Home and Away

1. We are trying to get back to our old house, the one with the garage in front. First, the door is slanted and collapsing, then the sand spiders start in. God, the sand spiders.

2. The kid is amputated at the thighs and sitting on a mirror. "He looks like a worm," I say to you. "Hey Dave," you say to the kid, "haven't seen much of you around."

Tazed

We are on a bus in a foreign land being wrongly interrogated by police. The police say they will let us go if they can taze us in three places: our feet, our hands, and our nipples. Everything goes slow motion as we bravely submit to them.

Horn Scam

Snowden gives me a French horn in lieu of beer money. The guy at the bodega won't take the horn and insists upon cash. I do some snappy debit machine scam where I don't swipe my card and I run out and leave the French horn on the floor by the gum racks.

Ringworm

Alan brings a bunch of diseased cats over. I ask him politely if he'd mind bagging the cats, as they are sure to infect Maggie. He complies, although he uses paper instead of plastic (in spite of my suggestion).

Hiatus

We got a puppy. No sleeping. No dreaming.

Where to Start

I'm a doctor and my patient is a little girl. She presents with trouble urinating and a detachable nose. The nose is plastic and meant to resemble caucasian flesh tones, but it's a bad match and kind of terrifying.

Taller

There is a fight about his drinking, another about his actual height. She claims she is taller, but they can't measure now because they are driving across the desert. When they stop at a gas station, he pretends the fight was a draw and holds her at arm's length so he can't be proven wrong.

Nobody You Know

A group of people walk in a straight line over a sand dune and stop at a patch of concrete where a plane took flight seconds before. They stare at the air where the plane was. A blonde wig falls from the sky and someone picks it up and dashes it onto the sand.

Fight

We are having a big fight because you betrayed me the way I betrayed you. We are in a hotel room and I am crying. I keep trying to throw things at you, but they just rise up into the air and flutter gently to the ground.

Halloween Dreams

1. There is a lobotomized kid coming to live with us. He has curly hair and glasses and walks like a zombie. We get some kind of extra healthcare benefits if we let him sleep on our couch.

2. I am at church camp and I'm supposed to be crawling through a series of progressively smaller tubes. I don't want to do it so I direct a kind of growling sound at one of the coercive camp counselors. Then I woke up in my bed, making the growling sound out loud (which was really scary).

Chi and Me

I have to teach a group of little kids an emergency Tai Chi class. I start by stalling in the gym supply closet until one of them comes after me. Then I ask each of them to tell me where they think the soul resides in the body; we all agree it's somewhere between the brain and the chest, probably in the neck.

Funeral Crashers

We go to two Jewish funerals: one happy and one sad. We are late to the sad one (because we were having so much fun at the happy one) and we disrupt the service and cause a scene. Later, the deceased shows up as a chair ghost and I seemingly hover while I sit on him in the aisle of the synagogue.

TIger

A woman's throat opens up and inside is a small plastic tiger on a chain. "It's the coughing that keeps me up nights," she says. I am unswayed and insist it's the rap music the neighborhood boys have been playing that keeps her awake.

Flapples

Natalie Portman and I are trying to figure out where to eat. I suggest a vegan slice at Vinny's Pizza, but NP claims they use the same cooking trays for the regular pizza. I am annoyed that she has taken her veganism this far, and I am also surprised that I never noticed that she has no ears, only little flaps on the sides of her head that open and close when she talks.

Money, Greed

1. We are in an airport that is full of restaurants and bars and drunk people. One of said people is standing in line in front of me and money keeps falling out of his pockets. My first instinct is to take it, but then I feel a sudden moral shift and I dramatically hand him his money (and his Belgian passport, which had also fallen from his pocket).

2. At our neighbor's dinner party, we discover that though we share a floor plan, our living room is 50 feet narrower. We are particularly enraged because they pay $50 less a month. Silently fuming, we eat dinner with the other guests, making eye contact with no one.

Baby Talk

This baby boy I'm taking care of is making these little crab hand movements. Soon, it's apparent that he's doing Morse code. I start to write down what he's trying to communicate but all I get are the words "so there" and I know I've missed the most important part.

Over It

Something about windsocks? And my mom is there but she's basically breaking up with me. "Let's just give this whole thing a rest," she says.

Contests, True Love

1. I'm competing in a ten-key adding machine race. The grand prize has something to do with winning a private train car. All of the numbers on the key pad are switched around, but the judges assure me that if my tape shows sums that are "perfectly wrong" I'll still win.

2. Stephanie tells me she is happily married to a Jamaican basketball player. She is eating dinner at my house, but she keeps checking her watch because she works the late shift as a waitress. As she talks to me, I see an image of her husband blocking her approach to a basketball hoop and the two of them collapsing in the grass and kissing.

Adventure Date

Harry Connick, Jr. (who is about seven feet tall) picks me up at the airport for a date. His Hasidic driver takes us to all of these cathedrals and churches and HCJ hoists me on his shoulders so I can look into the windows. Later, our driver accidentally runs over a baby (it looked exactly like a statue) and a pair of gay lovers (the fathers) chase us down the street.

New Job

1. I'm at work and I'm not wearing pants. I wrap someone's navy blue hoodie around my waist before going into a meeting. "Who here is uncomfortable with this?" my boss asks.

2. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing at work. "Just gather data," a coworker suggests. I make a pie chart that documents the colors of peoples' pants.*

*I'm still not wearing any.