Batch

01-02-2013 -- This one seems to start almost as a gas station mystery shop. I am at the pumps at a gas station, getting ready to maybe pump some gas, and also looking around at outside displays, thinking to maybe get some oil. I suddenly realize I brought oil with me, and it is already mine, even as I am pulling it off the display, and am hoping I don't get in trouble for using my own oil, because it sure doesn't look right, the way it is going down.

Soon I stumble into a sort of meeting of an organization that seems to be kind of a get-rich-quick thing. You know ... the various real estate gurus who advertise buying property with no money down and making a fortune. There is a sort of feeling of some kind of scam going on, and though no characters appear, there is a strong feeling of something connected to Psych. The guy leading things seems to be Alexandre O., a pastor I knew from my days at Hosanna Printing.

My cell phone rings, and I am asked to turn it off, as they want no recording of the meeting. My phone quickly turns into a small hand-held cassette recorder, and though I try to turn it off, the wheels keep turning and the tape keeps moving, so I think it is still recording. They don't think it is a problem, though, since that is what everybody else's recorders are doing. (Just how many people are recording this thing when they aren't supposed to?)

It is a longish meeting, and there is a lot going on. It goes on for quite a while, but not in any detail I can put down here, except in a few small scenes. At one point they give a small, meek, slightly Oriental girl (think Amy from Futurama) a lot of money, several thousands of dollars that they collected from the rest of us at the meeting, and she is insisting that it is too much. The guy in charge interrupts her, and demands she tell us her name, and this shy girl who has barely spoken to us, and has identified herself as Amy in a whisper speaks out loud and clear, and gives her full name in a forceful manner. His point? Money has a large effect on a person's self confidence.

They bring a pizza in, and ask me to try the first piece, and I could swear it was the pizza that was made in my last dream (see Harry Potter, Voldemort, and the Pizza). It looks like the pizza from Aldi's, as it did, and is also fairly mangled. At one place, the crust has bubbled up, but instead of just a bubble in the crust, it bulges up and almost looks like a small planet on a column rising up from the crust, and I am really not sure about eating it.

Soon the meeting has been thinning out, and I have been asked to do something to show some sort of talent or skill that I will use to make something of myself. I grab a rather basic and simple guitar and start to try and play it (rather badly, as I have no idea how to play the guitar) and one of the other people takes it away from me. They somehow kind of unfold it into a much larger string instrument like a bull fiddle or something, and start to play amazingly on it.

I am embarrassed, but I start to sing along as they play. I have a lovely voice, and sing really well, but very softly because of my throat. [I have had no voice for about five years.] Soon we have moved away from the hotel we were in for this meeting, and Alexandre has turned into what almost looks like Peter David, and I find myself actually kind of whining about how I'm not actually good enough at anything, as we are trying to cross a really busy street to get back to the hotel.

The street crossing was fairly realistic, except for trying to dodge into too small of gaps in the traffic, when we can see much larger gaps a few seconds away, and would have just waited for them in real life. As we finish running across the street, Peter David has turned into Dale, and he has accidentally run behind a fence which separates the street from the sidewalk, so he has to back-track to get around the fence. I expect to beat him to the hotel because of this, but he still gets there first.

We head inside, and I note in passing that it is a nice hotel, but when I push the button for the elevator, and the doors slide open, they don't open onto an actual elevator, but onto a hallway containing the elevators. Weird. I glance at our room number, which is something like 5641 or some such, and hit the button for floor five, but that's not where we want to go. The rooms are not numbered by floor, but sequentially, and we have to read a sort of chart to figure out which floor our room is on.