in but not of

I was making a bed on the floor of my aunt's house, and it kept increasing from very humble to getting on toward a darn opulent sort of sleeping arrangement. My mom and aunt were coming and going, getting ready for some big deal, sort of in their Christmas dinner mode, but it wasn't that. Then I was out in the yard, and Sarah Palin showed up for this shindig. She had jet black hair and the face and body of a hag, but she was acting as though she were the attraction for the event. I went in and told my mom and aunt that she had arrived and whether or not that was some sort of a mistake, I was splitting. Suburbia turned into the city as I stormed down its homeless-lined streets. Someone was becoming violent toward me. So I ducked down an ally toward a finger of suburbia. At the edge of it, a path ahead across an embankment would take me back to my aunt's neighborhood, stood, or barely stood, a funky old trailer with trash in the yard and an angry bigot acting as though he'd wanted to murder me his whole life ran for his rifle. I started a run for the path, got caught in that age-old bit where I wanted to run but was paralyzed, and willed myself out of it and down the path. The bullets were zinging past me, and I was having great difficulty getting away, but get away I did.

I found myself back on the city streets, though, with Nick Mason, Rick Wright and Dave Gilmour. I was telling them of my ordeal. They were appalled and expressing their relief that I'd come through. We pretty much agreed that the Sarah ogre had been as dangerous as the people trying to shoot me. Hours collapsed into seconds and Nick and Rick were gone, but David and I and his mother were on a cable car together. His mom sat next to him across from me, and she was griping about how he'd had all this success and done all these great things and never married. He was saying that he'd never felt the need, he'd made a lot of money, was quite comfortable and... and couldn't finish the sentence because three gorgeous young things were instantly on him, fawning over him. He rid himself of them by pulling me across into his lap, the face-to-face kind of into his lap, and our arms and legs were going around each other, ever closer, and his mother was getting happier by the nanosecond... when a lady with a high-pitched voice in my back bathroom called to me and woke me up.

There of course was no lady in my back bathroom, but she'd woken me up anyway, just in time to break my heart, and just in time to hear the heater kick on.... I forgot to turn it off before bed last night. Maybe the lady was the heater making some noise in complaint in the cold, like when the phone is ringing and I'm dreaming someone's yelling "peanut butter" insistently at me... or maybe she was my ego resisting death for the quadrillionth time. I hate her.