i was playing with a toy that belonged to my niece. it was a fisher price loom. but it didn't weave anything, it was just some string attached to pieces of plastic that moved up and down in a plastic case thing. i thought it was weird that fisher price made a toy loom.

my sister and i were driving up to a toll booth. she had seen my brother in law go right through a toll booth once, without paying, so she decided to try it out. she drove wide around the end of the toll booth. she thought we had gotten away. i kept telling her it was a terrible idea.

at some toll booths they have spiky strips on the ground that come up and bust your tires if you drive right through. this one had lines on the ground with holes in them, and they shot flames up at your car. we were going too fast for them to melt our tires though.

i was telling her "nicole, they saw you drive through the toll booth, they're going to send cars after us. we'd better stop" but she wouldn't. she didn't even seem nervous, she wasn't driving any faster than usual. cop cars kept pulling up next to us, and i'd think she was about to stop, but she'd drive onto an exit ramp and go onto another road. there were more and more cars showing up every minute, and i was wondering if i was going to get into this ever increasing trouble, even if i was just the passenger.

we were walking along a road next to a building. the road was actually a race track. but it was ok, it was night time and winter and there were no races. but oops, there is a race happening. someone notices us, and makes us get off the track, just before the cars come zipping past. whatever, we think, we will just go across. so we cut across the middle of the track, and cross at the other side. the cars were way on the other side of the track, and we crossed without a problem. but they are pretty fast. i didn't realize they's get so close so quick.

we walk along the side of the track. we have to get to halifax. the side of the track is all slushy, deep as our ankles. we get to the end of the oval track, and start crawling through a hole in the wall. most of the holes have grates, but we can fit through this one. there is snow on the inside. we jump out, and once i do, i am waist deep in slushy water. it is freezing. but it's ok since we are now at the halifax race track.

i see vic eating little lumps of sausage from a vendor. the vendor doesn't want anyone to find out she sold vic sausages, because she'd get in trouble.

waiting for vic to finish, i sit down by the wall, shivering, and watch the race cars zipping past high above me. they are on an elevated track, and i can't really see them because of the wall, but i can barely see their tops. and i can see the effect they make on the sky. they're going so fast they are making the sky turn purple and pink and different blues. it is one of the prettiest things i have ever seen.

i was at a cafe in sackville. the whole town was preparing for a big event.

jimmy from shotgun and jaybd worked at the cafe. when i walked in he was super excited to see me. both him and fred gave me hugs, but jimmy's was much more enthusiastic. i thought to myself "am i on hugging terms with these guys now?".

jimmy showed me a pamphlet for the dance later that night, and then he asked me to promise to dance with him. he was so nice and sincere, that i said i would even though i was worried about not being able to dance.

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later the cops pulled over all of us, the college kids, who were in vehicles driving through fields. there was something big going on, a plot of some sort. someone told the cops i had seen everything, which i hadn't really. but i knew what was going on. if i only knew the names of those 4 ringleaders, i would have turned them in, because as much as i like illegal activity, these guys were dicks. but i didn't so the cop went away. then the ringleaders came over and were trying to intimidate me, in that super annoying way, "uh.. you didn't tell that cop anything, now did you alicia. we know you'd never do something like that" *glare*. i told them i didn't give a shit about their plot, and i didn't know their names anyway, because they were losers. i wasn't afraid of them. they went away too.

my dad was crying, and my mom wouldn't tell me why.

i was in ian's mom's basement. ian's mom lived way down at the end of the pier. her house was beautiful, all plush white carpets, comfy sofas, glass and chrome. we were practicing for our two shows that night.

i had to use the washroom, and i couldn't use the one the boys were using. so i had to go upstairs into ian's mom's giant restaurant. it was a really fancy restaurant. people had to put down a 300 dollar deposit just to eat there. she made me have some soup. she had a weird accent. the soup was really good. a girl came in, she looked just like this girl i met in newfoundland, but she was from kiev or some crazy place, and she had a strong accent. i told her about our show later, but after she left, i realized i forgot to tell her it was at bunkers.

so off we went to our first show of the night. it was in this huge crazy bar. i don't know if it was bunkers or not. there weren't enough inputs or something, so i sat at a table and watched. scott boudreau played acoustic guitar and he was playing my parts. i was delighted by this. everyone in the band was sitting on stools.

i was at a table with that girl i met in ian's mom's restaurant. we were doing a crossword puzzle, the clue was "rats and mice" i really wanted to put "savagogement" but she was like "no, silly, it's 'rodents'". i felt dumb, but still secretly thought the right answer was savagogement.

tf was still playing, but it sounded terrible. no one knew what they were doing. i went up to sing harmony with ian, but he would hold the microphone really far away from him, so all you could hear was me singing. then he walked off the stage and all i could sing were the harmony parts, so the song sounded really weird.

i was at some sort of all women's event. melanie and ashley were there, as well as every girl i know. everyone started singing the old bluegrass standard "i'll fly away". i was stoked because i've been listening to it alot on the o brother where art thou soundtrack. it was all girls singing, so everyone was trying to sing really high, and i had to sing really really low.

when it was all done, and everyone finished clapping, melanie announced that it was the single from some girl's newly released album. i said under my breath "yeah, hers and everyone else's" and the girl was standing right behind me. she was wearing a purple pantsuit. she just kind of laughed as i tried to apologize for being rude. i said "i just make jokes." and "it's just because i have been listening to the o brother where are thou soundtrack alot lately".

i was with an old man, it could have been my father, but he was too old.

we walked and walked down this dirt road in the woods. finally we came to it, the salvation army junkyard. it was a creepy place. the old caretaker (even older than my father), came up to meet us. his clothes were the color of rust, just like the old scraps of metal lying in the yard. he told us we could have anything we found but to be careful.

he started telling us about a young man who went inside the building and found an old college book, and started reading it. but he just continued to read it, on and on, and never showed the slightest signs of putting it down, day after day, night after night. i didn't want to go inside the building to see if he was still there.

then a young boy came, dressed in the same rusty clothes as the old man. he started telling us a story about the junkyard dog. it had the same creepy feeling to it. the junkyard dog just went round and round in circles and never stopped, not even if there was something in its way.

my parents and i were going on a trip. the way we travelled was to sit in laundry dryer cylinders. it got very hot in there. my parents accepted the tradition of closing themselves into their dryers and turning them on. it was very hot in there, and very uncomforable travelling, because the dryers were twirling. i decided to leave the dryer door open, and that way the cylinder wouldn't turn.

we were in new york city. we were at a small, very prestigious school. i found out about a mystery involving the school. then someone put a bomb in the school and blew it up. i drove away from the school thinking that it was my fault that the school blew up. the CN tower stood in the distance against the cloud of smoke from the burned out school.

i was in a laboratory. there was a rare and poisonous species of frog. i was worried it would get loose.

could have been worse

after a night of complete havoc, i grabbed joe o'toole and dragged him into an oversized tv cabinet. i closed the doors and we made out, a lot.

everyone decided to cut watchmaker and thieves from the record. i tried to reason with them, but no one would listen to me. ian was being a huge jerk. he made me cry.

i went to a bar that looked like baba's and everyone knew me there. some weird guy kept trying to buy me drinks. then ian and everyone showed up, and none of them talked to me.

we were waiting for a train. it was night time. i realized there was a dane cook autograph session going on in the train station. it was terribly exciting. he was autographing brightly colored folders with nothing in them. i got him to make one for me and dave. i was so excited to meet him, i kept saying the stupidest things. he was also selling t-shirts for 5 bucks. i ran out of the room to the bank machine, but then i realized i had money in my pocket. when i got back they were packing up, not many people were left. i felt awkward.

i asked for 2 shirts. his t-shirts were just blank t-shirts, already worn and with mud all over them. he wrote his name on them in pen. he got me to write some of it. my handwriting looked nothing like his. i bought myself a blue collared work shirt, it fit nice and it wasn't covered in mud. then i told him to listen to my band. he wrote our myspace down, but said he was on tour and alot of people wanted him to do things like that, so he wasn't sure when he could check it out. i felt awkward again and rejoined my friends.

we were still waiting in the train station, i told them that osheaga festival was going on later tonight, and we could go because it was only 6 bucks to get in. i didn't know who was playing.

later, me and sidney were walking over the last bit of the over pass and onto the terminal road. i told her it was a shortcut. the wind was so strong is almost blew her over. then yvette suggested we take the train tracks all the way to the mall, in the other direction. we started going, i was worried a train would come. there was a paved walkway on one side of the tracks, i started walking on that.

the walkway gradually got higher and higher off the ground, and ended at a straight wall. the walkway was now part of a building. it was too high to jump. i wondered how yvette got down.

so i started going through the building, which was filled with tourists and school groups who were looking at the train tracks. i kept going in rooms, but they never led me down and outside. finally i found this small room, like a cylinder with a ladder in it. along the wall there were indentations, only a few inches deep, but this was the ladder you had to climb to get down.

when i got to the bottom, i could see people walking past a frosted window. i was afraid i would get in trouble, but when i peeked out, i was where i wanted to be. on a second walkway on ground level.

yvette was there with bags and bags of fireworks. he mother got them for her, and she wanted to set them off on the train tracks. i was worried someone would get hurt. a big crowd of onlookers had formed but NO ONE had a match or a lighter. darren and mikey were there, with a bunch of our friends, they were rolling stuff, but they had no lighter either. we saw a guy smoking a cigarette and started forming a complicated plan to ask him to borrow his lighter. the man didn't really want to lend it to us.

oh, and a few nights ago

we were at a festival (with andrew, too!). we went for a sunny afternoon walk. we were walking through a parking lot of a school near a flagpole when you stopped and took a contraption from your backpack. we hooked it to our backs like a parachute and it allowed us to hover for brief moments of time and control our direction. two old ladies looked on and talked about how silly we were. then i looked into your zipped open bag and saw a cassette tape case. inside was (like a matchbook) strips of LSD. david bowie lsd that you said you got in edinburgh. that's when i realized why you were so crazy.

my latest dream sequence:

a) we appear on a porch of a hotel that is $30 per hour to stay in. the room was beautiful with lots of white. we were dressed old-fashioned. the rest of the group were busy for the afternoon. then we returned to the hotel with the group and i noticed you were avoiding me to some extent. i stuck my nose in the air and went on with my day. later, you lost your david bowie tape and albert, jeff and i started rumaging with you through a clean but extremely untidy hotel room. there were piles of things i liked strewn about: books, clothes, and darker clothes. (the door and windows were open, late afternoon, summer.) we found other interesting casettes, but not yours. i wondered why i was so quick to help you after you avoided me for hours.

b) allie and i were at a concert/art show. joni mitchell sat two rows behind us and had a cameron diaz haircut (but was still beautiful). everyone from the concert was going to this burger joint/restaurant place so there were some people i knew there, but mostly just lines that were too long. while i was waiting, i noticed erin and laura chapman at the counter. they took their seats without saying hi because i hadn't noticed them looking. later, when i was about to order, i could hear erin talking shit about me to an old acquaintence of mine, trevor. i walked up to their booth and gave her the eye, to let her know i heard everything and disagreed. she shut her trap.

i went to london, ontario to visit my cousin. london was huge and filled with futuristic skyscrapers. but when i got there it was past dark, so when my cousin picked me up, and we had to walk to his place, we had to stop at the sherriff's house and get a special permit which meant we wouldn't get fined if we looked anyone in the eye. the sherriff was skeptical as to why we would want to look anyone in the eye, but i told him that on the east coast we do it all the time. the sherriff had a southern accent.

there was an electronic billboard at an intersection by a big church. it would flash messages at you from the church about all the sins in the world, by telling you what the driver of the car opposite you may have been thinking. they actually ended up being kind of perverted and graphic, and you wondered if the church people who made them up were just trying to live a little. some of the less perverted ones went like "he is thinking homosexual thoughts right now... ABOUT YOU" or "he wants to have sex with your teenage daughter" or "if he can find a way not to get caught, he will steal all your money".

then i was at a ct show... there was a "dance-off", in which shane went down into the crowd while playing and handed out free movie passes. i was wearing jeans and a bikini top and a cat in the hat hat. shane did not give me a movie pass.

wait, aren't you dead?

i was at my mom's parents house. only my family was there. the phone had rang, and when i went in the other room to pick it up, i realized that my grandfather had answered it and was talking to his sister. i wanted to hang up as to not be rude but i waited until i heard his voice again and then clumsily hung it up.

me and ian and a few other people were in a room with a 400 pound lady. she was so fat she couldn't get out of bed. she kept rolling around, and anyone on the bed would be sucked into the dent she made. she kept ordering us around, telling us to do things for her because she couldn't get out of bed. she wanted us to call a 1-900 number for her, it was a psychic hotline. apparently she was really rich. we couldn't believe it, we watched on her cell phone as the charges for the call grew and grew. as we left we talked about how we couldn't believe they could charge $3 a second for a psychic call. then we walked past a waterslide.

i was at a giant carnival. it was outside of a hotel. there was a giant production going on. they were singing songs from disney movies, dressed up in elaborate costumes. then they broke into "thriller" by michael jackson. they did the thriller dance out into the street and stopped traffic. i was amused that no one got upset with them, because they did the same production every hour. there was a black man in a sparkly suit singing, and there were three girl backup singers, whose hair was in a giant pineapple shape. i've never seen such big hair before. someone told me that one of the girls used to play bass for the smashing pumpkins. her name was d'arcy.

a small island with a rocky beach. komodo dragons were in the water, they started attacking people, and they ate a child. we knew that they would soon move onto the land.