I had a strange dream about John Cleese last night, it was like watching a Monty Python episode.

John Cleese was a banker sitting in a little office and these two old ladies were asking him questions about their bank account. Every time they asked him a question, he'd step out and ask someone. So eventually the old ladies started to ask him all kinds of nonsense questions, and Cleese kept trying to be helpful and answer them anyway.

OLD LADY #1: If you were going to put something together what would you use, a horse or Vancouver?

CLEESE: Vancouver would probably be the most efficient because lots of people live there.

OLD LADY #1: Six!

OLD LADY #2: Five!

OLD LADY #1: Four!

OLD LADY #2: Nine!

OLD LADY #1: Two!

OLD LADY #2: One?

CLEESE: I'm not sure about that, let me check.

(CLEESE leaves, comes back a moment later.)

CLEESE: Terribly sorry, they say I'm only authorized to work on bank accounts. Is there something else I can help you with?

OLD LADY #1: If a man smashes apart a computer and wallpapers an airport with it?

CLEESE: Hold on, I'll see.

(CLEESE exits again. He returns a few moments later carrying a smashed computer.)

CLEESE: Sorry about all the noise.

I.

I was in Florida or something, in someone's kitchen, waiting. Waiting for my love, I guess. I was holding my big Simba plushie.

A pretty woman came up to me and put her arms around me. I supposed the plushie hath charms to attract, or whatnot. She told me she was Judette Santiago Chavez. I'm like, you got married?

And then we were at her place, and I saw all her kids running around. Everyone left to go somewhere. I saw them off and went back in the house. Weird thing, but even though the house from the outside looked like it was in a sort of forest, you could see the beach from the bedroom window.

I went into another room, and there was another girl on the computer. She was using WinMX and looking over her shared files... she had a lot of the same music as I had. I talked to her awhile about I don't remember what.


II. (fragment of)

In the shower room in the back of a supermarket, arm wrestling...


III.

I was in, apparently, New York City, albeit a rather weirdly pristine one. I wanted to take my SATs again. I could do it free, because I was an alumnus already, but I didn't have any supervision.

The worst part was, I couldn't find the next two pages of the test, or the secret code to unlock the "extra" SAT features. Beh. So I finally gave up.

My grandmother was going about looking for some kind of magic cockroach. I had the jade mask and ... damn, actually I left the mask behind at the SAT place. So I went outside to the car wash where my grandmother and Francisco were, and found that she had left the cockroach en la tienda and couldn't find it. Well, we went to the market (which was right next to the SAT place) and I went to the SAT place to find the jade mask. (I couldn't find the mask, but my grandmother found her cockroach.)

I was in a dark tunnel somewhere, searching for the person who the mask got forwarded to when it was lost. He said that he had sent it on to Francisco to send to me. "Well, at least it'll end up at me sometime," I said, climbing out into a relatively better-lit building.

(Leaving the building I realized, hey, this is a video game, as I was able to look up people's status screens. I noticed main characters had more full stats than "NPC" level characters, but that even they sometimes could have special stats; I saw Ted had one.)

Around the corner I met a lady who was painting the side of a factory building. She was painting it mule, which was apparently yet another word for off-white. She said that it was important that it be beautiful.

I told her, this beauty wouldn't last. The paint would fade, the graffiti would come, and the beauty would be gone. In fact, I had pictures from the future of this building to show her. It was the regular, dingy New York.

...even as I showed them to her, I saw half the wall now unpainted, and graffiti taking its place. (Someone had even put in a Sluggy Freelance logo.)

It was wrong to ruin such a place, to destroy her dream! Why did I have to bring in the reality?

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