The book of mars

i am with a group of people. we are connected via friendship, or maybe circumstance, but not necessarily blood.
maybe blood too. i can't tell, or maybe i can't remember. we're not all related though. there's about 6 of us.

this epic i awoke from is fragmented, and i carry over only pieces, like a drunk night's morning. they are probably not in chronological order, but i'll try to make it make sense.

scene one

i am in the woods with the group.
we are together, but spread out over the trail. i can see the last person and the first person.
we are looking for the "bad guy" of the story. he's some king but only the word applies, he's not royalty or at least its never talked about. for some reason we know he is in a "cold room", which is a specific thing.
quite all of a sudden, and i mean ALL OF A SUDDEN a train cuts thru the middle of our group. i can't see the rest of the people, and one lady is missing. she might be my grandmother, but that's a 50/50 chance.
the train goes by, or somehow we all re-group with the train still going, and after everyone thought she died, she is here, fine, shooken up but alright.
i think to myself how we really have to be careful because the trains can come from anywhere, anytime. there are no tracks.

scene 1.5

we all go to the train station. the train hasn't arrived yet. there are two hobos who are waiting for it, to jump into the boxcars and go. there's a third man, standing and staring at us. well fuck, that's the guy!
someone says his name is "dale" or something with a D....the train arrives. he was on the other side.
me and someone else go into a boxcar just to see how it is.
it is pretty much the inside of a VW, two facing seats inside a rectangle box. kinda nice.
we get out and the train leaves. no dale and the hobos are gone.
my mom is with me, or maybe she's part of the group. she uses my phone to call someone named dale.
"wait no, now he'll know my number and know where i am!" she called the wrong dale, i had two: some guy, and THE EVIL GUY!

scene 2

we are outside a supermarket. we are coming up with some kind of plan. we go in, and everyone scatters.
time goes by, maybe i do my part in the plan, i don't know. after some time, i start to panic.
where is everyone!?? i run thru the aisles, and there is a feeling like i'm being chased or watched or waited on.
i see a boy i know who wasn't part of the original group but was part of this plan. he's running around with his cart empty, so i go up to him. he talks to me and i help him put a lot of wine in his cart.
i hold a broom. it's part of a plan.
we escape now, and run out the door. the alarm goes off, and they chase us out for a second, so i throw the broom at them. "yeah i stole it, here have it back," is what the action meant to say. they didn't notice the wine.

scene 3

i am running, running running up a hill, towards a bingo hall. i am with someone else.
we run up to the top of the hill that it's on finally and hide. we are going to try and track down where the cold room is, where dale is.
i go into the hall and it's a store. i take a magazine and when i come out and open it i realize its 300 pages of models. boring. i text heather. my mom's here. we're going to look together.

scene 4

i am in the cave/forest/dungeon/tunnel/room. the final one. the-boss-key kind of room. we will find the cold room here, and dale, and defeat him or whatever we're doing.
we are all spread out in this long room. its like mountains and forest inside a cave, inside a building.
i climb thru some of the obstacles for awhile. its just a hunt for a long time, dream-time too. climbing and climbing.
then, behind me someone yells they've found it!!! what? i'm pretty much at the entrance.... she's behind me even further. how'd we miss it?
seriously, how'd we miss this: at the beginning of the room, there's a secret ledge. there are footholds but they have no depth so they don't look real. well, they are. she climbed up 'em and at the top is the cold room!
which isn't actually a room. it's a cylindrical hanging piece of cloth, and i guess dale is inside that. and it's probably cold in there...because that's what someone told me.
well, okay, looks like i'm gonna be the one to confront him first. i grab a ribbon thats hanging from the ceiling and swing over to the ledge, grab it, and hang on. i climb up, and talk to dale.

his voice booms, like thru a loudspeaker. it is just like wizard of oz. a big big boomy death voice...actually a man behind a curtain. well actually...dale gets to talking, and the voice is completely female afterawhile. whatever?
dale asks what i want to eat, and i say a grilled cheese please...i get it, and eat it, and it's good.
now he confronts my mom, who's sitting at the entrance.
lobster! duh....he sends her lobster. she's eating, and then dale makes it rain electricity all over her.
what. what. what. what. he just killed my mom!!!!
it's still raining, and i don't want to live without my mom, so i jump from the ledge onto the floor where my mom's sitting.
i get struck by electricity balls already accumulating on the floor and more from dale. the feeling is crazy.
my whole body is conscious of every other part of my body, and i can feel my skeleton. i am my skeleton only.
i crawl to my mom, and close my eyes.
then i open them. i'm not dead...this just feels really cool. she slowly opens hers, and she's not dead, but she's worse off than i am. we sit together as dale addresses my dad now.
i don't remember what he asks to eat, but he doesn't get struck or anything bad. just eats.
after dale asks everyone in the entrance what they want, he talks to me. (he's talking in a male voice for this now, before it was very female).
he says something about music to me. recently i have wanted to try my hand at an instrument in waking life because i've never really studied music, or how it all works, or really listened to music with a musician's ear.
he talks to me about this, and scolds me by saying how i've never listened to real music.
he offers me more lemonade, which i guess i had a glass of with my grilled cheese. i say no...
my mom says "that's like a GOD and you're not accepting more of the food he's producing on his own by magic???"...shit, put that way, i realize i'm an idiot.
he offers my dad more watermelon and he lets me have a piece, now that i realize what this food is. (somewhere along the lines, dale became a neutral figure, not good or evil, and very magic...)
the watermelon is the worst i've ever had. it's chewy and without water.

I get “dropped off” in a town (I’m just suddenly in the middle of the road in a foreign town. Perhaps this was the beginning of a dream.) There are a few cars but no people and the setting has an eerie loneliness to it, as if it was a toy town or a set up. It feels “off” like I’m being tricked. I walk onto the sidewalk in front of me. There’s a big sign with a dancing lady advertising burlesque dancers or something. Proceeding, I see a door that says “For Farting Only”. The door has a lock and is obviously for the “management” behind this fake town. I’m bored of looking around so I enter the next door I see.

It’s an office building. There are typical cubicles full of busy workers and shelves stuffed with folders and papers separating the people. In the back of the first room there’s a clear window-wall with an archway. I have a “destination” in mind I’m not conscious of it. I don’t care about anyone in the room and no one cares about me, so I get into the second room easily. I see a girl who’s working and tell her to come with me. She does so without much thought.

Outside, I look into the sky and see a short distance away a little movie theater. As we begin walking toward it, we pass a field that people are setting something up in. I know (or am told, somehow- no detail) that it’s a religious banquet for the town. We walk passed it for now. On a wooden fence in front of us there’s a sign for the movies. 2 people=x amount of money, but 2 girls=a discount. I’m pretty excited that I can get in for less money because I’m gay, and the movie suddenly has a “date” quality to it.

The movie theater is inside a building that, on the outside, looks like a mesh between my high school and my junior high school. There’s a big pavilion (like junior high) hanging over the side of the building, but the actual building is my high school. Beneath the pavilion, there’s an old guru/monk who’s taking people’s money and giving them tickets. I ask for two tickets for two girls and he giggles at me. He gives me the tickets and my change back, but instead of the right amount he gives me two 268 dollar bills. For a moment my mind questioned or was at least surprised that these bills existed, but no lucidity. He said “just kidding” and took them back, giggling.

We didn’t go to the movies (or I don’t remember it) and just walked back into the same little section of town. I have something I want to do now: I plan to make food for the banquet but put “evil” devil food things on the inside of seemingly good dessert meals. I don’t remember if the girl comes with me anymore, but I at least forget about her existence. The office building is no longer the same place, but it’s in the same place and I re-enter it.

It’s now someone I know’s house, but I don’t know who. Heather, Tyler and Jack are there. Tyler comes up to me and starts whispering something about her teeth. She got her braces off (she didn’t have braces in real life). Her upper front teeth all blend together and look like two giant teeth and my dream self “knows” that this is because she had braces on the upper teeth before. Now she got her lower braces off, and those teeth all blend together now too, so she has three giant teeth on the bottom row. We laugh about it and she’s embarrassed to show Heather.

We all begin to work on making the evil dessert. First everyone makes regular mixes for cakes and brownies, but we pour them into trays with the center’s hollowed out. To make the “evil” food, we all spread across the floor and little crimson red glowing strings weave between all of us, making a big cross-hatch pattern of “evil”. Somehow we form this into an edible red mix and put it in the center of all the food. We like making things, so I also make chips and dip using regular potato chips and a mix of strange salsas all put together into a bowl. Henry is there and he keeps eating them and I remind him it’s for the religious banquet.