I had brought my old English professor Ross to a magic show. I knew of the magician somehow, knew him to be brilliant, and wanted to impress Ross. The first trick involved a naked woman, evidently covered in shit, walking up to Ross and grabbing at him, touching him. The trick, of course was that the woman was actually covered in chocolate.

The magician called me down to the stage as a volunteer. I was very confident and relaxed about it, sort of performing to the crowd myself. The magician instructed me to walk around the perimeter of the room, along an elevated, unprotected walkway. It turned out to be strewn with obstacles—things to step over or around, at the peril of falling off the wall. I navigated them with no trouble and was not scared.

“What music are you listening to these days?” the magician asked.

I could only think of lame, obvious replies. “Hendrix. David Bowie. Led Zeppelin. I guess kind of classic rock”—I cringed at myself using the phrase “classic rock.” “The Dead,” I added.

The trick was that at the end of my journey around the room, the magician produced a box full of cassette tapes of the artists I had mentioned. I realized that he’d accomplished the trick by culling the box from some selection of thousands of cassettes that had to include what I’d mentioned.

Dreamt I was 10 minutes late for the meeting on Tuesday with my boss (actually scheduled) to determine “responsibilities” for the coming month. Feeling guilty, I took a job with me—it was a physical job, in an old-fashioned job jacket—and brought it with me. She said something like, “Is this a good time? Do you have to take care of that job?” I paged through it, feeling slightly ashamed that I hadn’t beforehand. I looked at the instructions in the routing sheet and they didn’t seem unusual. “I don’t think it’s urgently hot,” I said.

The mood in the workplace was self-consciously celebratory and upbeat, like the hallways of the “Fame” school or something. Music played as employees arrived and greeted each other effusively.

At another point I was in a record store browsing through vinyl, and considering buying some though I knew it to be almost obsolete. The selection was limited, with only a few hundred albums in all, but an entire section divider was devoted to Marshall Crenshaw. I found a copy of the Wings’ Greatest Hits and scanned the tracklist, wondering if I should buy it. S. was with me.