I am accused of something and there's a lot of innuendo in the accusation. I'm at a bar that's long and low-slung, with a lot of old, distressed wood—floor, walls, tables, benches. I pick up a magazine, and on the cover the accusations continue. In one subhed, an ex of mine apparently had defended me and the subhed is accusing her, or us, of collusion or something, some kind of plot, and it's so far afield as to be laughable, but if you don't know us you might believe it.

Then the accuser is actually there, talking into a microphone, regaling the crowd with more accusations, including studies he'd done, like of our toothbrushes, and why, for six of the seven, was the result this and yet only mine was the toothbrush with the plastic cover? Finally I got so fed up that I brandished my toothbrush, which still had toothpaste on it, and yelled, “HERE! Take it! Do your fucking study!” and the guy grabbed it greedily and did his test. And how long would the results be? Almost immediate? I was wondering if it had been smart to allow this to happen. The results were coming in, but in some obscure language like Esperanto. You had to go to a certain website and plug in the results in that language, and what you got back was an image, a gif, which was a metaphor for the result. A guy next to me at the bar was doing this on his phone. There was a race to be the first to do it, as if it was breaking news. The image I saw on his phone was of a dark blue bird with wings flapping, and he said that was a good sign and I was in the clear. Later, in the bar's backroom, my accuser appeared, apologetic, with a plate of cookies, sugar cookies with frosting, and he was as insistent in his apology as he'd been in his accusation. He kept hovering. I said nothing. I looked at him but revealed nothing. I took the plate of cookies but left them on the bar. 

There was a sporting event I was trying to drive my car into, and there were two lanes on the grass, taking turns, and eventually it was my turn. I thought I was taking a short cut like that other cooler, car before me had done, but it led to a dead end, areas too narrow to get through—all of this on the sidelines of a football-ish game—and at one point, unable to go forward, I simply picked up the car and moved it to the path where it should be and kept driving. I was driving onto the field. The car was a purple convertible with Minnesota Vikings logos, and, crap, I was actually driving on the field in the middle of the game. At the far end of the field, which is where I was driving, there were eight or nine athletes lined up, like in a swim meet, but it was for a kickoff. They were returning a kickoff and I was in the way. But then it was made better. A fair catch or something? The kick went out of the end zone? The play had stopped. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time but hadn't affected the outcome. Then there was a kind of Native American ceremony hovering above the far sidelines and in the air above me, three warriors with tomahawks all lit up, and I wanted it to go away. It was highlighting the fact that me and my purple Vikings convertible were in the wrong place at the wrong time.