To the tune of "Wonderful Tonight," I overhear someone singing, "Marvin, you're a penny-pinching man..."

Because the Jewish consulate's elevator is slow and does not stop at the 13th floor, I am late for the quiz that would qualify me for a Jews in Latin America scholarship. We have half an hour to give twenty-five answers but the first few questions take the form of elliptical statements. I express my bafflement to the graduate students running the quiz, and they react warmly if dimly with apologies and clues. Later, when I have two out of twenty-five answers down, I learn that no one else had any trouble deciphering the questions. When my parents pick me up we the stairs down to avoid a wait. There is no garden outside so I eat at the mall with some friends of my father and explain to them the anxiety dream I had tonight.

He would be making a fine recovery were it not for the clumps of hair he pulls out at the base of his neck. Later a Cambodian man accuses me of "tragedy" but walks away without explaining.

Jon-Jon is making a concept album. It's a tribute to all the male literary figures who have been important to him, and it uses hundreds of riffs and quotes from well-known popular music of the last fifty years. The track dedicated to Lionel Trilling alone quotes Biggie, Jay-Z, Queen, and the Steve Miller Band. I stop by the studio where a South Indian woman is mixing down one of the tracks. I ask her how they deal with copyright: are they just tweaking the material a little bit and hoping it will be considered fair use? No, she says: they just go ahead and finish the track, and if they have any problems with rights, they go back and edit out the forbidden material. My friend Wayne is recording the conversation with a handheld DAT machine. As he looks back at her, we discover that she is also recording the conversation, with a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder and an eight-foot boom mike with several foam cones. These people are onto something, I think, as I drive back to the hotel with a duffel bag containing three tuna fish sandwich halves and an unfinished beet smoothie.

We decide to take a road trip across a foreign North America. All we have is a camper van and an abbreviated atlas so we stop for provisions at a small supermarket. There are three pygmy lynxes making their nests among the aisles. I give thick steaks to the first two and a helping of ground beef from the butcher to the third. Later at the trailhead the natives have staged a culture clash. They speak in code and scrawl their greetings but we know their first language is the same as ours. And I am asked to wait in the sitting room of the inn while my fellow travelers are shown their rooms.

I spontaneously pose to be drawn from life on my own birthday. Then I bring the pound cake to my own party despite the death threat.

Cast as the only naked human in the largest performance ever planned. In the room above there are a hundred men in cow suits; to the left there are a hundred men in bunny suits; next door are men in tree suits; and a roomful of fox suits; and soldier suits; and robots; and beetles; and sheep; and so on, stretching as far as it is possible to imagine. The script is that I must have a one-on-one conversation with each of them. It is not a melodrama.

Flying lessons on the shoulder of the superhighway.

At a party a biologist tells me he is measuring the time it takes for a rumor to evolve into an argument online.

It's voting day again but since a certain Virginia company is having a party my charming married friends postpone their own until Thursday. Seeing that my review is slated to run in the next issue, a coworker who had submitted a piece a year ago turns over a chair in disgust. I approach my boss to tell him I'd feel terrible if one should run before the other; the phone rings.

I dreamed, I tell my friends, that there was a freak hailstorm in Chelsea. A black Camaro ran a red at about twice the speed limit right in front of me. When a heavy Chevron tanker saw me in the crosswalk I heard the squeal of brakes and a slow and beautiful rollover unfolded before me, hurtling slowly westward. As the tumbling truck began to catch fire I ran toward the water as fast as I could until I reached the Javits Center. Avoiding the exhibits I climbed into the ceiling ventilation to catch the subway uptown for another first date. Train delays meant that I had two unintentional dates on the subway proper before arriving at 72nd St. It turned out she was a single mother. Her baby was ten months old and had not yet begun to speak, she told me, because she was half neandertal. Wasn't she worried that the baby would be taken away from her, I asked? That's why she was looking for a boyfriend, she told me.

Sleeping at her parents' house I agree to an undercover cooling system in lieu of my custom of sleeping naked. Later, I join the local capoeira circle. The uniforms are cheap but the terms are severe, like therapy.

After a long road trip, the English professor forgets that she is not my grandmother and takes me in. I have to sleep on the unmade divan.

As she turns around I see that there is a baby in her arms, and that the baby's left leg is entirely without skin.

If I want to date her I must revise that travel piece on the fate of feral trains after the 2012 subway renovation.

At camp this summer they are teaching us how to concentrate.