wake up call.

I desperately want to join the black men's sacred singing group but am not sure that I can commit the time and am too shy to bring this up with Sheldon. Later at the party, I discover some home footage of a man cutting open his own thigh to reveal many fetal mice, each of which he in turn cuts open. Sadistic and clinical, I tell my mother and a dear friend at a party in the house where I grew up, yet somehow faithful to the truth! Later that night I see a photo of my cousin holding three cats at the kitchen table, and I know where the mice went.

A series of brass tubes finely etched with characters and symbols by Joni Mitchell. One has to rotate them with little knobs to understand the message. Later on the shop floor, I see the machine that made them: a long robotic arm of stone that heats up at the edge to carve a line in the brass, then pulls back to be cooled by a stream of water, then heats up to carve again.

The tennis pro drives up to the fence in his black coupe and parks on the court itself. He delivers a pronouncement that Laurence interprets as bluster. She had no tolerance for this Miami word order in the French language, she says, until last year. Now she finds it charming.

A lush one-way alley tram to the coast, where there three kinds of knee-high pets made from swarms of dots: terrier, horse, and giraffe. And lo, their oversized counterparts are loose too, including a 30-foot-tall abstract ostrich wrapped in a halo of black flies.

Part of my stage act is peeing in the corner, which raises a flurry of sand flies.

It's very complicated.

As we prepare for our journey, David shows me his only piece of luggage: a wide empty plastic case that folds out into a bed. I make a purple shake and there is just enough for my family. Later, on the back of an Army transport at night, we drive out onto an endless tarmac overgrown with grass.

Routine break-in and burglary with David Spade and Chris Farley. Later, I step on a pin.

Cleaning the tub.

"I gave you up before I gave myself the chance..."

To play along at the salon, I pull out my acoustic bass guitar. But someone has already started playing a somewhat throaty antique instrument. I apologize and go into the other room to pluck out "New York State of Mind".

Renovations at work. H is naked in a corner of the stairwell and asking for wheat. M says he's going to work three hours a week just to keep his health insurance. And Sarah says they're dismantling a 17th century cupola, already, and an improv nook, and the hall of graphite, just to build god knows what in its place. And that's just on the first floor.

After the dinner party a fight breaks out—or it might be an epidemic. I stay inside waiting for casualty reports. After, R doesn't want to talk and leaves angry, with the flash of a smile. On the bed I find L splayed out, pale and visibly in shock, with a severed penis between his legs on the bedspread. He says he is giving it to charity because what doctor would perform a reattachment on the Friday night before New Year's? I can hear his mother in the kitchen, starting up the phone tree.

Roy and Edna.

As I nod off on the train, I hear the intertwining strains of violin and trumpet which occasionally resolve into a full quartet. When I wake I realize my editor is sitting behind me. And the whole scene, including my first auditory dream, was itself just a dream.

The new office is furnished with a guest bed with flannel sheets.

My mother has been hired to assassinate Sigmund Freud at a convention of psychoanalysts. In mercy I empty the 11 caliber revolver of its rounds and, as I slide them into my desk drawer, see that they have turned to shiny quarters.

The yoga teacher explains that she is happy to take our questions in the hall after class, and that she is not forbidden to spend time with students as friends. But if she watches a film with us, for example, she will charge us for two hours of private instruction. Later my brother takes the wheel and guides our model car into the sea. We arrive at the quayside inn soaked and late. As we prepare for bed, I see two cats, one gray and one black, that keep jumping down to a concrete courtyard at least three floors below. They land on their feet.

Wake up with shin splints on a flint plinth and think, "I need a mint julep."

Milky and pure with a metal tinge.

Once we settle on Chinese delivery, I'm taking orders. Tobin wants beans, which I assume means mung.

Drive off a cliff again. Drive off a cliff again. Drive off a cliff again.

A thin man hands me a wad of bills. Wanting to reciprocate, I give him all the money in my back pocket. He takes back his own wad and walks away.

At midnight there's a short stack of mail in the garage. But only junk: Dad has already been through it.

First they strip you of your name and dignity and your sight and give you a common language: "Edo filiam ilu filiam." You march blindly through stairwells and halls chanting to the chamber whenre you are lifted to the sky. Then they seek your trust: sliding over outstretched arms in a game of imitation. Then they teach you how to draw blood, and how to give it. And finally a grain of speech: "This is the very painting of your fear, this is the air drawn dagger..." repeated like a sickness, each time with fresh motives and inflections. Then they make a beggar of you, a meal served at the hands of the others, and a shrill stomp and song. Before the real initiation, where we are painted with ash and drawn into the fire, I blow a kiss to the believers, and trudge under my pack onto the street.

A stand of spindly trees whose topmost branches are lit by a ring of cold pink flame against the sky.

A ferocious Bengal tiger who eats only squid ink linguini but gets so wrapped up in it that he is entirely neutralized.

Brad Pitt, Brad Mehldau and my cousin Brad, all clenched and floating together like a skiff in the rising tide. It's just a movie, but that doesn't stop my brother and I from taking the elevated train out to the Polish ghetto to wade out from the docks and find them.

Daddy takes me to the Ultra Speedboat Showcase.

Steve has set up a distance learning arm of his electric funk band for wayward boys. It uses bulky studio headphones and long stretches of electrical cord he unfurls from his second floor window. I stroll through town with my headphones still attached by yards of slinking cord to his stereo. I get caught on an overhang but miraculously work free without taking off the headphones. In a music store I ask for something small and percussive, preferably with tines. There is a folk violin that can be bowed through a small slit in its cloth case, but it is priced at $150. There are a variety of mallet instruments, and, just now, a pair of Central American sisters, the younger of whom is dating my brother. They take off their shirts.

That girl loves me but it's only because she was stolen away from her man by a degenerative neural condition.

At an outdoor picnic table with Ben and Peter and their two-year-old daughter discussing the merits of Grado headphones, which deliver superior sound quality as long as you're not on the subway. Later, we're watching the security tape of all three of us driving our new Camry into the evergladed capital city to reclaim our adopted daughter, now ten years old, who we had forfeited back in a triple sting operation intended to unveil the secret workings of the surveillance state in which we live.

At a small Rolling Stones concert in a riverside courtyard, the guitarist squeals the N-word without provocation, as if it were part of the rhythm and blues tradition he was imitating. My friend Jesse, lying on his back in the nighttime grass, channels our pure confusion by belting out a loud and involuntary "What the fuck?" The music stops and a burly Brian Jones knocks over a ride cymbal as he comes to confront Jesse. We try to run interference and leave as quickly as we can, taking most of the small crowd with us. The Stones turn their amps around and start up again, facing the river.

Washing the light-skinned infant messiah in a basin in the men's room. He pisses all over me but it's infant piss. When he's twelve, of course, he runs away from me.

Dina, Derek, Jesse, and Greg on the lawn with matching technicolor bicycles. Mom is baking pies to raise bail but we sit down to thin slices of a surplus pumpkin pie with the awareness of some dim sibling drama in someone else's family.

I pass a flustered aunt and uncle returning from the annual meeting. At the play, I am drafted at the last minute into the ensemble, which is performing a silent walk-through. Each actor has an small ovular touchscreen which shows the desired location of all four actors on stage with little colored dots. But I don't know which way to orient my own screen, so I'm lost on stage. Afterwards I help my father read the Yiddish inscriptions on the back of the clayware until I notice there is a small bright transliteration in the bottom righthand corner of each one. I don't let on.

On an all expenses paid trip with my grandmother in a luxury hotel halfway around the world. We must leave the cool and easy lobby for the burning sun to complete some kind of quest. By the industrial skyline and the series of period gunners marching from the water it must be Egypt on the eve of the First World War. We play along with the headscarves and squalor. And after a coastal stroll my grandmother takes the wheel of the rental car and insists on navigating, poorly, through a maze of railway switches. My kingdom for GPS.

Up and up the stairs. With a lady who might be my friend. Til I go on half flight too many into the sky. And she's waiting at the ticket taker. Later with my father at the one at a time dilating upside down centrifugal ride. He tries to speak to the attendants in French but I'm the one who has to get strapped in.

The flood in a Honda.