Daytime and the hedge of awareness. I try on bright plaid pants at a thrift shop in NoVa. I stretch hand over hand to the rubberized grips of the climbing wall. I listen to Inga drunkenly confess her management woes late night in Pharmacy Bar, and marvel at the world of people who must manage others and be managed in turn.

Sometime after bedtime I lose consciousness, and the shit hits the fan.

The airplane is foundering so low over the field that I can see a furrow of turbulence parting the cornrows just below us. The engines roar and strain like animals. I wait to see if I will die.

My team of Emergency Medical Technicians is on the scene of a hazardous material spill, possibly a terrorist attack. The authorities decide to seal off the scene, fearful that the contagion will spread. We are sealed inside, potential contaminants ourselves.

I am on a bus full of refugees when a man boards with a large gun. This time there is no question of whether I will live or die. I wait, hunched over in a reflexive but futile posture, as the machine gun fire hits bodies around me. There is screaming. I feel the rounds smack into me, but there's no pain beyond the concussion of impact. The screams go silent. Still the gun splatters out bullets, and still I feel them strike my flesh. It seems inconceivable that I should still be alive.

A day breaks through this skein of nightmares. I read the paper and lay around in bed until eleven. We go to the Museum of American Art to see one of my favorite artworks ever, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (ca. 1950-1964, James Hampton). It's a monstrous altar crafted over several years by a janitor in a rented garage. There are no crosses or other recognizable religious paraphernalia -- only wings. It's all fashioned of colored construction paper, pieces of cardboard and dozens of light bulbs coated in shiny aluminum foil.

Night overwhelms us. Susan leaves me for her ex-husband. Devastated, I beg her to talk to me, and she tells me to stop being so fucking histrionic.

I must defend my three-year-old nephew from the ravenous attacks of bears that pursue us with the enormous, unblinking eyes of cats.

Morning splits open. I clamber up the prefabricated grips of the wall. Susan and I sit under the awning outside a coffee shop in Dupont Circle and watch people pass by for almost two hours. We tell little stories about many of them. When some pass by again in the opposite direction, we add on to their story, bringing their faces momentarily close to ours in the anonymous shroud of rain.

After bedtime a woman shows up whom I touched inexpertly, clumsily, some years ago. She still thinks about me sometimes when she holds her new baby. She is standing in my room naked, and I am repulsed by my own mindless wanting for her body.

Light comes. Standing in the shower, I foresee an art project that will require a great deal of human hair. When I last worked with hair, it was in a small town. I struck up a useful friendship with the local barber, who supplied me with all the castoff hair I needed and was completely uninterested in what I planned to do with it. Here in DC, I fear that urban suspicion will deny me the same opportunity. Maybe you might send me your hair. This will be a very cool piece, and I'll include you in the credits. It'll be so interactive. Send me your hair? Please? (Find out how.)