Chapter One

The other night, I had an unusual dream that most likely owed its genesis to an unholy marriage between Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto and Stephen King’s The Mist. In it, cavemen and -women were milling around at the ocean shore one morning when a fog rolled in. You knew they were cavemen and -women because they were dressed in tattered skins and, in a shout out to the creationists, there were dinosaurs milling around with them. As you can see, there was an awful lot of milling around going on but you have to understand that this dream was set before they invented TiVo.

Anyway, from out of the fog and waves emerged civilized people from the future! No, not today, not 2007 – I said civilized. They were from a time after mankind conquered its primitive instincts, ended the miseries of war and poverty, fed the hungry, healed the sick, reversed global climate change, and all that good stuff. (They were from January 2009.) The cavemen and -women didn’t know what to make of the sudden arrival of these enlightened beings, but the future people were from a time after the economy recovered and could see only one thing: cheap real estate. So they moved in and gentrified the neighborhood.

Cut to a few years later, after a lot of temporal immigration and interbreeding between people with such different outlooks, and the ocean shore started to look more familiar – like downtown Baltimore, in fact. War had broken out, crime was rampant, and the homeless wandered around in packs. Most of these unfortunate souls were pure-blooded cavemen and -women, who for some reason had traded in their tattered skins for elaborate Victorian costumes that inhibited their movement when they were forced to clean windshields for spare change.

Chapter Two

The other morning, I went to the dentist. I wasn’t aware that I had an appointment, in fact I was quite sure that I didn’t, but they called me up and said I did, so I went. The hygienist was a surly woman I had never met before, who startled me with bad news on the enamel front, then while I absorbed this, knocked me for a loop by tilting the chair back and forcing me to look at the children’s drawings that were taped to the ceiling above. These had always been there, and most of them were scribbled admonishments to properly brush and floss, but I noticed the addition of a new portrait of a squinty-eyed troll wearing a necktie. I found this disconcerting enough but was really horrified when I finally noticed the caption: “George W. Bush.”

Under this hateful supervision, the surly hygienist jammed sharp metal instruments into my mouth.

Chapter Three