Weirdo at the Track and a Depressing Store

MORNING OF JUNE 16, 2011

I was at a walking track that was vaguely like the one I walk at each morning in real life, only this one was in a downtown area, near a lot of little shops and such. There were several people there, including a really weird, awkward man who decided to talk to me. He was around my own age, tall and lanky, and I think probably based on a real person I met before. He kept hounding me about random, pointless trivia I didn't care about.

There was some "game" he wanted to play while we walked the track, like, some kind of "Dungeons & Dragons" style role playing we could enact in real life. I just wanted to get away from the guy, so my dream conveniently provided my friends Eric and Richard, so I ended up hanging out with them.

At some point I had to leave the track, pick up a push lawnmower from somewhere, and bring it back to the track. It was early evening, and I was mowing the grass near the parking lot (this is a bit odd, as I live in an apartment and therefore haven't actually cut grass in quite some time now).

I eventually put the mower away and went back to the track. It looked like Richard and Eric were gone by now, so I started to listen to my iPod. Then I found Richard and Eric again.

We walked down the street from the track to where there was a fictional comic book store. As we approached it, we saw a sad, fat man placing a "going out of business" sign in the window. We decided to check it out.

The sad, fat man--bearded and wearing an ill-fitting, generic superhero costume, was the lethargic owner of the shop. I browsed a for a little while. The selection in the store, both of comic books and of collectibles, was fairly pitiful. I couldn't figure out if this was because the closing sale had emptied a lot, or if it might have always been so.

There was a large boxed set featuring a large Batmobile toy based on the 60's TV series, with matching Batman and Catwoman figures to go with it. The store owner told me it was marked way down and it was his last one, so I should really buy it! The "markdown" price was seven hundred-something dollars! There was a similarly overpriced "markdown" Batman statue of some kind.

I looked at a shelf in the back of the store and they had a lot of old toy sets from the 80's or before. I saw a lot of things that reminded me of my childhood, including a set of "Tinker Toys", which I haven't thought of in years.

Now it was as though I'd come into this store with a girl instead of Richard and Eric. (I can't even remember if she's someone I really know or was a fictional dream character). I approached her and told her I was ready to go if she was. She was very anxious to go, explaining that this store really depressed her. I had to agree it was a fairly depressing place.