Thrown Rock Hurts (dream) by Ray Ogar

>>> COPYRIGHT 1998

we are on a road trip to ‘pacifica’ –and the map we have is an exageration of the u.s., the north western portion out of proportion to everything else—it has only a few roads.

we stop in a parking garage that is a part of a mall and discover a book warehouse that is housing illegal books at discounted prices.

travis and i start watching tv in a hotel room with large carpet spaces and he falls asleep and says he’s irritated because the ceiling has millions of sparkling stars on it. i ask if he wishes for me to make the stars move in some way so as to keep him awake. he says no and is wrapped in a cacoon like substance.

i get up and look outside at someplace that is familiar, perhaps arizona and a wasteland combined. travis is asleep now and i have to go to class. i carry a stack of books and swim down a channel of water the color of the book island’s water in the game riven, crystal blue green. i am at a test facility of somesort, government but you would not know it. people are trying to break into parts of the complex in several different places. i go to class and we are having a test. the teacher comes up to me and says ‘how did i know that?’ and i ask her what she means, she says how did i know that ‘thrown rock hurts’ and in my mind i begin to come up with a logical argument and the social characteristics of a society that would conceive of such an idea. for some reason i knew that in her mind she thought i evolved and was born from a neanderthal culture in which the dna does not allow for thoughts of hurt and anger to exist. i knew otherwise at that moment and she was perplexed because i kept saying ‘thrown rock hurts?’. we start the test, something about highly simplified equations for super planetary motion. she says we do not get a test copy until we mail our text books back to the publisher. i begin wrapping mine in grocery sack paper.