Target practice from the chairlift.

As my family waits in bulkhead seats on an interplanetary flight, I take the next shuttle to their craft, but am stuck in the pod with a man who must be some kind of spy. I ignore him.

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.