I’m going to begin min­ing my old dead­jour­nal (yes, I had one) for use­ful mate­r­ial here. Dead­Jour­nal was a clone of Live­Jour­nal that used to be pop­u­lar in the angry-kid-with-a-bad-haircut crowd; a lot of my old friends had one.

To start off, here is a dream I had a lit­tle before Hal­loween 2004.

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I was work­ing for TIME mag­a­zine. My boss was Jay Leno, with the chin but with­out the perk­i­ness. My job was to put together the cover, type­set­ting, pho­tograph­ing, every­thing else. The cur­rent cover I was work­ing on had a pic­ture of a very lonely look­ing Pres­i­dent George Bush behind his desk in the Oval Office, with the words “The Right Stuff?” in a large Con­densed Hel­vetica type­face in black set in the left side. I was mak­ing high-gloss color laser proof copies of this to be sent to my Jay Leno dop­pel­gänger boss. In his office, I am briefly intro­duced to a Michael Moore-ish char­ac­ter, look­ing like some base­ball tourist with a cam­era around his neck and a Detroit Tigers ball cap tilited a bit far too north for fash­ion or com­mon sense. I leave the proof copy on my boss’s desk…

Later, the Michael Moore-ish guy offers me a job; turns out he was at my work­place ask­ing about me. My boss gave me a good rec­om­men­da­tion and he hires. What do we do, I ask? He’s a pho­tog­ra­pher for a video game pub­lisher, and he trav­els the globe get­ting ref­er­ence and source pho­tos for video game ani­ma­tors. Real­iz­ing that I’ll be soon trav­el­ing the globe, going to exotic places, (Phnom Penh came to mind, for some rea­son) I cel­e­brate by going to down­town Asheville and meet­ing most of my friends there. Only down­town Asheville was more like Green Park, near Buck­ing­ham Palace, except with the Vance mon­u­ment still in the mid­dle and the weird traf­fic pat­tern. Every­one was happy for me.

Later, I’m with some­one (I for­get who, now) at a restau­rant in Saluda, on 176. On the left if you’re com­ing from I-26 going toward the town itself. The restau­rant was Amish how­ever. I could tell by how the women dressed and the curi­ous High Ger­man accents. The strange thing how­ever, was that there was a large white cof­fin on a stand in the din­ing area, with the lid propped about two inches open, just enough to see inside. I peered inside, and in it was a girl, beau­ti­ful, and look­ing very much alive but for the utter still­ness and lack of breath. I paid my bill and left.