It's time to pour the concrete floor for our worskhop, and we have like twenty people here to help. For some reason, the form is really long and skinny, like a lap pool. Tara and I have been running around with the attendees all morning, doing last minute things to prepare for the big event. I am not wearing any clothes. Nobody seems to think this is weird, myself included. Occasionally I have twinges of thinking I should probably put something on.
When Rick leaves to get the concrete, I decide it is high time I got dressed. Leaving Tara and all the helper people, I materialize in a giant brick elementary school—apparently that's where I keep my clothes. I'm on a treasure hunt now, fully nude, running around the darkened hallways of this empty school. Eventually, I find what I am looking for hidden in the back of a classroom, in a brown paper bag.
On the outside, in flowery print complete with bubble letters and glitter like an 8 year old kid drew it, it reads:
Your clothes, for god sakes!
I open the bag, and sure enough, there they are. When I go to slip on my favorite pair of jeans, one of the legs falls off at the crotch. I am freaked out because Rick is probably back and I should be out there helping. I'm relieved to find my hiking pants in the bag as well. I'm able to slip those on without any bizarre mishaps. Then, I start looking for my shirt.
I should backtrack for a moment here and say that over the last eight years or so I have gone through several "sets" of black t-shirts, whereupon I own like ten identical shirts and I wear them in rotation. I hate thinking about clothes. Recently, I've branched out a bit, but whatever. I say all that to say, imagine my horror when there is no black t-shirt in the bag.
Instead, there is some weird red shirt, cut so it hangs off my body like a poncho. It has a huge deeply sweeping neckline. Looking in the mirror, my neck feels really fat (I've never thought about the relative fatness or thinness of my neck in my life). Whatever. I am now clothed, and appear outside at the workshop site, where the slab pour is underway.
Rick is here with the cement truck, running the controls inside. All the helpers are lined up around the edges of the form, covered in a concrete slurry that is sloshing around inside of it like the ocean coming in at high tide. Rather than coming down a chute, the concrete comes out in cannon blasts that land in the middle of the form, which kicks off another wave.
The truck has some weird forklift blades attached to it, and Rick is using them to mix the concrete. Sitting on the dash of the truck are several rolls of our radiant heat tubing. My stomach turns into a ball of panic-fire and I yell to Rick, "Wait! We didn't install the radiant heat tubing!!" Looking down from the high seat of the concrete truck, Rick responds in a very matter of fact tone:
At this point Tyler, I'm not worried about it.
Meanwhile, he is running the controls for the truck's perplexing forklift attachment, using it to mix the concrete. At one point, he snags the floor of the workshop and a huge sheet of EPS foam lifts out of the slab form, impaled on on a forklift blade. There are a few bright red radiant heat tubes dangling off it, like entrails. I yell to Rick, "What are you doing!?". Again, he responds in a very matter of fact tone:
It'll be fine.
Next, Rick makes a fist and punches a big red button in the truck. It sends the EPS foam flying off the forklift-blade-cement-mixer-thingy, crashing haphazardly in the middle of the concrete form. When it lands, it breaks into a million little pieces. I am filled with sorrow as the the tiny balls of styrofoam that comprised the sheet float through the air around us all.
I wake up.