I was still in the basement - it was my friend’s basement, but not really - and had finally finished picking up all the keys that had scattered across the concrete floor when I dropped the weird little drawer. I say “keys”, but they were actually uncut keys. I’ve had some exposure to uncut keys because my first job was at a hardware store that copied keys. Anyway, it’d taken me a frustrating span of moments, but I’d got them all gathered again, back in the weird little drawer.

I knew my dad was coming to pick me up, we’d made plans at some point. He just got a new car, said it was going to be a Nissan something-or-other. Altima maybe, or Maxima. But that doesn’t matter. I’d spent so much time getting those fucking keys back into the weird little drawer, I was sure he was waiting outside by then.

So we’re driving along, and I notice that the new car isn’t a Nissan at all, but a ‘95 Ford Escort. In fact, it’s the exact silver Ford Escort that my mom used to drive. Made the same disproportionate revving noise as it slowly accelerated.

- What happened to the Nissan?
- Well, this bad boy only cost about five-hundred dollars more, but I think I got a pretty good deal…
- Uh…
- I really like the way it handles.
- I’m pretty sure you, uh, got ripped off…?
- Are you kidding?

But then I was distracted by a roaring waterfall to the right of the road. Well, not a waterfall exactly, because there was no water involved. It was root beer, pouring off a cliff face of green glass, into a churning man-made pond. A pond of root beer, naturally. Then I remember that it was the A&W near the mall. They’d always had this monstrous fountain, as long as I could remember. I’d always been partial to the “orange drink” they served, though.

* * *

That was the most exciting, or at least the most notable, of my experiences from the last three months or so. It was, of course, a dream. And I’ve been unemployed.

This has been strange for me, as ever since I was a freshman in high school, I’ve either been a full-time student or had an essentially full-time job. Over the years, I’ve often fantasized about some idea of the Good Life, in which I would have no responsibilities other than to reading, self-betterment, and “taking it easy.” But here, on the other side of three months of free-form living, I’m here to tell you: Shit gets old.

My free-form life had a few, albeit loosely secured, anchors. Namely, coffee, cigarettes, books, a typewriter, and those Internets. Sometimes food. Sometimes doing things with friends. It sounds more badass or romantic, as I write this, than it ever really was. My days resembled less a Henry Miller novel than an episode of Seventh Heaven, in which we witness the anarchic spiral into social retardation that some tangential character descends when he shirks the virtues of a Puritan work-ethic.

It occurs to me that having a job, or going to school, gives one a sort of metronome for experience. It gives one a tempo to keep up with, enables collaboration with others’ rhythms. Not that we can’t, or don’t, all have our own solos, but the metronome makes sure that we can get back into the proverbial groove after we rip some shit up. Or, whatever.

This said, I finally got a job, one that I could rationalize as being “worth waiting for.” I’m working at a fantastic bookstore, finding books for people who either appreciate my help or don’t, “ringing up” customer’s consumer choices for an hourly wage, starting each day with at least some anticipation of quitting time, and each week looking forward to the weekend. I am, you Marxist bastards, largely alienated from the system of production that provides my job. But Marx was a bougie (bouzhy? boughie? büzhy?) prick, and I like having something to do outside of my own head.

And speaking of what goes on in a head, I’m brought back to the subject of my dreams. Over these months, they’ve been extremely strange, even as far as dreams go. Without constructed guidelines in my waking life, my sleeping life was getting even more solipsistic, if that makes sense. Or, doesn’t “make sense”, or whatever. I discovered that the lost city of Atlantis really existed in a membrane between a dolphin’s brain his skull. And that Abraham Lincoln, it turns out, used speak-and-type software to write his speeches.

Dreams, I think, are the experimental bookends, or better yet, intros and outros to our daily lives. They take the chords and scales that we practice as we live, and infuse them with surreal spontaneity and metaphorical doses of LSD-25. And then they proceed to rip some shit up.

* * *

The shelves in the WWII section are completely packed, and I’m trying to fit in three copies of Anne Frank’s diary. No amount of rearranging, shifting of pressure, unshelving and reshelving will do the track. I’m feeling the tension and I’m about to throw the Anne Franks behind a stack of Harry Potters, and the store speakers are playing some Gordon Lightfoot single on repeat. Apparently.

- Do you work here?
- Yeah, but it’s only my second day…
- Do you have the new James Joyce? It’s supposed to come out today…
- James Joyce doesn’t have a new book, does he?
- Yeah, I heard about it on Fresh Air.
- B-but, he’s dead…?
(Awkward silence. Staring, and the radio switches to James Taylor, thankfully I guess.)
- Are you joking? He’s married to Nancy Pelosi…
- I’ll look it up…

But the fire alarm interrupts, starting softly but getting harder to ignore as I jam some keys on a keyboard that appears to be attached to an iPod. A couple of my co-workers, for whom I have no names that I can recall, are laughing by the door, and the customer ruefully shakes her head and walks away.

- It’s a drill, the managers are already over at Starbucks, in the pool.
- Of course they are, managers are like that.
- Well, it’s OK, the police are showing Twin Peaks on the side of the building.
- The first season?
- Yeah, and the movie.
- Wow, that’s great. The second season was kind of weak…
- Yeah, Lynch wasn’t really in the mix, you know…?
- Never a better time for cigarettes.

I grab my keys, and almost forget to log out of the system. When I try to put the keys in my pocket, the ring breaks, and they’re all over the floor. My co-worker, the girl with brown hair who wears the same white hoody every day, says Leave ‘em. But that doesn’t seem like an option to me, and I’m scrambling to pick them up, and wondering why I have so many fucking keys. Yet the alarm is getting louder and louder, more and more impossible to ignore, and I realize that if I don’t get out now, I’ll be in trouble.