I was watching a documentary about the last, miserable days of the Grateful Dead. The tour beset by riots and threats. They were onstage now, with Jerry fading into the background. At one point he played from behind a wall, half backstage. He didn’t look too bad though, and bore a whimsical smile, like it all amused him after all. They played “El Paso,” which turned into an impromptu song with the refrain “Fuck Roger Goodell.” Vince led this, and at the end he turned to the band and said “fuck that guy!,” like he’d been personally wronged. I noticed J. T. was playing bass, not Phil. Come to think of it, I did remember him telling me he sat in with the Dead way back when. I made a mental note to ask him about it. Because it was remarkable when you think about it.

A book of old texts and photographs depicting rugged men of the Old West, long-haired and bearded, who belonged to some esoteric spiritual group.

I was trying to buy a guitar, a knockoff Gibson semi-hollow body, on Amazon on my phone. I was in a classroom and the bell had rung and I was still trying to decide the color—maybe green, maybe black. I really wanted to do it before class began. The teacher was up front, annoyed that my phone was making all kinds of noises.

A gambling dream. It was a table game that looked like an elementary children’s board game, like Candyland, where you roll the dice and move your piece. I was doing very well, at first taking my turn and then betting on other peoples’ turns. Then something happened in someone’s move that was a derivative of the game and required another bet. I put down much more money than I needed to, thinking what the hell, and lost. The dealer counted the spaces in the resulting move and the piece landed squarely at the end of the game. I thought that had to mean we won. But he shook his head and said, “Not good.” He admitted he didn’t like the odds for us in that situation.

I was taking a computer programming exam that I was completely unprepared for. Fuck it, I thought. Maybe I could guess at some of the answers. Maybe it would be multiple choice. The pencils they provided were very short. I had some difficulty writing my name clearly in the designated spot as there was a background, like a heavy watermark. A part of the test was collaborative so we broke into groups. Mine entered a room where the instructions were to "find a calendar with equal sides with another equal side." I thought I saw it, there, on the floor.

A rich man’s estate. One space in it had a zigzagging floor that led you from indoors to outdoors without noticing at first. I was with J. T., J. L. maybe, someone else. We were playing tennis against the wall of a room, darts against the door.

C. W. was suggesting that my guitar parts were too repetitive and that I played better when I had longer hair.

There was a terrible scandal at UConn that made the front page of the Times. Something to do with administrators who had lied to cover up sex abuse. There was something else, too, a scheme to embezzle funds maybe. The story ran to multiple pages in multiple sections—continued on page A whatever, and so on. I struggled to figure out where it began and where it went. I thought about the basketball team, soldiering on through it all. Then I was in school, neglecting my duties. Skipping that English literature class again, the one with tons of reading that I’d never done.