I was standing on some sort of landing in what I presumed to be an old basement. Two black guys and one white guy came down the stairs carrying large (4 feet tall) beer bottles and set them up along the same wooden landing that I was on. This landing connected the bottom of the stairs to the opposite wall (where I was) and then ran along the wall to my right, made a 90 degree turn left following that wall, and then when it reached that corner, stairs descended from it to a sublevel areain that "U" shape. The area in the U was all dirt--it was the earth that this building was built on. Underneath me, there was enough room between the earth and the landing for a person to stand comfortably. But over on the other side of the room, where the stairs came in, the ground sloped up enough that you could step ddirectly from the landing on to the soil. One of those three did this as the other two kept bringing in more bottles. He picked up a shoevel that was lying there and began digging away the dirt right next to the landing. I watched this go on for quite a while, until the digger had made a big enough hole for all of the bottles to go into. The two guys still on the landing tossed bottles to the digger, and then he'd toss them into the hole. I couldn't believe they were being so careless with glass bottles, but nothing seemed to be breaking. Until one broke, that is. They grabbed it quickly and ran over to the stairs coming down from the landing. One of them shouted "Quick! We've got to clean up this spill or else the cops will smell the beer and then they'll pin us to the crime! Look around--we need something sturdy, like toilet paper!" Always willing to lend a helping hand, I spoke up and said "I have some Kleenexes on my desk!" I leaned over the edge of the landing and pointed down to the area underneath where my desk was sitting. They grabbed the box and started wiping up the spill from the dirt. The Kleenexes were just tearing up, as they weren't made for cleaning spills off soil. The guy that seemed to be the leader turned to me and said "These Kleenexes aren't anywhere NEAR as sturdy as good toilet paper!" and I said "What did you expect? I don't take dumps out of my nose!" I got frustrated and left.

I went to a nearby music store to relieve my frustrations. I was with someone, and it might have been my mom, but I'm not sure. I commented to whoever it was that they were playing "Daughters of the Kaos" by Luscious Jackson over the in-store speakers. The store was set up a lot like a fast food restaurant, where there was a counter that completely separated the selection area from the cashiers and the stock area behind. Over along the far wall from the counter, I saw someone stocking things on a shelf and she reminded me of Erin, one of the SA's at Selleck last summer. When I saw that person, I got all nostalgic for Selleck people so I left to go find some of them. I climbed onto an old yellow school bus and took a seat. I looked out the window to see a balding man with an apron run towards the bus holding a cd. I put my window down and asked him what he wanted, and he told me that I forgot my free Radiohead cd. It was some exclusive cd of b-sides and outtakes only issued by that store. Based on the color scheme of the place, I am pretty sure that it was a Virgin Megastore. As the bus began to drive off, I noticed how incredibly dusty it was--almost like I was in some old west movie.

I rode to a house nearby where Bob the Selleck summer deskworker lived. I went in and Bob was there along with Erica, the desk supervisor. Bob challenged me to a game--each of us would be equipped with an arsenal of different colored sponges of various shapes and sizes. We had to throw them on the coffeetable that lay between the two of us. After they landed, Erica would assess point values to the various tosses, based upon how the colors worked with each other and how attractively the sponges were stacked on each other. The action was intense until one of my throws went astray. I tossed a blue sponge and it accidentally hit Bob in the head. It got caught in his hair, and when it hung there, it blended in so well that it made it look like Bob had a totally full head of hair (in real life his hairline is receding). I told him that, even though I was in complete disbelief, because as much as I told myself that was a blue sponge stuck there, I could not deny that it looked like his sandy blonde hair! Erica backed me up and told him that it looked like more hair, but he just thought we were making fun of him, so he took the sponge out. Oh well.

I walked into the other room where Bob's aunt and uncle (who were both black, and Bob's white, but no matter) were sitting. They had their infant child (I don't remember if it was a boy or a girl) with them. I asked if I could hold it and they let me. As I took it, it started talking to me in a VERY adult fashion. I didn't think much of it, and carried on a conversation with it. I asked it where it was living, and it mentioned some street name and then asked if I knew where that was. I said "Ah yes, that's in Portland Oregon." It was then that I realized something was peculiar. The child had not opened its eyes this whole conversation, and it had pencilled-in records and notations on its whole scalp, and those two bits of evidence were all I needed to conclude that this child was less than a month old! (I knew very well that babies couldn't open their eyes until long after birth, most often one month, and that when they were born, instead of writing records on various pieces of paper and then making copies, the doctors would scrawl the birth records on the baby's scalp in pencil so that they could simply take a large piece of silly putty and place it around the baby's head and peel it off and get the records imprinted onto the putty. The pencil marks would usually wear off by one month) So it struck me as odd that I was carrying on an adult conversation with a one month old baby. I turned to the parents and said "How long has this child been able to carry on like this?" and their answer, as I should have expected, was "Oh, not very long. Only about a month or so."

I caught the next bus home (again it was an old yellow school bus) and found my cd was sitting in the very back where I had accidentally left it. I was feeling adventurous, so I decided that I would get off the bus north of Peru (a town north of my house) and ride down the Nemaha river to my house (which is physically impossible based on the route of the Nemaha river, but I was going to do it anyway). The bus was heading east on a country road out of whatever dump town I was in, and it was approaching a river bridge which was almost entirely washed out (a cue which I should have made note of). I was afraid we were going to go in, but the driver tipped the bus over on to two wheels and made it safely across on the thin beam that was left. After crossing the bridge, we turned north onto another country road, and after driving a mile or so I got out. A tributary of the river was right beside the road here, so I simply walked down the bank and climbed in the water.

As I said earlier, I should have noticed that the bridge was almost washed out, suggesting FLOOD. The water was slightly high in this creek, but it wasn't anything unmanageable. I quickly drifted downstream, anchoring myself to the side by grabbing onto trees in the bank. It was sort of like going across monkeybars, except instead of my body dangling in the air, it was drifting out in the water. From the sound of crashing water up ahead, I could tell I was nearing the intersection with the river. When I saw the water coming in from the right (I was going east to west and interesecting the north to south river) I made my turn to the left. I grabbed onto a tree right on the corner turning south and fell down a waterfall probably four feet tall. The water was shallow here, so I was able to stand up, but the current was really strong so I couldn't really dilly-dally before grabbing on again. However, in those few seconds, I actually looked out in front of me and saw what was once the Nemaha River. I expected to see another bank probably 30 feet in front of me--a pretty small river, you know, but instead, I saw nothing but water for probably 200 feet. All of this water from upstream had carved a new wider channel, so along the route of the normal river was one branch of the expanded Nemaha, and continuing along the route I was on was a new branch, heading southwest through a field, presumably where a waterway was dug. (I know that in real life, two flowing bodies of water would not cross and carry on their own merry ways, but that's what was happening here) The channel before me, the new one, was much wider and therefore I was totally awestricken at all of this churning water that was tearing down trees right before my eyes. In those few seconds of amazement, the current from behind me knocked out my footing and carried me out into the "forking" area.

Since I wanted to travel the regular channel, I needed to veer to my left, but the current I was caught in was taking my straight ahead to the new channel. If left up to my swimming skills vs. the water, I would have kept going with the current. But about halfway across, my feet hit what was left of the old west bank of the river (which had since been seriously eroded so that it was 5 feet underwater now) and it gave me enough traction to push myself off in the southward direction, giving me the momentum I needed to get caught in that current and get carried off towards home.

It was really dangerous being floating freely in the water, so I did my best to get back over to the bank and start swinging myself along again. It was especially tricky in this area, because even with the flood waters, the banks were really high. Since the river wasn't usually this high, though, there were trees rooted down lower sticking up through the water, and that actually made it quite a bit easier to travel. But due to those high steep banks, it created a sort of tunnel effect, like I was sliding down a pipe. Also, this section of the river decreased in elevation, so I was accelerating from that too. Very dangerous. As I proceeded, I noticed that the steep bank slopes were actually just walls. Part of the time it seemed like brick, part of the time concrete, and part of the time solid steel. But they were always very sturdy and very definite barriers. I recall thinking "This is strange that when I dream of nature, there is only a thin layer of it, and then an impenetrable barrier," thinking back to the night before when I observed a cornfield that only went 10 feet back from the road and was then stopped by a huge wall.

I just kept on swinging until I arrived at a tunnel which passed under a road, and upon entering the black...

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