I found myself in Manhattan looking for a record store, and of course there are none anymore. I took a walk around the block and took the train back home.

Buckles was describing to some people the chronic shoulder pain he suffered due to a Little League pitching injury. He now had limited mobility in his right arm and found it very difficult to jerk off.

Had band and music dreams too. I’d written and recorded a reggae song. The band had just played a reunion show. We heard back that someone in the audience had said we should not be so “wry.” I took this to mean we should take the music and the audience more seriously. I said that was certainly true. Jake agreed.

J. D. had been organizing baseball lessons on Saturdays for our kids, Theo and Jackie and a few other friends’ kids. It was pouring rain, so I figured it was canceled this week. I found myself at his place anyway. There were open boxes of donuts. I realized the lesson was not canceled. Everyone was already on the bus that was to take us there. I climbed on board with Jackie. Someone handed out beers but skipped me. I was annoyed.

Vexing work dream. I’d been demoted in some weird way. The result was that I was moved from my cubicle to another one that was not equipped with a Mac nor two monitors. I protested, but apparently nothing could be done about it. On the other hand, my monitor was expandable, like a window on a touch screen. The actual physical object grew and contracted as you gesticulated in front of it. So that was something. Still, I felt slighted, marginalized.

Had a dream featuring Robert Duvall. He was in charge of some kind of operation and I was a part of it, but sort of a remote part of it. I wasn’t close to him in the logistics. But at a certain point I encountered him and had the opportunity to address him. I needed to refer to a car for some reason. A car that was in use during the operation. All along, I thought it was a BMW. A convertible. White. But upon closer inspection I noticed that it was an Alfa-Romeo. “Bobby,” I called out to him. I said something about the Beemer, no, sorry, I mean the Alfa-Romeo. I was wondering all the time, is it OK to call him Bobby? I was a little bit worried that he wouldn’t want me to call him Bobby.

Dreamt that I attended a kind of immersive theater experience set in a bar. The performance entailed zombies attacking the bar. No one knew when it was to begin, so no one knew when the zombies would appear. The tension was agonizing. I was watching the main floor of the bar from the second-floor balcony when they burst into the crowd. I saw one lunge at someone, leaping over people and riding their bodies like a crowd surfer.

I impulsively bought lots of tickets for things. A late-season Yankee game with them already out of the running. A Talking Heads reunion tour minus David Byrne. Lou Reed, not yet dead in my dream. There might have been something else, too. Something where Dr. John was the opening act. The Grateful Dead were doing a reunion tour and I was thinking about going to that. It occurred to me that lots of these things would not be very good, and that I’d spent a lot of money on them, so I went to try to sell my tickets. I arrived at a sort of entertainment complex, with an outdoor amphitheater and an indoor arena and some other performance spaces. I wasn’t having much luck. I realized I was going to have to enlist some people to go with me, and I couldn’t think of who.

I was issued some kind of reprimand, first by the principal of my high school for being late to class without permission. Then it turned into something worse, something involving my work, and I was required to assemble a sort of jury and make my case to them. We sat around a table and I presented the facts in my defense. At the end I thanked them for their time, very genially, almost warmly.

A work dream in which I was concerned that everyone thought I was weird. The workplace was a vast outdoor park, with employees sitting in groups, like at a concert. I had a boom box that I loaned to a coworker, a young woman. For some reason, we used it in our work. I crouched in front of her and explained that I'd need it back tomorrow morning. She indicated the group beside her and said, "They're drinking beer and shots," and I turned to them and made a plaintive, shrugging gesture, like, "Where's mine?" and one of them handed me a glass of beer and a shot, which I drank. I stood up, said bye to the woman and thanked the others, thinking that the interaction had gone well and that I wasn't too much of a freak. Later, the woman gave a speech to the entire agency and I realized that she was an important person, a higher-up. I tried to appear to be listening dutifully, standing among coworkers.

I also dreamt about eating at an outdoor table at a restaurant in France with my dad and Jesse.

Later, I was in a group of people at a swimming pool, possibly taking lessons. The instructor had us get into an adjacent hot tub. There was a feeling of airy conviviality. John D., Pat C. and Mark B. were there. I was happy to see them. We swam laps.