When I told Masa that the image of a hand on Chase's computer screen was an affront to him, he walked on, silent, and left the room. Chase came back, ear or lip bleeding, and urged me to tell Masa that the image wasn't an affront on him. I found him and tried to tell him, but he refused to listen, using some strange knobbed device that resembled outboard audio equipment (one knob was labeled "X/Y") to contort and inflict pain on me. I had the sensation that I getting beaten up, watching the knobs on the device turn.

I was attending classes, and I was on a campus vaguely resembling Evergreen, but with different buildings and feeling more like airport structures than a school. Laura from my class was there, I was talking to her. It must have been the end of the school year, and the discussion seemed to turn serious, and we hugged with a desperate intensity as she departed. I tried to ask her for her mailing address (I knew it ended with the normal Olympia suffixes), but she told me my PO box as the elevator closed. Sad-stricken, I walked back to the table and sat down with Loren and someone else I recognized, and lamented the fact that I always met girls who were about to leave. Someone nearby started to rap a few lines of Outkast (I don't know any Outkast, but knew it was), and suddenly all the people in the room were shouting and yelling this song. Right as the song finished, a DJ came in and set up a turntable, but the song had ended, and no one seemed to care anymore.

Somehow, weird living tree creatures that fought off tree diseases from attacking people was worked into all this. And me playing a show.