Josh leaves me at the fair

Frontier early dinner, silent art auction at [AC]2, some beers & a movie with Josh after.

We're at the fairgrounds at the silent auction, it's over and Mike tells me that we've won "a painting by Beatta," which I surmise to be the round painting we bid on, since I know the other was Mike's. I didn't realize it was Beatta's painting, and I also hadn't realized it was only the tip of the iceberg, that the round painting represented an installation of an additional 28 objects, mostly chachkis, pennies on carboard, bits of this and that. Mike gets it all out & we take a quick look. We load it all into the car. Josh gets in to drive, and I'm about to climb in shotgun but something catches my eye and I pause for a second. Next thing I know, Josh has driven off without me. I run after the car, waving my arms, but the deep sand of the fairgrounds makes it impossible for me to gain, and he doesn't see me in his mirror. I know he's just spaced out & not being mean, but it is very frustrating.

Will he come back? Should I wait for him there? I wait for a few minutes and he doesn't return. Well, where can I go that he will find me? I don't want him to be driving all over creation looking for me and getting freaked out. Ahh, we were going to go to the post office, I'll go there and try to catch him. I have by skateboard [?] and I skate the short distance east on Central [the fair is somewhere around University in this scheme] to Cornell and go to the post office. I wait there for a short bit, but then figure that I should really just go home, where there's a phone and he'll have to come home eventually anyhow.

I skate south on Cornell, and Snoop Dogg is sitting on a stool in the street, near the gutter, with a gas can with a clock mounted into the top. Is this a bomb? Naw, he's just a homeless guy, and with the gas crisis [?] he's just there to give stalled motorists a bit of gas so they can make it to the service station, and make a couple bucks in the process. The clock is some sort of pumping system. As I skate past him, he turns and looks at something behind him, and I reach down and snag his gas can contraption and skate away. I head up Silver, and it occurs to me. "Did I just steal a homeless guy's only source of livelihood?" Well, too late now, I can give it back to him later, and I really want to get home right now. I suddenly have all of these packages with me that I have to balance. The second hand of the clock hits my fingers and I don't want it to break, so every 60 seconds, ostensibly, I have to lay my palm out flat so the hands can move over my fingers.

I get home, which is 406 1/2, and I approach from the far end of the alley. I pass Mikaela & Priscilla's yard fence, which has been replaced with chain link coops for large birds, like you'd see at the fair. We have a bunch in our yard, too, instead of the gate. I have to go through a series of these coops, which are tall enough for me to walk through, to get into the yard. I realize I ;ve left the first gate open, and a tiny black chicken and our little brown puffball puppy "Baby" have gotten out. Baby is chasing the tiny chicken, which is the size of a softball, and eats it before I can get to him and stop him. I'm calling out, "Baby, lay down' lay down, Baby." He chows the chicken and then "fffoooh" blows the head up in the air and it flies like a feather. I grab him and put him back in the coop and close it up.

While I'm in the coop, there is a song playing,
"Jean Vasquez, Jean Vasquez,
It's a period, I've read.
Jean Vasquez, Jean Vasquez,
It's a theory that I had."
over and over again

(321-123-436554b is roughly the tune, if you it were applied to scale, don't know the key off hand)

The phone is ringing, and I know I'll never get there in time to answer. Yet I can hear my disembodied voice on the phone, obviously talking to Josh. I'm yelling, but with humor. "I don't care if you did it chemically [by which he means automatically, without thinking], you left me at the fucking fair!"

And then suddenly Josh has pulled up in the drive. He bypasses the coops and uses a simple gate next to them, duh, and goes in the house. He doesn't speak to me. I follow him in. He's sitting on the carpet playing a video game or something. He still doesn't speak; I blow him a kiss, he doesn't respong. Is he mad at me? What the fuck? I'm dumbfounded. In no way is he allowed to be mad at me!