more existential.

My car's name is Adelaide. She is a 2001 Honda Accord. We've been through a lot together, Adelaide and I.

The first time she was stolen was at the "David Bowie, Booze, and Placenta Mice Babies" party. I needed to get my sunglasses out of her glove compartment, because I was wearing a blue wig, and it was dark, and I was very drunk and very high. My friend Simon, who was wearing tinsel on his head, and who was also very drunk and very high, came with me. There is a picture of us on the lawn; him in his tinsel, and me in my sunglasses and blue wig. My arm is draped jauntily over his shoulder, and the car keys are dangling from my fingers.

That was the last anyone saw of Adelaide for a good long while.


My friend Barbara saw her briefly, when she was being driven away early that next morning. Barbara was returning from the house of a man with a glass eye, and maybe it was in thinking about the glass eye that she failed to recognize Adelaide until it was too late. She thought the two men in the front seats did not look like people who had my permission to be driving Adelaide, and so she hurried to find me.

I was in my bed, still very high and very drunk and very sick and having nightmares. I dreamed that I was in my childhood bedroom again. I was trying very innocently to plug a cord into an outlet.

But sparks started flying and before I could stop it, a flame had spread onto the floor. I doused the flame in water, but now a huge, soggy circle was spreading across the rug. When I touched the circle, the walls of the house shook in a loud rumbling noise and the entire wet part of the floor disintegrated, crumbling downwards into the dining room and leaving behind a huge, gaping hole.

In shock, I stood and stared at it. One small action had spiraled out of control, and now my home was destroyed. How was I ever going to tell my parents?

It was out of that thought that I was awoken to Barbara's frantic knocking on the door.