This man's my hero. (And yes, John, the comparative essay's coming soon, along with one about the dance-floor politics of Shannon's "Let the Music Play"; I have a legitimate writing assignment to knock out this weekend, so keep your trousers up!)

I had a nightmare last night -- not just a bad dream, but the kind of dream that finds you with your heart racing when you wake up. Took place in an airport-slash-bowling-alley-slash-library-slash-entertainment-complex on Long Island (fictional; it's not JFK airport), a really ugly, utilitarian old thing. I was with my parents, but I got lost from them in a crowd assembled for an *NSync concert in the upstairs tier of this library-entertainment-etc. When I tried to leave, I became embroiled in an airport-garage crime wave -- delinquents hiding in stairwells and behind cars, beating on the unsuspecting with lead pipes, kicking the daylights out of them until they were left in a pile on the concrete. They were all over the place, and it was actually quite frightening to walk around this garage with the knowledge I might get killed. When I finally found my parents, the humidity outside had turned to rain -- pouring, disgusting rain -- and we ran to an outdoor lot to find our boxy rental car. People were running in all directions, moaning as if they were escaping a holocaust or a zombie attack. We got to the car and sped off on the Long Island Expressway. There were dead bodies, bloodied and filthy, heaped up on the side of the road on the way home.