March 5, 2019

I had been asked to write a 60-70 page paper for someone about an open question posed by some academic article about “Renin” and treatment methods. It was meant to be done over a few nights, but 4 years later - I was still working on it. I had delayed this person’s graduation and for some reason they still haven’t failed their course and was still waiting for this paper.

I was out for dinner with my parents and some family friends. From the moment we walked into the restaurant, my mother kept bringing up how I was the only “child” at the table - all of the children of the other parents went off with their own dinner plans. This was reiterated to everyone who would listen once again after we had finished ordering when I had enough. “Fine, I’ll leave” I said and walked out the door.

I walked along the main road until I got to a bookstore and walked in. As I walked into the far end of the store, I found myself surrounded by pianos and string instruments. A curtain was closing off a back section of the store that contained even more pianos and racks full of giant crates. I went to the closest employee I could find to ask about the curtain and they said that it was closing time.

The sun had already set when I got out of the bookstore. I started walking back the way I came when I stumbled into a childhood friend. As we caught up and chatted while walking, he would greet everyone on the street as if he were friends with them. Some of them seemed to recognize me as well but I had forgotten who any of them were.

He took out a small plastic chip and told me that he was going to pull a “prank” by planting child pornography on someone’s computer. I told him that wasn’t really a prank at all and probably something much more serious. We were standing in the middle of a driveway during this conversation when two men came up to us. One of them handed my friend another chip and said that a much better prank would be to install an incredibly frustrating game on the victim’s computer. However he warned us to make sure it was never played in Mexico, for it was illegal there.

After the two guys had walked away, the person who had wanted me to write the paper came running towards us. He told me that he realized that the “open question” had already been given a solution in the last 10 pages of the source article and that he had only now read it.