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.