2 naps in 1 day. I am exhausted.
This time I'm in a pub in London, not the London I used to live in but another London, similar but in a parallel universe, waiting tables, it's my first night on the job and I'm completely lost, someone, a waiter in a pub - restaurant. A waiter I used to work with there a long time ago hands me a beer and a cup of coffee and tells me to take it to "the Reverend" who's in the far end of restaurant...table 95 he says, I ask where it is and he tells me to cut through the barn and I'll find it...
I'm cutting through the barn and the little paddocks and this calf takes a shine to me, like an over eager dog, keeps leaping up on me and licking my face, I can't find my way, can't lose the calf, finally I take this shortcut through an open storefront where I tie the calf to a nail on the office desk....
"Well I never..." say the proprietors of the store, they're talking about the calf that's still wanting to play with me...
I ask where table 95 is, they give me directions, I'm off and searching again, the hotel/restaurant, it's at the far end, and I'm lost because the blocks are all crooked, they don't run parallel with the streets, and time is running, has run out....
Finally I find it, a small pub, there are a bunch of legless dwarfs in it, dressed in odd clothes, playing cards but not regular playing cards, other, odd cards, one plays a hand, the other says something, I'm looking for the Reverend, I think I see him, the dwarfs are making calls as they lay down their cards, one of them makes a call in an unusually deep voice with a heavy North American Accent, I look at him for a second and I recognize Tom Korte, whom I haven't seen since elementary school..."Tom Korte I presume" I say, stepping forward to shake his hand, glad at the familiar face in a strange land...."I didn't recognize you, you look.....well... different", he takes this the wrong way, he looks odd, a coconut shaped head, long features like a monkey carved into a coconut; he seems to realize my awkwardness and takes offense; "I'm doing very well, thank you...my investments have worked out nicely...."
And I'm running again, I've given up, lost in this London-not-London, trying to find my way on foot between distant remembered tube stops, to find Fleet street or Piccadilly Circus or someplace, anyplace that I can remember, there's someone I have to meet, I feel bad about leaving my job but I'd have never found my way anyways, was too lost, I wonder about the person, a friend (I don't know who) who had gotten work with me at the pub, but they'll be all right.....