I have a little hand sized crow bar and I’m prodding the door frame of a red Lamborghini. I can get a portion of the door to split away enough that I can make out the artificial looking interior. Frantically, I make my way around the car, prodding every orifice that I can cram the crow bar into, peeling back and bending the metal.
“Don’t fuck with the techno-geeks,” I’m muttering, “we’ll tear your shit up.”
The guy who owns the Italian beauty comes running out. Somehow, he thinks I’m doing him a partial service because he lost his keys and wouldn’t have been able to get in had I not twisted the door frame enough for him to reach in and unlock the door. He quickly hops into the left door and sits in the driver’s seat, which happens to be on that side of the car. He grabs a towel and crams it up to the door frame where I have bent the door into a gaping hole.
“I think it’ll be alright. Thanks for your help.” He says, handing me a tip and closing the door. The door makes a quiet padded thud against the towel and it looks almost like it will heal from the disastrous mutilation of my iron.
As the driver revs the engine, I grab the hood of the car, just next to the door and prepare to skate along-side the car. He jams it up to 60 in a blink of an eye and I’m sliding, attached with one strong arm. I try to scream a warning that the wind speed is tearing the door frame off the car, but it’s too late. The driver’s door falls slightly at the hinge, a slow-mo warning, delayed by dynamic seconds–just enough to think, “oh, no”. Then it rips off is tumbling through the air behind us at a magnificent lack of speed.
“Holy Gambler’s Fallacy!” screams the driver. He stops the car as abruptly as the door vanished and I go forward, continuing at 60. My skates have retracted and I’m sliding on the soles of my shoes to slow down. Luckily the road is covered in slick rain so the pavement doesn’t rip apart my feet and I glide to a halt with anime action hero prowess.

Later, I’m telling my high school friend, J, about the dream. He’s amused but gets worried when my visual demonstration of the slide-to-a-halt part sends me careening down a guard rail toward him and some strangers at dangerous speeds. I grab the rail and slow to a stop to alleviate his fretting.
“It was a really cool dream!” I exclaim.
We leave the museum where my friend is able to leave his embarrassment. There’s a free monthly event he knows of that has free food and drinks. He ushers me to the building and tells me to act like I’m there to get a stock analysis.
“What kind of stock analysis?” I wonder and ask.
“It doesn’t matter. Nobody will actually talk to you. Just act like that’s why you’re here.”
“OK…” Puzzled but adventuresome, I follow him up the elevator to a banquet hall where men in suits, portfolio folders outstretched, are chatting with housewives and construction workers. There is free beer, wine and cookies on a table and my friend starts to pile handfuls of desserts into his pockets. I grab a couple of beers, one open and one for the road. “It’s too bad they just have cookies. I’m going to assume they aren’t vegan and not risk an allergic death. You know of a lot of these kinds of events?”
“Hell, yeah!” He whispers in excitement, “this is how I’ve been eating for the last 3 months, bitch.”
“Oh…ok…um…don’t you have a job and get paid and whatnot…”
“Yeah, well, it’s sort of a protest to the man,” he explains. I stop the inquisition there. I don’t want to hear his tirade about starving people again. He continues back to the original topic, “I know of another fancier one. They probably have sandwiches and stuff. Let’s go check it out.”
We head uptown to this gathering, up on the top floor of some business downtown. The whole floor looks more like a large, open honeymoon suite with no furniture. The carpet is white and the people are wearing pearls and holding their drinks with classy finger poses. There’s a piano player and he’s tinkling some mellow, unrecognizable tune that stinks of a bad remake.
My friend grabs a sandwich and calls me over to the balcony where a bunch of people are talking about some kind of business issue. We start to mingle, adding in industry bull-shit as needed. Without warning an older gentleman at the balcony side pulls out a remote and presses a button, causing the balcony with all of us on it to jettison off the side of the building into the Puget Sound. When we hit the water, the balcony begins to sink and the old man curses.
“Why is it always that everyone has to come onto my boat? Why can’t it just be me. We’re sinking and it’s just because there are too many people on board!” He tries to push people off but it’s too late. The balcony has receded below the sea worthy surface and soon we are just sitting in shallow pool of clear sea water. The water is strangely warm, comfortable, and clear. We sit and watch the fish and coral, all multicolored and in total shock that we have come to invade their world. Some of the fish are trapped, scared into a corner where the balcony and people separate them from freedom. They swim back and forth looking for an exit. Mentally I join them; physically I mingle with the other unfortunate victims of the balcony catastrophe.