March 25/26, 2005

Sitting on the 97th street corner. Sunny day. Mom comes up and sits beside me. We're talking, and I tell her I was playing some Slayer tunes on the top strings of a guitar and something else, but I can't remember what. I look to her left, and remember. It was a metal cover on the curb, 4 or 5" diameter maybe. Some young girl is running around on the yard behind us, and we turn to look. There's a newspaper blowing across the lawn, and mom says to grab it, because there's a hundred-dollar bill on it. I'm confused. There's printing on the top page that looks kind of like a bill, but the number is the page number of the paper, and it's only 37. We head back to the house. Dad's in the front yard, and he has a kit of mine in pieces. He's going to sell it. I'm sad, because I like that one, and I go in the house. I see him after a little bit, and he says he's not selling the cymbals with it, and that makes me feel a bit better.


I go into a big room from outside. It's supposed to be a classroom, but it's pretty dark, and people by the door are playing video games. My teacher's on the right, playing something. I go in a little ways. Some small fires start up in the back of the room, and the lights go out. People aren't stampeding, but they're definitely nervous. I open the door to outside, and light floods in. I'm standing by the light so that people can see an outline and know where to go. They're leaving in small groups. Three or four people are standing right in front of the door, and I tell them to keep going outside so everyone can leave. I walk a little farther in, and then back to the door, and there's another group blocking the door. I tell them the same thing, and they get pissed off at me and say they're waiting for a friend. Most of the people go out, and the lights turn back on. It looks like a ballroom, and there are still a number of people left. I walk to the back of the room. Linus is there talking to S?. They're deep in conversation, so I just walk by, out the door at the back. There's a little hallway with a couple of other rooms, but not much going on. I head back through the ballroom to the door, and as I pass by the two, I hear S saying that I'm a genius coder, but I only work at night, and he's just the opposite.

I go outside, and there's a number of people hanging around. I have a spiral notebook in my hand, because we're going to take a class. On the left is a big glass-fronted room, with a bunch of people inside. Colin Powell's teaching a class in there. We're making a bunch of noise out front, so he glares at us and closes the blinds - big metal pulldown jobs. I'm waiting for some friends to come out of the ballroom, but RH shows up with two of her girlfriends. They come over, and she shows me a drawing. It's a guy looking at a kid, and his eyes are all funny. She asks me what he's thinking. I say "nervous excitement," and she says she thought the same thing. She starts reading the "answer" on the back, but she's making up all this extra stuff, and everybody's laughing like crazy. They sit down, and I think it would be nice to sit with a different group every day. Everybody starts singing a song together. We're all facing the building. Powell opens the blinds, and we can all see inside. There are two or three fireplaces, all lit up. We start another song, and I'm singing lead over top.


At the top of a building, with W. We're in a Spider-Man game, and we have to get down. I go down some normal way, but she does something weird. Can't remember. Then we're under a tree, on the street in New York. It's night. We're walking along, past stores and people. The graphics are pretty decent, but it looks a little low-res. We descend into a train station, and as we walk through the hallway, I notice everything's in the right place. All of New York has been mapped correctly. I say the hard part's done, and the graphics can be cleaned up easily, but I know that's not quite true. We go onto the platform. There are lots of people around. She's really thirsty, and I'm laughing, because just like the real world, water's four bucks. We get a giant soda, and head to the end of the platform to wait for a train. I'm listening to a conversation between two guys. One's telling the other how to send bootlegs through the mail. The other guy says he'd wrap them all in ice cubes, but that wouldn't work out too well. I look at him out of the corner of my eye like he's insane, but in a funny way, and we all laugh. Then he says it doesn't matter though because he only knows one guy and he wouldn't mail them to him anyway. A train shows up, and we walk over to it, but it's the number 400, which is definitely not what we want. There's another train behind that one, and we go over to it. There are people everywhere, and we go right to the end, but it's so crowded, and the last car's doors aren't opening.