I am in an empty grassy lot. It’s the yard where my childhood home once stood, in a small town next to a big lake. High school buddy Norman W. is with me & we’re working on some sort of writing assignment. A professor enters the yard & I immediately see that he favors Norm & will be giving his writing special attention, even consider publishing his piece. Nervously I start smoking cigarettes, using the centre of my own notebook as an ashtray. Norm tells me, as critical advice, that I should “Cut the whole middle out of my book.” But he doesn’t mean cutting it in an editorial sense, he means cutting a physical circle the size of an ashtray from the centre of my book. Then he walks out of the yard with the professor, & I throw my book & cigarettes into the air. Cigarette butts fall everywhere around me, raining down into the grass.

Now, in the same yard, I am looking after two small rabbits that have been placed in my care. I put them in a long rectangular cardboard box. I am with someone else, someone I don’t know, but we smoke some weed together. Then the owner of the rabbits comes to retrieve them, & he can smell the pot smoke & makes some comment about it, & I get embarrassed for being high while I was supposed to be looking after rabbits. The owner & his girlfriend open the box & free the rabbits. I am growing more & more self conscious, so I leave the yard to go for a walk by the water. I want to go down to the train-docks, but I get distracted on the way by this scene:

A 50 year-old fat Greek man is playing on the shore. He is interacting with supernatural waves. While he runs in & out of the sur f, giggling, the big waves try to ‘get’ him. The waves seem to have intelligence; they chase the man like playful animals; like happy bounding dogs; but they are physically par t of the water & so can’t get very far up the shore. These are not malicious waves—these are fun waves. Then I see the Greek man teaching his skinny friend how to run in & out of waves & not get ‘caught.’ It’s harder than it looks. The skinny guy is not so good & getting very wet. I would like to try too, but am too shy to join & just continue watching from the street.