People are acting different because they’re obsessed with a play that’s been written and produced by the government. All anybody ever does anymore is go see this play. It happens every night.

Tommy Carcetti from The Wire acted in the play for one season, which lasted for one year, but actors are not permitted to stay in the cast past a single season. When I attend the play one night, I see that he has gone completely nuts. He is filled with rage at the actor who has taken his place and sits in the back row, mumbling his old lines as the new actor says them.

I come back a few nights later. Carcetti is up to the same. Halfway through the production, he pulls out a double-barreled shotgun and shoots his replacement in the head.

There are many other problems with this class:

• It conflicts with my hours at the Writing Center. I will deal with this later.
• It requires me to “stuff a dead squirrel into the compost so that it decomposes to the point at which it will make belching noises when poked.” I must also make some large slabs of meat decompose. While stressing out about this requirement, my female friend offers to take care of it for me. She finds hunks of meat as large as a person and starts punching them. Punching meat makes it rot faster.

  We need signs to keep people from eating the meat. For signs, we need paper. I run to the Writing Center to get paper. Running is difficult and requires all of my concentration. When I arrive, the WC is a dock. Fishing is going on; a fisherman guard stops me from entering. I tell him I work at the WC and he starts to let me by. A fat, old, naked man in a passing boat speaks to me.

When she gets a chance to talk to Brian, she asks, “Is Dirk Diggler here?”

Brian knows that Dirk Diggler is a character from Boogie Nights. “No; he left.”

The woman is disappointed that her practical joke did not pan out. She tries again, this time asking for Dirk’s real name (I don’t remember.)

Brian kind of knows what she’s trying to pull, but is either slightly duped or decides to indulge her. He asks for the character using his microphone. Satisfied, the woman leaves to join her annoying friends; they are going to laugh about this joke a lot.

The room darkens, thunder claps, and wind blows through the room. Mike tells me that he has discovered that I am using BitTorrent on the school’s network.

“And all that sneaky shit? Only allowing encrypted traffic, using randomized nonstandard ports? Did you really believe that we wouldn’t find out?”

I apologize very much. Mike is very disappointed in me.

“What the fuck are you doing, Rej?”

“Oh. Sorry,” but he smiles and does it again. He’s bored of driving safely and I am very angry but too afraid for my life to do anything but yell at him. He continues to drive at highway speeds over uneven desert terrain.

He then takes a jump and launches the car to the left in a huge arc that ends in the ocean. We sink immediately. I realize that I will need to breathe in water to scold my driver, who is now more like DJ Roze. Given the necessity of screaming, and because I am partially aware that I can breathe perfectly well when I am lying around in my bed, this seems an acceptable tradeoff.

When we reach the surface, I attempt to inflict bodily harm on DJ Roze’s face for his carelessness.

(This night, DJ Roze also dreamed about driving recklessly.)

Melanie makes her ukelele sound like an electric guitar with the distortion turned all the way up. She plays blues progressions and it all grooves like crazy while I run back and forth on a wide, dark trail with lots of dangerous roots. There is hugging and congratulating because Melanie has written a very awesome tune.

I wake up again when four middle-aged women, one of whom is Mudd’s old Chair of Institutional Diversity, walk into my room. “Who is here?” they ask. “Have you taken the survey yet? Wake up!” I pretend to be asleep, but one climbs up to my bed and yells directly at me. “Have you taken the survey yet?”

“What the fuck are you doing in my room?”

“We are suspicious that most Mudders do not have real jobs, so we’re conducting a survey. Do you have a job?”

“Well, I grade and tutor for the Computability and Logic class and I am a Writing Center consultant.”

One of the women smirks and says, “you see, neither of those last two are real jobs.”

“Fuck you! Get the fuck out of my room! Fucking christ! Get the fuck out!” Before they have a chance to do so, I realize I am in Scott’s bed and wander out into the courtyard where people are filling out a written version of the survey, writing things like “taking pictures?”. I return to my own room, which is turned around so that there is an illusion of much more space. Also, my couch is repaired. As I go back to sleep, I envision the biting editorial I will publish attacking these people for their rudeness and wrongness.

I look outside to see that the sky is black. It is 2:00 PM. Lilia demonstrates that I am seeing a tarp.

Later, she attempts to describe how difficult it is to sleep near to an ex and not have sex with him or her.