I was telling the story of my gay dentist, trying to get it right. “I was living on thirty… No, I was living on the Upper West. I was working on 35th Street, on the west side. I found the dentist on the provider website—he was closest.” Then I was making the journey there. I ended up at a wine store. There was a woman who was struggling through a curtain of water. She reminded me of a salmon swimming upstream.

Then I was staying at JL's house, thinking how I needed to drive back home. There was a bagel delivery as I left. Richard Pryor handed me a warm bagel.

I was on a bus in Paris and my mother was on it too. She was sitting across the aisle. I wanted to ask her how to get somewhere, to this apartment where I was going to stay, where I’d been before but couldn’t remember. I called out to her, but she didn’t respond. “Mom! Mom!” I said. Others on the bus were waving to her and pointing at me, trying to get her attention. “Mom, I need you!” I yelled. Finally she heard me. Together we puzzled out where I was supposed to go, from some landmarks and from a box of matches with the logo of a nearby business that was stamped with the street name.

Neil was roommates with Lewis Hamilton and had become close friends with him. They’d hang out, go to parties together. Jesse, Henry, Kevin and I, and maybe someone else, met up with them in Las Vegas, where a Grand Prix was being held. Lewis was very friendly and spent hours with us. He asked me about my mom, and said he was in town for the race. After he left, we talked about how amazing it was that we’d just spent the afternoon with him. Someone pointed out that Lewis’s mom had a young son, who was effectively Lewis’s dad. The filial math didn’t seem quite right to me.

“You mean stepdad,” I said.

“No, no. Dad.”

It didn’t occur to me that the correct term was brother or stepbrother.

We were in a shop and a bad heavy metal tune came on. I wanted to tell Kevin how bad I thought it was. I turned to him and found him behind the counter, ringing up customers for some reason. “What is this? Don Dokken?” I said. Kevin just rolled his eyes slightly at me and continued working the register.

Jesse and I made our way to some blackjack tables. “What are these for?” I asked him, thinking I was being very witty. He only smiled a bit. I didn’t feel like playing but he did, so we sat down. I dreaded the possibility of losing money. We each put a hundred dollars on the table. The dealer sat on the floor behind the table and fussed with the shuffle machine, which she held in her lap. It was taking a strangely long time, so we left. I must have wandered away first, and then met up with Jesse upstairs where the others were.

“Did you take my money off the table?” I asked him.

“No!” he said indignantly.

I was furious. I went down to try to find it and got lost in a maze of similar-looking gaming rooms and hallways. At one point I climbed up some stairs to find a swimming pool, the water cresting at the level of the floor and splashing around my feet. “At least I found the pool,” I thought, and wondered if the others would be interested in going for a swim. As the dream ended, I was either saying or thinking “I’m lost!” and I felt somehow that my friends would hear me.

I got a job back from the graphic services department and the copy had been replaced by curses and insults—“this sucks!” “fuck you.” I got the scary sense of a malevolent intelligence over there, anonymous, that desired to sabotage and malign our work.

I was at a bar in the East Village and decided to check out the location of the old Nightingale’s on 2nd and 13th. It was a hip record store now, a throwback to places like Festoons and Brass City Records. Then I went back to the bar and reported to everyone it was “like 1984” in there.

I was at a bar. Chuck Brown presented me and someone else—maybe Rob D.—with a novelty shot, part of some kind of promotion. It came in solid form, an orange, rectangular box. It seemed a bit too big to fit in my mouth but I did anyway. It was spicy. I thought it’d be funny if I told Chuck that it was like the Devil came in my mouth, but I thought better of it.

I was flying somewhere to interview or be interviewed by Marc Maron.