I can't tell whether D is angry or distracted. J turns out to be some fat kid on the street.

After the threat seminar, L guides us around a deep mud trap. We park at her house, which is filled with fine porcelain relics. I can feel an old kinship coming back strong.

Tobin leaps through a large glass window. We are shocked; he was not supposed to fall through. The height is a certain killer. When we find him, hours later, in the shallows of the river, he is lucid, though a little subdued, with a hole in the small of his back that is just beginning to bleed.

Into the harkness with a dungeon.

It turns out the black dog is not dead; they had just told us that to ease the sting that came with giving her away to another owner. Walking her to the beach, we pass a cat's carcass submerged in the wet sand. Two passenger jets are floating on the stormy tide, with two blue plastic helicopters there to rescue them.

Party on the submerged airplane wing.

Hang gliding up through winter crags, I ration eggs.

Let's talk about the shock of losing my grandmother again.

"I am your dog," says the body of a woman as it walks from the wreck of an car accident where the corpse of a retriever lies smoldering. "I am your dog."

When I return from a long early shower, the musicianship class is moving from marketing to promotion.

At the reception, my mother urges me to take a bite of the brisket Courtney Love has on a styrofoam plate.

A rhino named Natalie.

A wake for my grandmother, a month after her death. She lies in a pod, built into a panoramic chamber, her corpse just long flaps of skin. Then the pod closes and I am ushered back in to the party.

She shoots herself. Once for show, and once for real. And after she shoots herself for real, she shoots you.

At the shore, I'm combing the surf for mammals taken in by the tide. First a stray possum, then a few kittens pawing out of the wet sand. And behind a sandbar, submerged in shallow seawater, the possibility of a grandmother.

I walk by a continuing education school where an algebra lesson is underway. The sign outside says: "Regular class: $95. Isaac Asimov, $150." "Might as well spring for the Asimov," I think to myself.

A red-headed friend sings an anthemic folk song. "It sounds so simple," I say, "but it's nuance all the way down." Most of the songs on her album have faux-naif redundant titles like I WAS A SRIROCCO AT THE ROCKY ROCOCO BAR BEFORE COCO CHANEL WENT CUCKOO FOR COCOA PUFFS. The demos have already been animated with fast bright talking woodland animals. She leaves for the Obama speech but sends a handwritten note inviting me to learn the songs so I can tour with the band.

A classmate bikes by and yells, "Truce!" I give him the finger and walk into a poetry seminar. The professor is at the blackboard. I dictate a stanza that ends, "Together we could rule the world."

At the high school assembly a hippie-looking man steps up to the mic to ask a question. "I am Cheeseburger Jesus!" he begins. I move on to the next symposium.

Grandma got pregnant again.