I was in the clutter of my past that never was. While rummaging around in this basement I found a Gerber's baby food jar that had a green sphere of frog eggs floating in the murky water. Many other things from New Jersey were there like a colorful afghan crocheted by my maternal grandmother. My attention was drawn upstairs.
At work there's an older woman who does her job as well as me, if not better. A short half-Japanese woman entering middle age is doing laundry upstairs and is completely oblivious to my presence. I squeeze past her, afraid that if I brushed against her my invisibility would be cancelled out, and go outside to check on my bike.
It's still there, leaning against the post but the Kryptonite New York chain is cut and a few remaining links are dangling from a nearby bicycle repair stand. My brain starts telling me that the bike is gone but it's just the shock that someone defeated that $100 chain and lock. Why the hell would someone go through all that trouble and not steal the bike?

Dad wanted to take me for a drive through Colorado Springs. The streets became much more narrow and the buildings were taller and more tightly packed like a European city. We sped through a three way intersection towards a pizza place that he wanted me to try out. When I got out of the car, that's when I discovered some government agency wanted to recruit me.
They were typical agents, cookie cutter slacks and button-down shirts with close haircuts you could set your watch to. First they wanted me to play a strange falling block game that required me to move the controller in circles guiding a spaceship that would block the bad blocks. This test was really rushed and according to some guy in a back room I registered an eight percent increase in my intelligence. Next was another test framed like an interview. One question stood out and I remember my answer.

"Explain the symbolism of dead people in a dream"

"Dead people who appear in a dream are always influential in the dreamer's life. Instead of giving sycophantic opinions and suggestions, they have been properly distanced through death that gives them an objectivity which is far more valuable than any love."

After this test, there was a lot of commotion and they reported I was the first person to ever show a thirty percent increase in intelligence. Feeling confident, I was ready for the final trial. I was put on the phone and told to take various calls using a set of notes about possible issues and conflicts raised by the calls. One of the calls was an elderly black woman. Yes, I could see in my head that she was black rather than hearing her voice and discerning her race. Her spiel was about her cat and I found I was supposed to maintain the cat was dead even though she kept saying her cat wasn't dead and how she last saw her crawling through the bushes. Sadly the goal of this test wasn't about being stalwart and defending the party line as truth. At the end I was surrounded by disappointed faces.

Later I was debriefed by an agent who looked like Forest Whitaker. As he talked I did what I usually do and stared at his mouth rather than making eye contact. One of his incisors was a USB connector that flashed in the light. Soon I realized that all of his teeth were USB connectors. The gist I got was that I had raw potential but after careful evaluation I wasn't right for their organization.