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.