There are two ways to use a crowbar. You can use the bent side to knock a person out, and you can use the forked side to puncture the skin and even the guts. To my horror, which I suppress, the man in the gray suit selects a homeless man and, behind his double-parked luxury car, does both.

On the airplane, we turn back just after liftoff. I blame the two young black men seated behind me, inexplicably and shamelessly.

Flashing back through the last thirty years of my life in five-year increments, until I vanish at the moment of birth. Then flashing forward through the rest of my life in five-year increments, until, at the great age of 85, I give up.

A red rubber ball moving through an invisible Rube Goldberg machine.

As a rookie fact-checker for the Brown alumni magazine, it takes me forty-five minutes to discover that the name of the university president has been misspelled. But I do get some respect for it.

We sneak into the rotunda to catch a few seconds of the film, which is a Victorian farce. On the way out we see dozens of keystone cops and button-down nurses preparing for their entrance. The theater manager whispers, "Some sort of a ruse." Later, after crossing a street that turns out to be a highway, I come upon a stranded tanker trailer and police car. Each are hoisted and dragged by its own swarm of half-naked partygoers who have worked their way underneath, like ants under a banana. It seems to be a movement. Not wanting to get involved, especially after seeing a real tank around the corner, I climb in a large wicker basket headed for the roof. A few moments of high-definition lucidity as I float aimlessly up, sinking from time to time, powered only by commitment to the dream, in what must be a tenement alleyway at dawn.

After I swipe my farecard in the subway, but before I can get through the turnstile, two black teens push past me coming the other direction. I am intimidated so I sneak in through the gate and ask the Arab attendant to let me pass. Since he ignores me I tell him a folktale in French, which pleases him. It's a few minutes before I realize that he doesn't want anything from me, that I am free to go.

During the ice storm Loren and I wait over an hour for a table at the rickety thirty-story hotel. When the music is almost over we are led up the stairs to an elevator which opens on a tiny balcony with a table for two which opens on a musty twenty-nine-story atrium. The food never comes, and when it does there is only bacon and potatoes, no eggs. So I strike out into the storm with a mechanized sled that has a weedwacker attachment to smooth down the ice in front. At the coast I ditch it for a sort of waterbound snowboard which, as a favor to the owner, I ride along the frigid coast to the depository. No choice but to walk back.

Young Indian couple in separate cardboard boxes on the highway at night. As I haul them to the median it becomes clear that they are speaking perfect English on their cell phones. They are grateful for the service. Later, I find that dream-reading is a reliable source of typos.

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.