I'm checking out in a grocery store and there's some confusion about a coupon or receipt. The clerk sends me to another clerk to sort it out.

Outside, I see my mom in a mini bus. She sees me and starts to get off the bus. The driver isn't stopping and she's arguing with him.

Later...

I'm coming home late with AJ to a hotel in New York. We get in and crash. I wake up the next morning with a couple of enormous whiteheads on my nose. I pop them with some difficulty and ask Susannah why she didn't tell me I had them last night. We're only staying for 3 more days and I consider extending out trip.

Susannah & I are stopping in a small town on our road trip. We wander into a second-hand store & browse for a bit. I come across a couple of old out-of-print video games I like and I take them to the owner to get a price. She tells me I can have all 3 for $200 and I balk and we leave.

Susannah's waiting to see a doctor or judge and we sit in the waiting room. A woman stands up and begins reading from a prepared statement (written on some Verizon bills). We both roll our eyes and wonder why she's doing this in public. As she continues to read, she starts bringing out big stacks of boxes & files. She places some on a table near us and some of the boxes are stacked precariously. I nudge a few of them so they fall on the man in front us, hoping to annoy him & make the lady look bad.

We walk over to the cafeteria to see what they have. There's some sort of beef stew & fish. Nothing looks very good. We walk outside into a farm. There are men grilling ridiculous quantities of sausage & meat. I ask one of them what some of the meat is. I walk around the barn & finally decide to get some grilled ham on a sandwich. I ask one guy how much it is and he tells me it's by the pound. The only sign I see is for ham and it's $17/lb. I try to figure in my head what a sandwich will cost. The guy walks around the barn with me trying to find someone to serve me.

Behind the barn, we see two men removing fence & moving it. The guy I'm with runs down the hill towards them & fires at one with a shotgun. The shot man goes down & the other man fires back. I begin to scurry back up the hill and around the barn as they firefight continues.

I'm now part of a movie/trailer featuring a team of special agents/thieves. Ving Rhames, Chow Yun Fat & a beautiful blonde are part of the team. Ving Rhames exits a building with a shotgun & goes down the street.

In an alley behind a loading dock, I watch Mark Walhberg walking. He sees a shell casing on the ground with a marker next to it. He walks inside & talks to a woman in the mechanic's shop.

I'm at a party celebrating my mom getting her PhD.  As she's giving her speech, an older family friend mentions money.  My mom says, "First off, you taught us academics not to value money so much,  Secondly, this PhD thing doesn't pay too well."  The crowd laughs.  I mention to her about my college professor and she starts telling his story to the crowd.  I quickly take over, "He was our journalism professor, always told us to 'get the story.'  One of his students was kidnapped by terrorists and executed.  One of his other students identified the kidnapper on video (recognized his shoes) and was able to put the guy away.  Unfortunately, during the course of the trial, the student's identity was revealed and he too was killed."

I go on to tell the crowd that the professor also gave his life in the cause of truth & justice.

I've just busted out of a poker tournament in a New York home game.  A couple players are complaining about the format (a 2nd tournament is starting at a designated time and some players will have to juggle both games).  One player starts talking about going to another game.  He mentions that Tobey Maguire will be there.  "You wanna play with Spider-Man?" He asks me.  Glenn (from NYC) chimes in, "You should come Dan, you're good with pot odds and can read people."  I nod and ask where it is.  The host says the street and cross street but I'm not familiar with it.  People around the table try to think of where it is and no one seems to know.  I ask if it's north of Prospect Heights.

There's a blizzard outside and I complain to a player, "Man I wish I had a ride on a night like this.  When's the B71 coming?"  He looks down at his notebook and checks the times he's been jotting down.  "Depends on when the B70 comes first." He says.  "I hate having to go crosstown sometimes." I tell him I'm heading towards Prospect Park.  We agree to walk back together.

Outside, we walk down the sidewalk through the snow as snow plow honks and drives by behind us.  I skip down a couple steps and land in a little melted snow.  We both note that I could easily have stepped in a deep pool of water.  We get to a railing outside a school and step gingerly around a very deep pool of water.

A woman walks by and my companion stops to say hello.  I recognize her as Andy A and give her a nod.  

Later...

I'm at a fancy restaurant with Nick, Susannah's grandmother Blanche, Bobby and somewhere else.  We're celebrating my birthday & waiting for a few others friends to arrive.  There's a computer screen built into the table and a game of poker starts between Blanche, Nick and me.  I'm distracted by something and come back to the game in time to see I have an Ace-hi spade flush.  I win the pot but walk off to see if the others are arriving.  

Susannah calls to say we're going to have 7 people instead of 5 and I wonder briefly if they can reseat us.  I walk over to the stairs & look down on the first floor of the restaurant and see Tom, Lynnette, Khue and a bunch of others (including a few people I barely know) coming up.  I greet them as they pass and stop Tom to ask him what the hell is going on.  He's exasperated and tells me all these people wanted to come.  I'm irritated and tell him I was hoping for a more intimate dinner.  He yells at me, saying it couldn't be helped.  

I storm off outside and pace around.  Back inside, the wait staff is rearranging some tables into an L-shape to accommodate us all.  I decide to get over it and come back in.

I'm in a dark & dingy camera store trying to find a digital SLR.  I talk to a young clerk about upgrading from my point-and-shoot to something with more manual control.  He shows me something between a Canon Rebel & a Canon Elan.  I ask him to find out the price and he disappears.

I'm on a small commuter flight from Lexington to Cincinnati (or Louisville) as we taxi down a narrow country road.  It's a flight that crashed recently where all the passengers died (I've been able to board it on a "Journeyman"-like trip back in time.  We drive along slowly for miles until we encounter a runaway bull in the road.  It charges straight for us and the pilot pulls us up off the ground to avoid hitting it.  We're going too slowly to be in the air and we hit some pockets of warm air and jostle around a bit.  Eventually we do crash but all walk away from it (we're in the after life?).  I pull the pilot (a pleasant middle-aged woman like the bus driver from "The Sweet Hereafter") aside and tell her about what I know.  Together we try to figure out why such a seemingly  minor crash would have crashed us all.  I ask her if it's normal to drive all the way to the destination instead of flying she she tells me we usually taxi for a long while before we get up to speed.  I ask her out loud if one bull is worth the lives of 30+ passengers.  We both agree that no one would've expected all on board to die.

I talk to a couple of high school students on the flight who don't realize they're dead.  I tell them I wouldn't be on this flight but that I entered a writing contest to commemorate this flight (4957 words) and somehow ended up on it.  I ask one woman if I'll end up back in the present or the past when this is all over.  I hug a black high school student and tell him not to be a stranger.  I tell him I might be a junior high school student (which I am) or an older man next time he sees me.

One of the passengers hands me a certified letter from a law firm suing on our behalf.  He wants to me to look at it and ask as their attorney.  I take it but tell them I don't have my law degree yet.

I take the letter to my mom nearby and she tells me where to sign it.  I wonder out loud how a law firm could've responded to the crash this quickly.  Then I realize it's a claim form for something that happened to me recently.  I check some boxes & sign a few places.

My mom shows me some different lengths of seaweed and other things that she got for me.  I'm a little impatient to get back to the crash victims.