I was looking at my year averages for several of my classes, and all of my averages were failing grades. I was taking my final exams the next day, and I thought that perhaps the exam grade may be enough to pull up the final average, but upon looking at the final averages, I was seeing grades like 10's and 25's. I approached a teacher of mine and asked her how my grade could possibly get this low. She replied, "Well you missed the last three weeks of school going to those Pentecostal festivals and art deco shows. I think you know why you have such a crappy grade. Think about it!" After crying and sulking, she looked at me again and said, "Butt (I somehow knew she was implying this word by her speech), Aimee, this is the PENULTIMATE grade. I still can average in your History IQ grade." She sent me down the hall to a studio in the school where I had to be on the History IQ gameshow with Mark Summers. Each incorrect answer accounted for another day that I was penalized to go to his home and finecomb his carpet. The questions were relatively easy.. Jacksonian Reformers, The Great Awakening, Transcendentalism and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but occasionally, he would throw in some nonsensical pop culture of the 1890's question in, such as, "Who slept with McKinley?" Because I'm not big on the legends of history (and probably because I made these questions up), I couldn't provide the answer. But my history IQ was 110. I went back to class, and Mrs. Holley, the teacher, laughed at my IQ and failed me.

I find myself flying without the aid of wings or jetpack. I am on a cell phone. I am talking to a girl I knew in seventh grade. We are not really friends. She is asking if I know about David S., another name that has a vague ring of “oh yeah” to it. I say no, I need updates, but she will not say. “It is far too depressing and strange to go into right now.”

I ask her if she has any video of me from my childhood. She tells me she does.

As I am flying I see a group of burned out houses in the distance. I set off to explore, dropping the cell phone.

I fly into a dark and dreary warehouse. My flying power wanes and I find that I can not stay airborne. I am stalling, touching the floor to push myself back into the air, suddenly top heavy. The floor is coated with grimy grease; I scrap particles of plastic and metal from the floor, disgusted and afraid that I will never get back into the light.

I know I need the light to fly, I am solar powered. I fly through seven rooms. On the last I am barley clearing the floor. My knees are scraped and bleeding, my palms are black and stuck with pointy bits of metal. I see what I think is blue sky and I manage to fly up to it, but it is only a picture.

I throw open the door and burst out into the night air.

It is very dark.
My flying powers are gone.
I land in a pile of weeds and rusty broken things.

We rent what we think is a copy of Charlie's Angels, but it turns out to be some sort of a political-mystery-thriller starring Lucy Liu and Richard Gere. The movie eventually turns into election coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign. It is the eleventh hour, just before polls are beginning to close, and President Clinton has lost his marbles. He is vigorously campaigning for Al Gore, but his idea of so doing apparently consists of assembling an odd group of people into the attic of the White House for speeches and Q+A. There are no video cameras, no reporters, just geeks. His aids are clearly alarmed and recommend that he do something higher profile, but he is adamant: "The noders are the ones that are important! I don't care about anybody else! The noders are the only ones that matter!" Now that my dreaming brain has figured out that this is an E2 voting block, I realize that their conversations have nothing to do with the political rhetoric that Clinton is throwing out there, and rather focuses on unrelated tangents about love and physics and philosophy. The conversation flows in write-up style; everyone listens to everyone else, but there is no connection between what one person is saying to the next.

All the while that we are watching, my head is on his chest and I feel pressed up close. I haven't dreamed about him in a long time. All in all, he's just mad that it didn't turn out to be Charlie's Angels after all and wants to take it back to the rental place to get our money back.
Dream Play & The Visit

  • With Mario, Genery and Jeremy in dowtown Santa Cruz. We know it's a dream and we're having fun willing random things into existence and creating sort of an art car to drive around in. Genery adds a hot tub and Jeremy manifests a miniature George W. Bush to poke fun at. I laugh my ass off.

  • Discussing the problem of artificial intelligence (AI). I say that I think it's a hardware barrier--AI needs a whole new kind of machine architecture in order to really succeed, perhaps something fuzzy by default.

  • Genery and I arrive in our RV which we have stolen from UC Santa Cruz. It has no door locks and is filled with our junk after months of being on the road. We arrive on some coastline where we're visiting our friends Ali and Noah. Their old place became unsafe to live in as they show us photos of it tilting on the edge of the cliff, dangling above the rocks far below. The new place is very nice and we're hanging out in the living room on the hardwood floor. Soon we get hungry and Genery starts cooking with Ali.

    Allen is there too and asks if we've met Noah's girlfriend. We haven't so we go outside and across the property to where she is sitting on a couch under a dead tree. She looks like Allen's girlfriend's roommate and she is overly friendly with me, very touchy feely and wants to show me her toes. Simultaneously Allen says, "Have you seen her toes?" They are very long and skinny and hard. I say they're like frog's toes.

    I walk back to the RV to get something. I open the door and step inside. Dream ends.

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