In the Virtual Bank Line

My husband and I are going on a trip with a bunch of people. We've just bought a house and as people are arriving, getting ready to take this trip with us, I'm paging through catalogs looking at trees, ground cover, etc. There are duffel bags and luggage stacked in the driveway, and people are gathered in the living room.

There is a very angry-looking young man who is pacing back and forth with his hands shoved into his armpits. His face is sweating profusely and his hair is disheveled. He keeps stalking over to the kitchen counter, pouring himself shots of whiskey, tossing them down, and stalking off.
Sitting on the couch are a man and woman in their early 30s. They're smiling, chatting, having a good time. They are obviously old acquaintances.

A truck drives up and a smiling woman lets two children, a boy and girl of about 10 and 12 respectively, out with their luggage. They throw their arms around me and tell me how glad they are to see me. They keep referring to me as "Lily." The woman who drove the truck says with a very warm smile "Isn't that cute? They think you're Lily. She was their sister." The past tense doesn't even strike me as ominous.

My sister arrives and she's showing me emails from a band who is also coming on the trip. They've just cut an album, and the emails are from a few weeks earlier asking for feedback on the lyrics/music they had mailed out to a small list of people. And hmmm...my name also appears in that list of people who received the email.

The angry man is drinking again, and stomping around. I briefly have a vision of him arguing with his landlord the day before. The landlord is upset about the state of his house and the fact that the man has dug up many parts of the yard, and the man proceeds to pour a glass of red wine on the carpet while staring at the landlord. The sputtering landlord leaves. Then it's night, and the angry man is dragging the limp body of the landlord to yet another hole dug in the yard. Hmmmmm....I am not upset by this revelation. I feel like you would expect to feel if you found out that an acquaintance is from your home town and his parents know your parents. Hmmmm...how interesting.

The happy couple are chiding the angry man. They tell him to lighten up, for crying out loud. He's ruining their good time. I have a vision of them at a party some nights ago. They have played a joke on another woman at the party, exhorting her to try an "invention" of the man's. The woman whispers "it's just a stupid hat - go ahead, make him happy." But it electrocutes her. Blood is pouring from her eyes, nose and mouth as the couple giggle to each other. The woman's hair is singed and steam is coming from her mouth. They drag the body carefully (since the head is now cooked) into the host's bedroom closet and rejoin the party, looking as though nothing happened. Hmmmmm...how interesting.

The children are crowding to sit in my lap. I find it touching that they are still calling me "Lily." They have brutally killed both their sister Lily AND their mother. Hmmm....how interesting.

I am driving to a large building, something like TRW. Outside a main entrance to the building are lockers. I open one of the lockers and place a space suit into it along with a note and my address. I'm inviting someone else on the journey with us, and this spacesuit is both the invitation and the garb they will wear on the spaceship that's leaving soon. Hmmm....interesting. I guess I recruited all these people. I wonder where we're going, and what we'll do when we get there.

And then I woke up. Darn. It was just getting good!

Memories of Random Meat

Several years ago I took my daughter and my nephew for a walk in a park in Chicago. The park had a pond in the middle, and we decided to walk around the pond.

We passed what looked like the remains of a picnic. Someone had dumped most of a bucket of fried chicken on the ground, and it was covered with ants and flies.

We walked on, and passed the remains of a barbecue. Someone had dropped a large piece of raw steak, and it was covered with ants and flies.
We walked on, and passed the remains of a fishing trip. Someone had left two fish without heads, tails or guts, and they were covered with ants and flies.

We fled for home, where we had cheese sandwiches.

A couple of days later we went for a drive and while we were sitting at a stoplight near downtown, we watched a man unload eight or ten pig carcasses (two at a time, one over each shoulder) into a laundromat. They were not covered with ants or flies.

I moved to Berkeley, and caught BART into the city one day to go to the Buddhist community center in SF. I had to take a bus from the station, and after I was done, I was waiting for the bus home when I looked down and saw an entire fresh package of balogna, exploded in the gutter at my feet. It was so fresh that the ants and flies hadn't heard about it yet.

A few months later, I was in Chicago again, and had to take a cab from my hotel to downtown. As I got into the cab, I noticed a neat row of three eggs in the backseat. The one in the middle was cracked, showing a portion of the white and revealing that these eggs had been boiled. Or perhaps they had just spent WAY too long in the back of a cab.

I'm beginning to fear that I'm due for another sighting.