I am alarmed that the Holderlin translation I have seems to differ from B's. She says "You have to pinch your arm when you are reading it so you can approximate what the poet was feeling when he wrote it."

We are somewhere with a group of people who are donning white clothes for an expedition into the woods behind the house I grew up in. The idea is that if everyone wears white, people can be spotted easily. I decide that I need to buy supplies for the expedition, so I find myself in K-mart.

I am waiting in the checkout line, attempting to buy a metal heart-shaped box containing a bunch of topological maps. The cashier decides that I have been stealing things, so she demands to make a search of my bag. I grudgingly agree and she begins to take the items out of my bag one by one. She removes a condom and says,

"What's this?"

"It's a condom," I say, "do you need a demonstration?"

The cashier is flustered by this and begins to put the items back in my bag one by one, including the metal heart-shaped box. I leave without paying for it.

I return to the people in white who are about to enter the woods. I'm slightly apologetic for the fact that I am wearing a grey cable-knit sweater and not white.

"You are a thief so you keep to the shadows," one of them answers.

We enter the woods and eventually come across what somebody calls the "graveyard of kites," scores of kites hang from the trees like spanish moss. This is where all of the kites go when they snap their strings, I think to myself.

We proceed further into the woods and reach what appears to be a conventional graveyard. I notice a headstone which bears the name "John Ashcroft." The words "Mars Falls in 2025" are written in blood on the headstone.

In an area where there are some benches, my father and my maternal grandfather are having some kind of argument. I'm confused as to what the dispute is about.