I decided to go up to the fifth floor and check if my cards were still there. I hadn't been up there in ages, and it was totally dark on the upper floors. Before I had reached the fifth floor, I became too scared of the dark to continue, and I came back down.
I found my housemate there with the box of cards. He was outraged that he had found such a thing in his house. He had also found a bag of potpourri (which he thought was "incense") and a set of swizzle sticks made to look like ancient Chinese polearms. (None of this is anything I own in real life) I tried to explain why none of this stuff was dangerous or offensive, but he insisted he was going to throw it all out.
"Look," I said, "do you realize that these are some of the oldest surviving Tarot cards in the world? You can't just throw away a historical treasure like that. Anyway, they're my property. If you want me to get them out of your house, fine, but you can't just confiscate them."
He reluctantly agreed to this compromise. I decided I would take them to my school and store them somewhere there, and my main concern was whether I had enough time to take them there before my first class of the morning, which was at a different school.
I got the cards and the other offending items and went outside, but it was so dark outside I wasn't sure I could find my car. Then suddenly, it was daylight, having changed so instantaneously that it left me disoriented, with a sense of "missing time."
I decided that since the weather was nice, I would ride my motorcycle instead of driving. I now had the idea that I was going to take the cards to Moab, Utah, rather than to my school, and I would need GPS to get there. I took out my phone, only to find that it was a non-"smart" model from some 20 years ago and didn't have any of the functions I needed.
"What happened to my phone?" I said. "It looks ancient, like it's from 2005 or something."
One of the neighbors heard me and said sarcastically, "Wow, last year's model. So ancient!"
I immediately understood that I had somehow gone back to 2006, probably at the moment the night had suddenly become daylight. I accepted this readily, with no sense that it was unbelievable, and the others around me were equally ready to accept that I was from 2025. I hurriedly began filling them in on what was going to happen in the next two decades, mentioning the election of Trump in 2016 (someone responded with "Donald Trump, baby! I knew it!") and describing the 2020 hysteria and fraud in vague and indirect terms, almost as if I were still in the 2020s, trying to avoid getting dinged for hatespeak. Everyone accepted what I said with mild interest, without showing any particular curiosity or incredulity.
I asked my housemate if he had GPS so I could find my way to Moab. He said he didn't, but he knew the way without it and could drive me there in his dune buggy. He didn't seem angry at all, presumably because we were back in 2006 now, well before he had discovered the offensive cards, potpourri, and swizzle sticks.
He drove his dune buggy and towed me behind him in a smaller dune buggy. He turned on the radio, and it was playing the B-52s song "Love Shack," except that "love shack" and certain key words had been replaced with Moab. I particularly remember the lines "I'm headin' down that old Moab highway" and the refrain "Moab is a little old place were / We can get together."
I'm not sure where it fit into the rest of the dream in terms of chronology, but at some point I went to sleep and had a dream-within-a-dream in which I found some little kittens that had been adopted by a tortoise, which they considered to be their mother. Then, after I "woke up" (but was in fact still dreaming), I encountered a real tortoise that had adopted a litter of kittens and commented on how the dream had been precognitive.
After waking up for real, I found that the dream had left me unexpectedly "homesick" for Moab, where I lived for five months back in 1998, when I had just started as a Mormon missionary. I found myself wondering whether a little diner there called Milt's Stop-N-Eat was still around. I ran a Google search, and -- well, it seems I still can't escape from butterflies!
"Tasty local butterfly joint"? I thought this might be some sort of slang I wasn't familiar with, but scouring the Internet only confirmed what I already thought: that butterfly joint refers only to an actual joint used in woodworking and would never be used to refer to a diner. I did find one café in San Francisco called the Butterfly Joint, but it's called that because it's also a woodworking studio, and the logo is a joiner's butterfly joint. So that's clearly a woodworking pun, not an example of butterfly joint being used in a non-woodworking sense. A Google search for "local butterfly joint" returns zero results.
My best guess is that the reviewer meant to write burger joint, and that some sort of autocorrect/autosuggest software is responsible for the butterfly error. Even that's a little strange, though. R and G are both adjacent to T on a keyboard, so mistyping burger as something like butter is certainly possible. Wouldn't the software just go with butter, though, especially coming so soon after the word tasty? Butterfly joint still seems like a very low-probability error.
("What the hey?" is Moab. "Oh my heck!" is Utah Valley.)
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