3 Giant White Goats and Etheric Daggers
I was living on a farm in northern England. In fact it belonged to me. I was venturing outside in the late afternoon to check on my livestock. My proudest animals were a trio of enormous white goats with voluminous fur and enormous spiraling horns. It was an overcast day and drizzling. I was wearing Wellingtons and accompanied by my friend Lisa and a little scruffy farm mutt.
My dog was being a bit disobedient and I was chastising him for not staying near me. Lisa was complaining about her love life and I was impatient to see my goats. He scurried underneath a fence and I ran after him. We chased him across a field and lost him in some trees. I had to enter my neighbors farmhouse to get to the other side of a field to track him down. As soon as I entered the house I was greeted by my ex-girlfriend Justine and several of her friends. We basically bumped into eachother in a doorway.
We were chest to chest in the the door attempting to squeeze by each other with as little physical contact as possible. She said something saracastic about the situation to which I retorted angrily. Her friends greeted me with open disdain. I was incredibly irritated by their whole vibe so I began arguing with them vehemently. I stepped fully into the room fuming with indignation as they begin haranguing me about a whole complex of issues. There was an enormous round, wooden, farm table with a beautiful meal laid out. Big ceramic crocks of milk, coarse loaves of bread, a platter of meats and cheeses, a veritable harvest feast. I grabbed the edge of the table and overturned the whole affair spraying the girls with food. I stormed out of the house laughing and ranting angrily at them over my shoulder.
I stepped outside into a massive meadow that gradually sloped up and ended at the edge of a beautiful city street. It looked like a stretch of townhouses in Chicago or San Francisco but more european. I was barefoot and making my way up the hill to a set of stairs that exited the park. There were three women behind me on the stairwell. They were all attractive and well dressed and it turned out we were all headed to the same bar at the top of the street. We stopped for a moment on the stairwell to meet eachother. I sat down for second to check my feet as they were quite dirty. They offered me some sort of fancy supplement to help me with my journey.
As soon as we kept walking I lost track of them and was walking on the outskirts of what seemed to be some sort of industrial area. It reminded me of a stretch of interstate near Philadelphia. I walked by an old TV set. On it was playing a video of a shamanic battle between two characters. I was friends with one of them who in my mind was the protagonist. He had just scored a major coup against the man pictured on screen. Somehow he had managed to lodge an etheric dagger in the mans midsection and his opponent was currently doubled over in pain, clutching his abdomen and coughing up yellow bile. I was friends with the winner of the battle but as it was happening psychically he was not pictured in the video feed.
The man who lost, I realized, lived around the corner and I wanted to go check on him even though he was clearly a dubious black shaman of no consequence. I entered his shanty-like room underneath the interstate. There were two other guys in there. One huge black guy with dreadlocks and another Hispanic man eating cereal. The black man was wearing one of my T-Shirts, which I notified him of promptly. I poked around the missing shamans belongings for a moment looking for a talisman to steal.
Bolivian defection and downy rats of alternating sizes
So, I am running up a ski slope on foot. It’s a beautiful, crisp day and I am moving along at an amazing clip. I notice an entire retinue of cars behind me and there is a young blond girl on a bicycle at the vanguard of traffic. There are semi’s and SUV’s and she is going slightly faster than them. In fact they seem like they are struggling to keep up. It happens to be on a ski slope on the edge of the mountain, so on one side is a sheer drop-off and on the other a sharp incline. We finally make it to our destination, which just happens to be her apartment. I’m hiding from her, waiting to see where she enters. All of a sudden I storm in behind her with an accomplice and slam the door shut. We scream at her accusingly, “We know you are planning on defecting from Bolivia.” My companion has the shady quality of a G-man, some sort of government operative. He grabs her blouse and tears her shirt off. She is standing there afraid and defiant in slacks and a bra. She pleads with us not to tell anyone as she can’t stand life in Bolivia anymore.
At this point I notice her apartment is totally unfurnished and actually only consists of a screened-in sun deck with wood paneling. I ask her, very graciously, if there is anything she might be able to offer us as incentive to not expose her plan. She suggests we take her most prized possessions which consists of three plump, English-speaking, white rats in alternating sizes. There is a very small one, like the size of a baby mouse, a medium sized one, similar to a New York rat, and an enormous one, like the size of a house cat. I put them in an unmarked, white shoebox and take my leave.
Suddenly I am on a sidewalk next to a rather fancy little hipster bistro in somewhere I would presume if NYC. There are attractive, well-dressed people sitting at tables chatting and drinking wine. I go to sit down and place the rats on the ground. One of the people at an adjacent table sees one of the rats sticking his nose out and decides to scream and lift the top off. By this point I am quite emotionally attached to them and am horrified at the prospect of any of them being injured by the judgmental and unenlightened patrons. Total chaos ensues as everyone attempts to get out of the way and alternately smash the poor little buggers under foot. I, meanwhile, am using my baseball hat (which I’ve taken to wearing recently again, in real life) to attempt to scoop up my darling rats. I manage to get the smallest one in my hat but when I pull him out I realize he is terribly mangled and has bled to death on the pavement. I lose my temper and begin shoving the very same well-dressed people out of the way in attempt to salvage my last two. I find them cowering in a hedge at eye-level while a pair of malevolent, gay, hipsters take it upon themselves to berate them for being rodents. I get in an enormous shouting match with one of the guys, threaten to push his teeth in and gather up my last two mice and storm off.