[SteveDallas]

I am not sure where I have gone, and perhaps if you come with me someone else will have some insight that eludes me. One thing I will say in preparation is that although I'm sure the experience of being drunk is subjective, one thing I feel when I'm really drunk is a surreal remoteness from my own body, as if I am not there, but sort of running things by remote control, and there is a soft gauziness to how everything looks. I might describe this as the same sort of thing as far as the sense of remoteness, but in this case the focus is very sharp, unnaturally so.

So let's go along and visit this place. I'm not sure how to describe it, except to say that there are a bunch of other people with me, my comrades, who are they? classmates in school of some kind? coworkers? neighbors? it is really not clear to me but at any rate I know them and they know me and we are all here at what for lack of a better description I will call a conference center. Perhaps it is a cross between the world of Logan's Run (visually I mean, and I have no idea why that cropped up since I haven't seen that for ages, but there it is) and a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults (in the sense that there are lots of things going on that you can pick and choose from). We are here, my comrades and I, doing whatever it is that we need to do in this conference center. We are wrapping things up, and things are looking quite good for me as we finish. I have done some things that look good, and I am requesting some furhter information from the staff, information that seemingly might lead me to return again, something that seems unusual but definitely very positive. One thing is quite clear, and that is that I have brought way too much stuff with me. My cohorts all have their own stuff, most of them a small item like a PDA or an ipod, and a few have a couple books or a laptop and some discs to the extent that they need a small backpack. None of them however require three good sized cardboard boxes to carry their belongings in, and that's the situation I find myself in, trying to schlep all this stuff back to our transportation (bus?), causing me to be late and thereby marring the successful end to the trip. Somehow or other it all ends and I do manage to drag things on, with the help of a couple colleagues, and we depart.

I end up returning to the same place soon after, this time with my family, and this time it is not a conference center or anything but more of a hotel. In fact you actually park your car in a private space that includes a small suite, and that is where I find myself and my wife and kids. We are, again, wrapping things up and trying to leave. I have to take a leak, so I go to the bathroom to take care of business while my wife settles up our bill with the front desk. I am standing in front of the toilet at the moment when, apparently, she checks us out, because a video screen on the wall comes one and text informs me that I am no longer entitled to the use of the suite, and I need to get out. Unfortunately I am unable to finish and get out before the timer expires and we find we are unable to leave because the doors are all locked and in order to open them and drive the car out we have to feed the automated system a $5 bill as extra rental. We do finally get out and no longer have to worry about this.

It is abundantly clear at this point that I am at a great center of higher learning. A couple of the more impressive scholars I know are lecturing, and I have checked out what they're saying. They are, indeed, there to speak as part of the festivities for our great holiday, and travel to and from the center is somewhat complicated by all the holiday traffic. At any rate I am standing in the lobby of one of the center's auditoriums waiting for one of the lecturers to finish. At the end I go off with him and several mutual colleagues. My progress is once more complicated by the large number of things I'm carrying (five boxes worth this time), but it's not as big a deal since there are fewer people to deal with and less time pressure, so I'm able to make a couple trips. I get interrupted in between as the staff of the center approach me, in one case to ask my advice on an issue related to the backup of a partiular file server, and in another to find out if I thought the lectures were going well. A group of my colleagues left, and I was a bit worried, but it was OK because three or four of them stayed and were talking as I made my last efforts to put my belongings in sensible form. So we leave and the most obvious route back to where we're going isn't available (due to the holiday traffic) so we have to make several detours. In the event it is fairly clear that we're lost, and we continue to get more and more lost, until we become so lost that we arrive at our destination, namely our laboratory. I'm deep into a discussion of experimental technique as regards the psychology of the human subjects available, and the information we have looks like it will be fairly easy to make into something that can be published. In fact it looks good and we definitely have to do some more rigorous timetables.