Greg and I prepare for camping. It begins at our house, sort of, though it vaguely resembles the setup of Elaine's bedroom, and the girls and I have set up a sheet-and-blanket fort (I think we're much younger, I'm about 8, maybe?), and the rats are appearing here and there, having fun, and making ridiculous poses -- sort of Nataraja poses, but transcribed to the body of a couple of fat rats. They are grinning and bruxing.
Greg is coming down to visit me! He arrives at my house, and we head out for the Location. On the way, we make a stop at the Coffeehouse; I had been here only once before, but it was pretty neat, as I remembered: there was a Brower-esque atrium, with brick and all, and numerous siderooms that somewhat resemble Wildflower's. In the center were Injuns and Gypsies selling all sorts of things in the atrium center trading area / marketplace. It was all sorts of hippie-groovy (but kind of dorky as well, in a Magic-the-Gathering sort of way?), and there was some damn cool decor on the walls.
We were with a couple of people, I'm not sure who, but I understood that they were Greg's friends from home; altogether, we are four boys and two girls. We went to the wooden door, Greg said the password... and no one answered. So we went in, and it was dark on the inside, and nobody was around. All the lights were out. I spotted a cop on the second floor going up some wooden stairs, lurking by the rafters with a flashlight. Somehow, we were all wearing masks now; and I remember the maskface of one of the people who was with us was like a deformed rainbow mask: lumpy and misshapen and with holes for eyes and such in all the wrong places. This is Greg's Relatively Unattractive Gay Virgin friend from home.
We decide to pick up the stash of weaponry that is there, sort of flaunting our presence in the face of the cop, because while we're inside no harm can come to us. We leave with katanas and axes, then sprint to hide out in a nearby barn, because once we leave they can get us.
The chickens: holy hell, the chickens. There are boxes upon boxes of them as far as the eye can see, and we try to wedge ourselves in to disguise ourselves and hide. But the chickens: I know their beaks have been cut off, but that's the only way I can identify them as chickens. They have also been already plucked, so they're raw and red and beakless and miserable-looking. I am repulsed. The bumpy red skin that most chickens already have for combs and such extends the length of their whole body, and they look like spiky tomatoes, whose faces come to a sort-of point and is simply hollow and full of what appears to be oregano. As the one boy who's moving into the chickens passes them and drops little food offerings their way to keep them from eating him, they flip face-down, feet in the air to accept the food with their claws, in a gross parody of how my rats eat.
I look to find Greg and discover he has the rats, he's had them the whole time. They're frolicking in his coat and greeting the animals and looking inquisitively at the axe he's got.
One of the slightly taller boys, in a white Tlingit mask which is almost his face, leans down to kiss the Rainbow Mutant. That lasts a while; then they pull apart. Apparently, this is the first time the Rainbow Mutant's been kissed, and then they discuss it for a while, and the Tlingit boy confesses his knees went a bit shaky when he decided to do it.
We're sitting on a bench, discussing the weapons we've got. Tlingit or Rainbow boy, I'm not sure which (I think both are discussing these very rusty very bulky katanas we've acquired) asks if, when attacking, you hold the keef of the blade out (meaning the sharp part.) Someone says yes, but if you're attacked with a club, you're fucked; they'll bludgeon you to death, the katanas don't cut.
I catch a bit of commotion; we all ignore it, thinking maybe it's the cops. I eventually turn around, only to see the place is open, and there's a stream of people going in. One of them is Mars! In an orange teeshirt, scraggly dreads out; and I try to get Greg's attention but he doesn't hear me, I think he's still talking about katanas. And for that matter, I can't quite hear him; he's talking at a normal volume, but I can't quite make out anything he's said. So I adjust the controllers on his voice, in a Flight of the Conchords Bowie-ish control panel; this is, I think, his controllers for his voice, not mine for my ears, because while I'm mucking around with them everyone giggles at how odd his voice sounds: like there are two loops of it, one going at normal speed and one going at a sped-up high-pitched fast-forwarded-cassette level underneath it. The pitch wobbles around for a bit until it reaches the point where I can perfectly hear it. He asks, "What are you doing?" I try to explain that Mars is over there, look, should we greet him? He can't hear me, though, it turns out; so he mucks around with my voice controls, and I can hear myself talking normally, but with the sped-up and kind of old-sounding cassette effect underneath it; and he giggles, and I can't help but start giggling too. So then we just muck around with each other's voice controls; it's (oh this is dorky) sort of like being in a Gundam, with the Bowie set up, and you're inside your own head, but inside the other's as well.
It starts to rain, so we all take cover back in the barn.
Outside the barn: a woman with dreadlocks is kissing some Eurotrash man, and says, "Oh Molly, make it pee out your mullet." She looks up, feels the rain; there's an effect where each raindrop becomes visible individually, and they are illuminated in the lamplight, golden-amber colored, and she says, "Oh Molly, you're back!" and completely ignores the Eurotrash man. She twirls through the rain and into the barn, where there's a corpse of a man with red (not auburn, red) hair (in a fashionable mullet, of course) laid out on the floor; and as the woman babbles, we catch visuals of Molly sinking through the water, his body intermingling with various kinds of seaweed, some the squelchy rubbery kind, and some a type that is husk-like and spiky and orangeish. (I exclaim, from somewhere off-screen, Oww! That's the spiky kind, I'm not touching that!, then giggle, embarrassed, and promise not to do anything that girly for the rest of the camping trip.)
It becomes an underwater scene; the statement, as though from some blog entry, appears: Project on Iran-Contra better [implied: more sincere] than presentation-type pee.
Then we notice, as Molly's body sinks out of view completely and instead in the seaweed we see fish, a sequence of larger fish eating smaller fish in rapid succession, a quick chain; and it says, "[Name of larger fish] better than [name of smaller fish]" and then the large fish is being scooped up by a net, and then a larger fish is in with a huge net of tuna, and then it says, "Well, any fish on its own is better than this bag of chips I've got," and we go back to Molly's wife.
