This was a dream of the future. Everyone had become much more hip hop in their dress and manner. My younger brother in particular now sported excessively baggy clothes that were bright powder blue, and had a visor to match. His girlfriend too wore a similar outfit. I met them in the kitchen of his third house, a house that was all granite countertops, yellow 70s-esque furniture decor and particle board. They announced their engagement after four months of dating, while friends covered them with gold chains.

There were many apartments in a row connected to each other by a series of regular passageways and banana-colored carpet. In some of these rooms people - still hip-hop people- were having sex. Outside there was danger. Roving gangs with automatic weapons would shoot up apartments on both sides of the street, including the ones my brother and his fiance were sleeping in, except that they weren't sleeping but playing some kind of yahtzee when the shooting started. No one was killed, but everything was full of bulletholes that leaked motor oil. One of my brother's friends informed me that all the sex was happening because 'people wanted to be sure some babies would survive the shootings.'

I recall walking around in something like a trucker's hat - I was non hip hop and poor but everybody treated me respectfully. On the tv there was a show on the president, and the president was this strange silvery-haired dude with a white lion by his side, and he read an address to the nation that was straight out of Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey. A reporter on the scene, who somehow came into the room with us while he was talking on tv, told us that the president ran the country according to the Temporary Autonomous Zone, and since nobody read in the country any more, no one cared.