Once, a young woman was found murdered in her house along with a young man, of whom the papers said that "no bullets were found, but a pablano to the face." It turns out that the woman was Mike's aunt, so Mike, Tim, (both from high school), Kristen (from grad school), and I headed out to downtown Chicago to find her house and go through her things. We took local roads, and got quite lost in the affluent residential areas. We slowed down in a town that was packed with tourists - it was one of those old-timey towns filled with candy and ice cream shops, with a festival running down Main Street. We decided to stop off and check out one of the main festival/market buildings.

By now, my dad and his girlfriend (in real life my parents are still together) had joined us, and we were walking from stall to stall looking at the baked goods. Everything looked great, and I thought about how awesome it would be if a stall had Chinese egg tarts. I must have known by this point that this was a dream, because when the next stall magically had egg tarts, I rather cynically nodded my head. I split off to go to the bathroom, but got sidetracked by a sort of narrow curtained-off area. It was dark and mysterious, so it looked fun. It turned out to be filled with albums of old pictures of my family, and I got sad about my parent's separation (again, not in real life). I thought nostalgically about how good my parents were when I as young, and lamented about how hard things had gotten.

I walked back out to the checkout area and tried to hide and dry my face at the same time. The others didn't notice, as they were busy horsing around and paying for their food. Tim was trying to keep Mike from drawing with a marker on Kristen's shirt. Mike laughed and said something about how ridiculously long they've known each other. In real life, Mike and Tim have been friends for about 25 years (but they don't know Kristen). I thought about how I had managed to get into our wider circle of friends 7-8 years after they had first met each other. Very cool.

There was also something about an Excel sheet with a list of murder weapons, or maybe genes, but I don't remember it clearly any more.

posted by Larry at 10:31 AM