January 9th, 2013

My friends, immediate family and I are having a picnic at a lake. We're in the grassy area where the tables are. No one knows about the lake. I discover it while taking a trip to the bathroom. It's a large lake with a calm, iridescent surface. Diving in is bliss. I discover a shack where the owner of the lake/picnic facility lives. He's an older man (in his mid to late 60s). He's tall and has got a thick, grey-white mustache. He proceeds to tell me he and his buddies invented the 1960s. This, of course, makes perfect sense to me. I return to the others and tell them about the man I met who invented the '60s. I also invite them to dive into the lake. This seems like a spiritual rite of some kind. At the very least, I lead people to the lake so that they can find bliss...it feels nice.

I'm on a city street near the picnic / lake area. A twelve year old African American boy comes starts harassing me. He seems to be "acting tough" for his friends, who form a semi-circle like a small audience. The kid is giving me a hard time for being a white guy. He seems to think that I'm racist because I'm white. His father arrives. This man is a huge, muscular black man with dreadlocks. I realize he could beat the piss out of me with just his pinky and I grow frightened. But we quickly recognize each other and he gives me a huge bear hug. Turns out we used to work together when I was in high school. The two of us and his son get into the man's old Chevy Impala. He says he knows where the lake is and will return me to it, but we keep driving down this long city street, past old buildings--we pass a roller coaster too--but he seems to have forgotten where it is. I suddenly find myself driving the man's box truck--the one he uses for his business (not sure what his business is), and one identical to the one we used to drive when we worked together years before. The brakes are incredibly squishy and I'm deeply concerned about my safety and the man's safety (he's not with me, but I'm worried that he'll get into an accident if he doesn't get the brakes fixed).

I finally make it back to the picnic / lake area. I go back into the shack where the '60s guy lives. A bunch of his old friends are milling about. One of them shows me a bunch of guestbooks from various decades. He hands me one that's quite old and looks more like it's from the 1860s than the 1960s. I flip through it and see that it's a scrapbook. The man points to one of the first pictures and tells me that was taken the day the '60s started. The image is of the same shack I'm standing in now, but the owner of the lake and about six of his buddies are there. They're clearly a bunch of drunk college kids just laying around working off their collective buzz. The next images I must censor due to their graphic nature--I'll humbly ask the reader to use her own imagination here.

I return to the banks of the lake where people are diving into the yellow-green rainbow.