“I love your thumb nail. I want to paint a green argyle pattern on it,” I said to Margo. She seemed unenthused, but didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

There was some sort of investigation going on that some man and I were involved in. We didn’t realize how deep it went until I went missing. The man followed strange clues and found me dead in a hallway of a large complex.
I was pale and slightly yellowed, laying on a metal table. It seemed like an autopsy table or something. It had wheels. I was very loosely covered with translucent plastic. The man tore the plastic off of me and then wondered why he did so - it was very easy to tell it was me through the plastic. He felt a strange guilt. A SWAT team ran in behind him.
“You know her?” the SWAT leader asked after they had cleared the hallway. The man looked up at the SWAT leader.
“What are you talking about? This is Lauren Brick. She’s been going through this investigation with us the entire time. You met her the other day.” The SWAT leader looked confused.
“I don’t know this woman, and I don’t know a Lauren Brick. Maybe you’re thinking of someone else,” the leader said. He turned towards his group and asked, “anybody know this woman? Anybody know Lauren Brick?” They all stared back blankly. A cold terror creeped over the man, because he had seen every man on this team meet and interact with me over the course of the investigation. That’s when he knew he was really in for it - everyone was secretly in on it, and he was next.
He was suddenly outside of the complex and in a big but largely deserted city. It was really dystopic - all the buildings were boarded up, there was litter everywhere, etc. The only business that was open on the street he was walking down was Sesame Street. Something happened with a group of children waiting outside.
The man was captured and taken away to be tortured. Instead of dreaming the scenes of torture, my brain distracted itself by paying attention to a woman who had walked by the man on the street earlier. She was a young blonde Russian woman. She was a successful actress in Russia, and had come to America to make it really big. Instead, though, she was a hostess at a sushi bar. This woman was very clearly based on a sushi bar hostess I spoke with the other day.
While the man was undoubtedly being tortured, my consciousness sat back and simply viewed her most successful Russian movie. I can’t remember the premise now, but it was actually pretty good. I couldn’t understand any of the words, but the woman seemed to be a good actress.
The man had gone missing for a while, and a new person had taken interest in the situation. He sort of looked like a young OJ Simpson, but with darker skin. He got deeper and deeper in it, and the bad guys began to realize that he, too, may be a threat.
The man was back in the picture. He was in a small room on one of the top floors of a large building. There was nothing there but a disgusting single mattress on the floor and some blank crumpled sheets of paper. He couldn’t remember how he got there. He had a massive scraggly beard. He looked down at his chest and saw a number of objects jammed into his torso somehow.
The most painful ones were two long, threaded metal rods. He tried to pull them out, but they were stuck, and he yelled in pain. He tried to unscrew them instead, and that worked better, but took a long time. By the time he got them out of his chest he decided he’d just leave the other objects in. 
He stood up, wondering how long he had been tortured for, and if there was more to come in this new place. He walked out of the room into a massive space that clearly was just the entire open floor of the building. There were brick walls and huge windows with rounded tops. The floor was a dark wood.
Another man was standing a few yards away, facing away from him. He recognized the man as one of his oldest friends - they’d known each other since he was a little boy. The friend had swooping white hair and a white beard, and stood with a straight back. The man yelled his friend’s name and limped quickly over to him.
The friend turned around and let a painful smile crease his face. He was standing near a bunch of miscellaneous objects on the floor - objects that the man immediately recognized as related to his investigation, my death, and his subsequent torture. Relics, almost. The man was confused.
“Your story really has captured the imaginations of the entire country,” his friend said, “they’re hanging on every twist and turn of it.” The man frowned and backed away a little. He had no idea his investigtion had any sort of press attention.
A crew of men holding ladders and construction gear suddenly hurried in out of nowhere and began rapidly renovating the space. The friend explained something to the man that made him very angry. By the time he was done explaining, the construction crew had completed turning the entire floor into an upscale cafe/restaurant/bar. The man and the friend were sitting on a cushioned seat.
The man had his face in his hands and felt betrayed. Then, he completely lost it, and began beating the living daylights out of anyone he could, with anything he could. He ran off and went missing.
The other man caught wind that the first man had been found, but he could not find him. He knew if he ran to the top floor of the clocktower, he would get the answers he needed. He ran up many flights of stairs and entered the top room, where he was immediately killed.
After he was killed, he found himself, alive, running up the exact same staircases, with the same loud sounds in the background, breathing the same breaths he had taken moments before. He couldn’t remember what had just happened, but as he approached the top floor, he had a moment of life-saving deja vu and backed away. He ran back down the stairs, and heard a voice speak to him. It told him that everything that was happening was all in his head, and when he expected bad things to happen, it made them happen.
The other man was horrified and looked out a window by one of the staircases as he ran by it. There were two massive buildings nearby. They were cylindrical and tall, with stout, cone-shaped roofs. They were exploding and collapsing, with huge firey clouds of black smoke. One explosion knocked him to the ground.
“How do I stop it?” he screamed, “how am I supposed to make it stop?!” He had to give up. He had to let go of the search, forget about the man, forget about me. He felt this answer spring to him out of nowhere. 
“I’ll stop, I’ll stop!” he yelled, curled up on the ground, deafening explosions seeming to creep closer and closer. He closed his eyes, and suddenly, there was silence.
He opened his eyes and he was inside a slick metal elevator. He stood up shakily, and the door opened. There was a huge space that seemed to be some kind of elite club. Everyone was dressed to the nines, drinking fancy drinks and chatting with each other. He wandered in. He saw me standing across the room, recognized me from the photo of me dead, and hurried over.
“How are you here? Where is your partner? What the hell is going on?!” he asked me. I smiled.
“Have a drink,” I said, and walked away.

From: Travis
Hallenbeck
PS u a bad bitch
May 18, 9:23 pm

“I should have brought trash bags,” I thought to myself, clutching onto a large poster mounted on foamcore. It was only wrapped in thin paper. I had initially thought I could make it through the rain, and that the umbrella would be enough. I didn’t want to mess up, because I hate messing up. If the poster got messed up, I was going to be angry at myself, later on, at the bar. I’d stare at a bottle of St. Germaine and just sit, fuming at myself - even though I supposedly don’t care about this stupid job. I hate messing up.
The rain was blowing everywhere and was sort of spectacular. Later, I told Travis it was like movie-rain. It came in torrential waves that seemed fabricated. The trees had gone sideways and reminded me of the many hurricane evacuations I have been through.
I stood under the Transamerica building in downtown Baltimore, halfway between where I had picked up the poster and where it was to be delivered. I shielded it with my body, and tried very, very hard to not think too hard about the fact that I was doing so (lest it spark an existential crisis).
A few people were seeking shelter under the overhang area, one of which was an old man, who I just hated for no reason. I would have hated him as a young man, too - I could tell. He didn’t really do or say anything wrong.
“Men should pay me to say words at me,” I thought dumbly to myself. I thought those exact words.
The rain would not let up. In the center of the overhang area, there were three drains. They were clearly not up to the job of disposing of all the water. At first, there were just large pools of water around the drains, slowly creeping towards all the people around the edge - but then, they began bursting like disgusting gray fountains.
“It’s like whale-watching!” I said quietly, to no one.
I alternated between staring at these occasional sewer geysers and the white curtains of rain billowing towards me. I called Travis on my cell phone, begging him to bring me trash bags for this stupid poster.
As I spoke with him, trying to describe exactly where I was, the drain closest to me exploded upwards, spewing dark water. The Downtown Partnership employees, all in yellow rain uniforms, shouted in unison.
I noticed something fling out with the water. It was a gigantic cockroach, redder than any cockroach I’ve seen before. I tried to sympathize and think about how it must be having a worse time than I was, merely due to scale - but then I was overcome by disgust. I kept having to move because it was walking right at me, no matter where I stood.
“This is happening because I’m a bad person,” I thought to myself. I wondered briefly if I was actually a bad person, or if I just do bad things. I hung up with Travis and waited.
By the time Travis arrived with trash bags, it suddenly became less dramatic of a storm, and I looked like an asshole. I considered the thought that it could be a direct result of Travis being a very good person, and the universe balanced out my innate badness with his innate goodness. I felt bad, then I felt weirded out that I was so karma-y all of a sudden. There’s no god or anything like that, so I didn’t understand the mysticism I was shrouding my entire experience with.
I delivered the poster to its destination - a law firm. There was a smudge on it from the rain, but the lady who ordered it didn’t complain, most likely because I was very wet and probably very sad-looking.
I hate the rain. I hate myself.

Hi mom!
I plan on hopefully making money, trying to get a new job, that sort of thing. I’m also going to either begin exercising so I can sort of get back in shape OR give up on that and just drink copious amounts of alcohol and be a hedonist forever.
Also I’m going to make a book with one of my favorite artists ever who is also one of my favorite people (Pat Larkin). It’s my first book project, I’m nervous. v exciting things~