I was at a Lincoln city council meeting where they announced that they were going to make the bike path that roughly follows Normal Boulevard into a street for cars. Some big guy was announcing that they were now taking applications for workers, even though construction would not begin until the summer of 2000. He said that each worker would make over $100 an hour, but that wouldn't be as good as it sounded because inflation was rising.

I went to sit in the back to watch his slide show about the construction project and my friend Melinda was back there so I sat by her and talked to her for a while. Then the whole room changed into this long cafe that sat on 23rd Street in Auburn alongside St Joseph's Catholic Church. Melinda wanted some hot chocolate so she went up to the counter to get some and when she came back, she told me she was really angry at the service she got because the woman was very unfriendly and rude. We went up to the front to see the manager but first I wanted to see the woman.

She was about 55 with her hair up in a bun and she had pointy ears and she was standing inside of a barrel. When she'd have to fill someone's drink, she would have to squeeze tightly against the side of the barrel so that she could get her arms down inside of it where the spigot things were. I thought maybe she was rude because she was in such an uncomfortable position. Then she started talking to a bus-boy and as she did, her words appeared in the air as if they were being projected onto a screen. I saw that every time she made a reference to something in the past, there was a corresponding date and code number and that's when I realised that we were in a soap opera and that referencing was for people watching at home who wanted to keep track of the timeline. So we understood that she was mean because that was her character role, and if we were to complain and try to stop her from being mean, it would disrupt the soap opera reality.

A member of the Black Panthers named Joseph came into the cafe. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a blue scarf and beret. He seemed to know us so he sat down at the booth adjacent to ours and talked to us about the construction project.

Suddenly, though, everything started shaking and all of the people turned into pancake batter. A large hinged panel in the ceiling opened and this big Ox-man (probably about 300 feet tall compared to us, but I got the impression that we were no longer normal sized so he may have just been normal ox-man size) reached in and grabbed some pancake-batter people and threw them into this frying pan. This was actually beneficial for the batter people, because it would solidify their bodies and make them able to move around easier. However, before they could crawl out of the frying pan, the ox-man would reach down through the ceiling and pile them onto his plate.

Since we were sitting at the east end of the cafe, we were the last to get thrown onto the frying pan. It was the two of us and Joseph there, and since Joseph had been thrown on a little earlier than us, he finished cooking earlier. The ox-man grabbed him, but before he could grab us, he was distracted and had to leave. He told us that he'd be back for us, though.

Before he could return, though, we crawled out of the pan. The cafe had turned into this run down wooden tree house. There was a window on the south slope of the ceiling and we were going to climb out and escape but before we could, these sea turtles and huge crabs started crawling in through that window one by one. The way the window ledge was, they would have fallen about 5 feet after crawling through, so we would grab them and put them on the floor to keep them from hurting themselves. This was taking forever and it was keeping us from escaping. I remember one of the turtles said his name was RC5. I climbed up to look out the window to see how many more crabs and turtles were out there when I saw why they were crawling in. There were tremendous floods outside with so much water gushing around that it was impossible to actually tell where the river was. We were out in a timber area and it was probably January, so all of the trees were bare and the grass that did peek through the flood water was all dead and brown, so it made for a very depressing scene.

We managed to climb down and wade through the flood waters by supporting ourselves on trees. There was a gazebo up on a hill that rose above the water so we made our way over there. When we got there, we were greeted by this fat Italian guy with a big cigar and a Hawaiian shirt. He welcomed us to his resort/flood shelter.

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