Occasionally I have vivid nightmares that leave me afraid to go back to sleep. (Probably PTSD from the LDS years.) The night before last, I had the worst I'd had in some time. It was one of those dreams that seems, while it's happening, to go on for weeks or years. It was also populated by a large cast of my friends—except that, in the way of dreams, none of these friends was anyone I recognized from real life.

These dozen or so friends and I were living on or visiting a subtropical island or peninsula of some sort. We were having a grand time doing incomprehensible things until a giant storm brought flooding. I climbed up a high stepladder to get out of the rushing water. One of my friends followed me up the ladder. I don't know if he was pulling me off or if he was going to make the ladder tip over or if I was just selfish or what, but I kicked him in the face until he fell off the ladder. The swirling water carried him away.

Soon enough things were sunny and dry again, and we were all living in a white multistoried house or possibly a beached yacht. All of us were having a grand time—all of us but our missing friend, of course. He turned up before long, though, not dead and hellbent on killing me for kicking him off the ladder. My other friends hid me downstairs in the house or boat, keeping a lookout from the upper stories.

Eventually, one of my friends came downstairs and told me the coast was clear. In a few minutes it would be time for me to meet the rest of the group out front and make my escape. He went back upstairs, and at the appointed time I slipped out of the house to the rendezvous point outside.

I found myself in a jungle clearing, but no one else was waiting for me there. That's when I realized that all my friends were hiding in the jungle, surrounding me. They had been on the side of the vengeance-seeker all along, and had lured me into this trap to kill me. I don't know whether they had knives or arrows or what, but just as they emerged from hiding to go to work on me, my alarm woke me up.

Okay, so that was pretty fucking scary (and maybe I'm thinking about it again today because I finally watched Episode Ten of Dollhouse, "The Attic," last night). I was glad it was time to get up, and that there'd be no question of going back to sleep.

But then something even worse happened. I made a pot of coffee, then set my first cup down on a piece of furniture while I picked up my laptop. I didn't see that the laptop cord was looped around my mug. Coffee all over the floor. I nearly wept.

I just saw the Dairy Fairy.

I know! Can you believe it?

The Dairy Fairy is the name Laura coined for the mythical figure who comes in the night and leaves milk, cream, eggs, and other assorted breakfasty goodies on our front porch. Every Friday morning, I rise at 5:00 am, dress, and descend to the porch to discover what bounty the Dairy Fairy has left for us this time, and to haul it back up to the kitchen. Most weeks I remember to leave a white cooler out for the Dairy Fairy's use, but on those rare occasions when I forget, a magical light Styrofoam container springs up mushroomlike from the concrete to safeguard our precious dairy treasures.

For the more than two years this has been happening, never once have I caught the Dairy Fairy at his/her/its nocturnal labors. I wasn't even sure the Dairy Fairy took corporeal form. For all I knew, a milky mist floated numinous through the night to make its weekly deposit on our stoop. Until this morning, that is.

As usual, I dressed and descended the back stairs, but instead of the usual birdcalls, a rumbling truck engine broke the morning stillness. Palms perspiring, I peeked around the corner of the house. The Dairy Fairy! There before my disbelieving, sorely disabused eyes! Our preternatural benefactor took the form of a stocky man in brown knee-length shorts and a V-neck pullover shirt the color of wet sand. His body was broad and rounded, like a muscular armature shrouded in layers of wet plaster. His head was shaved but not recently. The black stubble was like a wheat field after burning season.

In his hands he carried a carton of eggs and three vials of half-and-half. He bent to place them in our cooler on the porch at the side of the house. Beyond him an idling truck awaited in the street. The legend Oberweis Dairy had been painted on the side by true artisans in a careful hand.

But as he squatted, he seemed to cock his head slightly in my direction, to where I stood in the shadows behind the gate at the back of the house. I shrank back, but again as he returned to his metal carriage he seemed to incline an ear toward my hiding place. I knew he'd caught my scent. He knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew.

No matter. With a graceful bound, he sprang onto the buckboard of his mechanical wagon and growled off into the incipient dawn.

When I judged it safe, I scampered out from the shadows and collected the Dairy Fairy's semifortnightly gifts. I climbed the stairs with the heaviness of despondency weighting my footfalls more and more at each step. I could have dealt with the Dairy Fairy's prosaic appearance. Such disappointments are part and parcel of adulthood.

But a mechanical wagon? Not so much as a creamy white sledge pulled by flying cows?

The cream in my coffee just doesn't taste as ambrosial this morning.

I guess I've watched way too many episodes of The Wire lately, and read too much Richard Price. Now, every time I go to the kitchen to refill my coffee mug I think of it as the "re-up."

On an almost separate note, I'm delighted to report that besides my cubby at Writers WorkSpace, there are a couple of coffee shops right by our apartment that are laptop-friendly. It's less than a block to this one, where (taking a page from the gregvaneekhout playbook) I spent a little time on Thursday afternoon:

This is why you live in a city, kids.

A big cookie lies pulverized in a tight accretion disc in the bus lane of Madison Avenue. Two black (soot-stained?) pigeons peck away at the unbelievable bonanza. Peck peck hop peck.

Cars are coming. A gray sedan bears down. Fly, pigeons! Get out of the way! Pigeons, why can't you hear my telepathic command! CAR!

Black wheels chew up the meters. With an annoyed flutter the pigoens hop aside at the last possible instant, wings a finger's width from rubber mayhem.

Hop hop peck peck peck.

A bus is coming. One-way telepathic communication to pigeons is too stressful. I must turn away.

LIKE A ROCK
BUT DUMBER

I am sitting in a comfy chair in my local non-Starbucks coffee joint, laptop on lap top, having just finished a grande skim latte and a fresh draft of the afterword for my chapbook. Ben Folds is playing on the stereo.

A body could grow accustomed to this.

I could drink 132.38 Starbucks Grande Caffe Lattes before croaking. How about you?

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