So after a night a delirious dreams about the various ways the tour I was supposed to lead today would be canceled or somehow reduced to two from twelve, I convinced myself that I had to go to work even though I could hardly eat half my breakfast, it hurt to swallow, and I kept feeling nauseated. Once I got to work, I burst into tears and said I couldn’t go out. It’s cool, says my boss, I’ll take them out and Julia will be my assistant. Then Julia shows up with an ice pack on her hand, having dropped something large on it at her other job.

Long story short, el presidente took out the twelve people (and the water was flat and beautiful! a bad day for me to feel like something the cat hacked up) and I made my long-suffering way home. I took out my nuvaring (having decided it is the birth control that is making me cry about everything) took some pills and went to sleep with my down comforter. It took two hours for my toes to warm up, despite it being in the upper seventies in my room.

I had some more delirious dreams, the most vivid being that I was in a giant auditorium and it was full of people and it was some sort of police state thing and they were extending mind control over everyone. At first I was sitting in the middle, and when they said something I would shout ‘That’s not true! That’s a lie!’ at the top of my lungs, but I was entirely ignored. More and more people started chanting and shouting and they were turning into these large red abstractions of people, two long red cylinders with a round head on the top. They were called Zogs, and we were sopposed to be shouting ‘Zogs! c’est something something nuit’ but I’ve always been rotten with French. Someone near me said it meant ‘into the night!’ There was an adjective for night but now I forget. The beings on the right side of the audience had transformed into a swaying mass of inverted white exclamation marks, and the rows in front of me kept shifting forward and back rhythmically; there would be a line of people walking up towards the back on the seatbacks, then they would all shout Zogs! and reconvene. I moved to the back row, and there was some sort of guard there. I was sitting next to an elderly man, and the guard came over, put a towel over the man’s lap, then reached underneath it and pulled out three pill bottles, which he put into a special holder in a white five gallon bucket.

I started sassing the guard, telling him I would rather be fishing, then asked him if I could go to the bathroom. He let me, but said he would take away my shoes. ‘I don’t need them for fishing,’ I replied, ‘I was going to give them up anyway.’

There was a small restroom just off the auditorium, institutionally tiled, and in the first stall there was a female guard (in blue) writing something in a notebook. I got the feeling that she probably wasn’t as into the spirit of things as she was supposed to be, but I woke up.