California dreamin'

I have walked into some kind of unconventional classroom headed by Hugo Schwyzer. He seems annoyed that I have walked in late. And annoyed, perhaps, because he's never seen me before and suddenly I'm in his class.

They're all doing elaborate and painful-looking yoga poses. I don't join in, but instead gaze out the huge picture window into the California sunset, dipping into the massive Pacific.

I go outside and it's dark. I can hear the ocean, and even feel its presence, but it's so dark that I can't see it. I walk down the beach toward it, fearing the moment that I feel it overtake me. I know deep down that once I'm in, I can't get back out. I retreat to the beach, and then realize that it doesn't matter how far I retreat; the tide is climbing and the water will greet me anyway.

Buses gone wild

We are careening along on the interstate in California, past shores and hotels and up and down mountains and in and out of thick smog, obscuring what I've been told is fabulously beautiful countryside. We are in a chartered bus, on a tour or vacation, perhaps, and somehow we've gotten ourselves in a race with another bus — a Girls Gone Wild bus that keeps passing us and going slow and getting passed and then passing us again.

There are three men tethered to what might as well be a noose on the back of the GGW bus, they are hanging there — alive — their faces bruised and dirty and bloody from the abuse they've taken from the ass-end of that bus. They are yelling things at our bus. Our driver gets us close enough to them to realize that they are telling us stories. I can't quite make them out, but they seem frantic.

I can't help but notice that we're speeding along at speeds generally considered unhealthy for big, lumbering buses. Every time we lurch around a curve, I think of that poor team on that bus that crashed in Atlanta, and how awful that situation must have been.

It doesn't take too long, though, for our bus to meet a similar fate. Almost.

We top a hill way too fast, so fast that we take to the air and go flying, flying flying, bracing for impact, wondering what we'll hit — ocean or earth — flying, flying, I don't want to die because my guts were squeezed out, flying, flying, awake.