FryingMan

earlier: pretty much all forgotten

+ (f) on the backyard steps of my childhood home with uncles and dad, big and fat without shirts on, doing something with water and (Easter eggs?)

+ (f, impression) high school friends on a roller coaster?

final dream of the night:

+ No Good Deed Goes Unpunished (fairly vivid and present)
(I'm putting my bicycle into the back seat of my mom's car outside my childhood home?)
I'm in a parking lot, I walk up to my truck [false] which is double parked. There is a black woman there who says she saw some guys come by and check out my car looking for parts to steal, but the didn't take anything. I (or she?) says that yeah there are guys always cruising the parking lots looking for cars to strip. I get in my truck and start slowly driving away while the woman is walking beside the car on the passenger side with the door open, I'm wondering when I can just drive away without being rude. I eventually say "thank you" and close the door and drive on.

Right up ahead there are two convenience stores where I want to stop to get some breakfast, a couple sausage muffins I think, but I the woman is still walking there and it would be awkward for me to park and get out and meet her again.

Then I'm walking on foot with my bicycle and looking for the place in front of the large grocery store where I can put it. I wonder if I have a lock, and I look down into my bike's basket and see my bike lock (cable and combo lock) and think ah great. So I look for bike racks and find a few different styles.

I get down on the ground and inspect them. One is a low horizontal close to the ground piece of rebar with some cables strung about it. I'm closely inspecting it and trying to determine if I loop a cable lock over it if someone could simply pull the lock right off and take the bike and lock away together. Then I see some standing racks where you roll your front wheel into a slot where it holds up your bike and there's a little eyelet where you can run a cable through. I decide to use this one.

I start putting my bike here. Then a family comes by with 3 little crying and screaming red haired children with a very severe mother who is yelling at them and pushing them down in the cart. The girl is screaming about how the boy had been pulling her hair. I decide to be a good samaritan and start talking to the kids and say "would you like to help me lock my bicycle?" The mother stops the cart and lets me do this. The children quiet down right away. I show them how to thread the two ends of the lock through the eyelet (and under the bike's drive chain) and put them together. The lock becomes an electrical extension cord with male and female plugs, and the (father?) says "don't get zapped" to the kids. They push it together and we all continue in to the grocery store together.

I walk up to the mom and give her some advice, "I had two small boys myself, I understand what it's like, it really helps to keep them occupied instead of just screaming at them."

I'm talking to somebody else by a display stand about how my cousins's family is spread all over the country for graduate school [false] but they get homesick and really look forwards to returning home (for the holidays?).

Then I wake up (FA) in some back room of the store. I'm concerned about my bicycle. I realize that just simply using an electrical extension cord is a terrible lock, it could simply be unplugged and my bike stolen. I run in to the store and can't find my way to the front, I ask some people where the front of the store is and they point back through the back room where I woke up. I'm thinking now about biking the rest of the way to school, it should be easy since it is mostly downhill (flat, but tilting slightly downhill) the rest of the way. I don't want to arrive at school all sweaty.

I pass through a large dim room where an Asian woman is doing Tai Chi and is saying how we all should be calm.

I see up ahead a corner of an outdoor swimming pool and make for that and run outside. There is a young mother relaxing with her back up against the edge of a shallow (slightly deeper than a wading pool) pool, she has a small boy who is playing a few meters away from her. She is cute and my eyes linger on her for a few seconds as I run by, (she looks back at me?). A narrator says s.l. "this is the American way."

I run by another small pool to the left where a husband has returned to his family carrying and shaking some flavored milk drinks in each hand.

I make my way back to the front of the store and my heart sinks as I look over the bike area and don't see my bike. Some f^&*er has stolen my bike indeed. I look closer and see that all the pots and pans that I was carrying, including a dish brush, were taken out of my basket and piled there on the ground. An older woman is standing there saying that some guy had been there hammering, I think that must have been the guy who stole my bike.