Crazy dream. To begin with, I'm working in the apartment. It's filthy and disgusting, and Carol from the library is helping me to clean it. I inspect the carpet and see that it's more dirt than carpet: the dirt is so thick that oxalis is flourishing, blooming like crazy, right in the middle of the room. Laura comes home, and she helps in the cleaning too. After a while we get hungry and want to leave for a restaurant. But Jimmy and I are laying on the floor talking! We're discussing 'principles'. I told him that ignoring principles altogether will soon bring him misery enough. I had just read this, in waking life, in a book by Bertrand Russell. What I thought Russell meant was that abstract ethical principles are derived from concrete experience: it has been shown that if you kill somebody his brother will be very angry with you and his brother will try to kill you. Today the surrogate big brother, the judicial system, will get its revenge. Thus you should follow the principle of not killing other people. Less extreme, if you eat too much cake, you'll get sick. You are ignoring the principle of moderation in eating. I was trying to get this across, but naturally, failed, because I had just read it and the meaning had not quite sunk in. What interrupted our conversation was a middle-aged asshole reading a Bill Cosby book. He shook his head very disapprovingly and disagrees with everything we say, it seems, on principle. Laura knows him; she hates him. She cleaned his house once: he performed medical experiments on humans. Apparently the guy was trying to say Well I ignore principles and I'm perfectly happy so nyeah! Heh.  Now Laura and I are in a highschool classroom. We hide in a nook around the corner of the room and make out. We've stepped into a diorama of the bay on the floor. Nearby is an aquarium filled with all kinds of wierd animals, including a strange turtle, tiny, with all kinds of squarish spikes jutting out from its shell. The "aquarium" I referred to was a lot like the tidepool exhibits in the Aquarium. The owner of the diorama appears and points out the turtles. "They don't look like much, but they sure wreaked havoc on this part here--" he points down at a corner of the diorama-- "only you can't see it, because Bill fixed it too quick for me to show you properly..."  Now we're in the restaurant. Laura goes inside to get a table. Abruptly I decide I don't want to eat at a restaurant, and so I start walking home. I hitchhike: a blonde college girl gives me a ride. I thank her and get out of the car at the base of a wooden footbridge. In the background, Einsturzende Neubauten is playing. I begin to walk across the bridge and pass a skater kid. "Bitte," I say. "I mean, excuse me." The kid scowls, not appreciating my 'slip' into German. Laura meets me on the other side of the bridge. I tell her I was going to call her when I got home. We walk back across. On the other side I say "I got a ride from her--", pointing at the blonde girl, who is sitting on the lap of another girl. This girl is squeezing the blonde girl's breasts. There is a large plastic bag filled with the bagel place's Tomato Herb Bagels at her feet.  Then Laura and I walk into a hospital. We're getting flu shots. I answer a couple questions and they shove a hypo between my fingers: no pain. I joke with the very unimpressed, fat nurse that "I hate that 'full vein' feeling." Next to me is a black Caribbean man, twitching and looking generally ill. He recieves his shot and twitches away. Jimmy (who's suddenly with us again) asks the nurse something, and she begins to explain how Alex got his stomach lining surgically removed. Before she can finish, however, she is interrupted to serve up some peach pie to us patients. She uses the hypo syringe to do this. I thought to myself: "Gee, I hope she sterilized that before using it." The thought of that needle having been unsterilized (especially since it had been in the hand of that *very* infected-looking man) nearly makes me stop eating the pie, but then I figure, Hey, it's a hospital. *Everything* gets sterilized here. I wake.