My Substack is Frozen

It’s a sunny day and I’m walking down a dirt road with Boccaccio, a stocky elderly intellectual who always wears a brown jacket and a pink newsboy’s cap. I’m worried because he wants me to film him killing a small animal. This animal is his pet and is partly a dog and partly a cat. Despite my worries, we are wandering the countryside enjoying ourselves when a couple of twenty-somethings appear in recreational wear with logos. As soon as they join us our camaraderie is ruined, and the four of us plod on in silence until we eventually arrive at a castle that is also an expensive hotel and wine bar, and one of the staff soon appears carrying a serving tray with a rare liquor in an ornate long-stemmed glass that’s known to have a narcotic inside it. It’s for Boccaccio, there’s nothing for me, and I’m left alone to take care of his dog-cat. But I also have a job teaching students how to make films using cell phones. My class is huge. Hundreds of them are here in the banquet room and I get mad at some students who won’t pay attention to a woman who’s trying to show her student movie on her phone. But then Boccaccio’s cat-dog throws up on the lawn and for the first time I’m aware that the room extends all the way outside, and one of the students, a girl, disagrees with me that it’s Boccaccio’s responsibility to clean it up. We’re discussing this when Boccaccio walks up and announces that our cab has arrived. We get in together but the driver is very sad, and immediately begins complaining about being required to work on Sundays, and I say, “No, Sundays can actually be good sometimes. Let me drive so I can show you.” And I climb over the seat back to take over the wheel, and I realize there are other passengers besides Boccaccio and now it’s my responsibility to take an immigrant family home to their apartment on Beale Street between Folsom and Bryant in San Francisco. We’re driving in the South-of-Market area with its always-dirty streets and large blocky buildings when the brakes go out, but I’m able to stop the cab with the emergency brake and everyone is relieved. The family thanks me as they leave the taxi, and in general I drive brilliantly, but at one point I lose my grip on the steering wheel and go over a curb which makes me feel weak and incompetent and discouraged, and I give control back to the taxi driver who has been sitting in the back chatting with Boccaccio. But now we’re near Rincon Hill which makes me immediately think of the Persian guy who stabbed the startup tech guy to death nearby, and it turns out that the tech guy is actually a very successful author who I’m competing with on Substack, and he’s the guy I’m fighting with now on the street. I’m biting him as I have no conventional weapon. I know it’s a fight to the death and at last I’ve succeeded in injuring him. He leaves, bleeding, and now I realize he’s my roommate and because of my violence I’m losing my Substack. It has been frozen by the corporation but my Substack is also my room which is frozen now too. It’s impossible to see out the windows because they are all thickly coated in ice, and all of my possessions, my books, my clothes, my toothbrush; everything I own is covered in frost.