Morning of August 11, 1981. Tuesday.

I start out nearly lucid (there is even a perceived in-dream moment of standing where I first "know" I am not in my bed) but I am seemingly not in an "unlikely" location so thus I begin to accept the dream's clear albeit incorrect rendering of the hall of the King Street boarding house as "real".

The west wall of the hallway is extended out a bit more northward relative to the kitchen entrance. There is a lithograph in a narrow frame at eye-level which I eventually perceive as possibly being a photograph - though I still see it as mysterious artwork. It is a subtle visual tale of pursuit and vengeance.

An early 1970s model car is shown and behind the car with its head somewhat down as if in attempt to look through the back windows is an unnaturally tall giraffe. Perhaps its neck is slightly longer than it should be. I am not sure who the driver of the car is yet. In truth, the giraffe does not even seem threatening. I am not certain if the driver is even aware that he is being followed.

Instead of my mind moving on to another dream-rendered scene, surreal or not, I puzzle over the picture, refusing to move on. The driver is James M and it is fascinating how something "unknown" in a dream can be so easily grasped in consciousness. What if a giraffe were the devil instead of a goat? He "drives on" but the image is frozen. There is no sign of dream-rendered movement.

You can make the giraffe neck as long as you want, just like with (green and red) Christmas or (black and orange) Halloween paper chains. You can write a check out in pencil on the school bus for one dollar for a paper oracle and write my name in the blank after the "for" (instead of what it is paying for). One dollar for a paper oracle and seriously, what are you doing with your mother's checkbook? Does anyone believe a "four-petaled" paper oracle will really reveal how you look or what your fate will be? This is the sorrowful unworldly nature of people on the bus. The giraffe runs by the school bus, on the right, pursuing the car. "Oh look..."

The ecology teacher - who looks a bit like Billie Jean King, standing and holding onto the metal bar at the front of the bus as we ride back to the grounds of the middle school, tries to explain the meaning of "hostile butterflies" as if she is a newly declared profound art critic. My paper oracle no longer has a buyer as she is now forever sleeping, so it "flies" about, flapping eerily and with seeming impossibility for only paper, caught by an erratic "unnatural" wind, front to back at least twice, near the ceiling of the bus until it flies out a window near the back and to my right, across the aisle. "Oh, that was real clever!" shouts "Billie Jean King" in great anger over the single lost paper waste somehow eventually bringing about the end of humanity - and fixating on and blaming the person (with unrestrained hostility) whose paper it was rather than the totally unexpected wind that caused the event. However, she does not know whose lap it came from as her eyes dart around menacingly and with faux supremacy. She is frozen in her anger, being someone who sees humanity as forever only poisonous. Another student absentmindedly nudges the bracelet on her left wrist with her right index finger. Seriously...why would anyone ever wear a chain? A few other students tilt their heads about absentmindedly in expectation of something else perhaps flying out the bus's window; perhaps the teacher.

"You were definitely more extroverted this year." The ecology teacher gives me a sly look after writing this in my self-made middle school yearbook, as if she knows I will have to look up the meaning of that word.

The ecology teacher, first and foremost an English teacher, looks down at my notepaper art and intended title for a new story ("The Nature Machine"). "Before you become the world's greatest author, how about you learn to conjugate a verb?" (I already knew...and why do some authority figures always say the most absurd, obnoxious, or invalid things with the poorest judgement possible? It is the "fill-in-the blanks" mentality in trying to look clever when they know next to nothing, I suppose.)

The ecology teacher is overwhelmed by a swarm of hostile paper butterflies...or maybe paper oracles as there is little difference. James may or may not be eventually swallowed by the giraffe. The stuffed toy giraffe with no longer an owner.

Somehow I am distracted and live within the lightning on a dark August night in Florida. It is pure bliss.