Dream Journal Ten.

Last night's dream was in Joann's again. I can recall it with incredible vividness.

1. The register counter had inexplicably been rearranged to be diagonal, probably mirroring the incessant griping I get from customers regarding the new layout(in Actual Life). The diagonal ran along from the Right Wall to the Front wall, which had now been opened to face an altered Poway more akin to the Naughty Dog games in mood than anything else. The counter wrapped around this opening, so the only way that I could enter or exit it was by walking around, entering from the right wall. This, again, mirrored an absurd question endemic of the new customers('Do I have to go all the way around?')

2. However, I did not go that route. Instead, I rung from the outside of the store, surrendering little or no -- to my mind -- efficiency, allowing my guests to walk up the absurd segment at the corner of the store. I only learned eventually, presumably from a Junior Manager, that I had been allowing them into employee-only territory. Upon being confronted with the prospect of occupying this barricaded corner, I naturally asked, either out loud or to myself, how I was to escape should a robbery or any other such attack befall and the fact had occuured to me that, should such an emergency happen, the customers (who were 'always right,' in my obedient mind, since Day One), would be free to flee through the immediate parking lot, whereas I should be compelled to cloister myself in the cozy but compact Janitorial Closet, sharing the company of a water heater and maybe a broom.

3. My entire day, however, had not been confined to this corner of the store, since, upon receiving some vague semblance of approval from another junior manager, I took the frequent liberty of exiting the building in order to consort with passerbys who were usually old friends, long unseen. Upon return from one of the more Emphatic of these meetings, akin in mood to both the chance crossing with Spencer Breidenbach and the serendipitous encounter with Spencer Wayman, I found a District Manager, a sight oft spoken of but seldom seen, incarnate in the (now intimidatingly) kooky, bespectacled woman with the short lampshade of blonde hair, dressed now in a novel sight: a uniform identical to the Green that she would have worn in Actual Life, except that it was, in Surreal Life, plain, formal blue instead of green, with red lettering where I would have been accustomed to seeing White.

She said little to me, almost smiling with malicious reserve that nonetheless suggested, to perhaps a pang of guilt on my part, that it drew its fortitude from her Right ness, which would not be swayed by my wrongdoing. I must have become more self-conscious, at that point, that I was dragging along, spending just a trifle too much time with each tireless customer.

dm.A.A.