I was with an attractive Spanish woman in a hotel room. She resembled someone I was friends with in Austin (though had some romantic involvement).
She had ordered a steak from room service, but was not finishing it. I wasn't eating, but drinking.
woman: "Can you drink on an empty stomach?"
me: "I ate earlier. But it's also not really all that strong."
woman: "It has an unusual taste, what is it?"
I picked it up and examined the bottle.
me: "Oh, it's sherry."
She got on the bed with me, and I was telling her about spraining my ankle. I held hers and made a gesture of how large it had been, the size of two ankles. I nuzzled her bare legs, and it seemed like we were about to become intimate. But I stopped.
me: "I don't want to end this, but it's almost 9:45 and if the steak didn't do it for you...most of the places that are any good close at 10. We should go get something now."
We got dressed to go out. My clothes were fairly odd for me--including white socks. I puzzled over it a bit, but this didn't trigger me into lucidity.
We went and waited in line somewhere. It was a long line. Someone who seemed to be a manager stepped out to address the crowd.
manager: "Go ahead and come over to the seniors line--doesn't matter how old you are. People don't really respect the age limit anyway; I found out the other night a woman in that line was only 50."
I thought it was weird they were carding people for some kind of small buffet and salad bar. The woman I'd brought was getting chicken nuggets and picking up a lot of little tubs of things, including peanut butter.
me: "I actually have a whole jar of peanut butter at the hotel, and they charge by the pound. So no point in getting peanut butter here. Just get more nuggets."
woman: "I'll just get one of the containers, then refill it from the jar"
We separated for some reason, and were going to meet back at the hotel where we had been. Apparently we'd driven and gone in separate cars--which I did not recall.
I keyed myself entry into somewhere that my car was parked, and walked to it in a secured entry garage...up through where the cars usually entered and exited, on a driving ramp.
As I was backing up my car, I realized that I would probably be late rendezvouzing with her and she didn't have a key. So I pulled my car over to the side to text her--with my hazard lights on so other departing cars could pass me. It struck me as oddly busy for that time of night.
The phone interface was complex and confusing me. While I was pulled over, an older but well-dressed kind of hispanic woman leaned onto my car. She was drunk and uncoordinated.
Note
My instincts were that this secured garage was not the usual place you would be asked for money or similar things.
drunk woman: "Excuse me, sir..."
me: (putting phone aside) "Seems you have a situation that needs addressing. What's wrong?"
drunk woman: "We depend on his money, but they say it's all gone."
me: "Who's 'we'?"
drunk woman: "I've got two."
I looked past the woman to see a small sports car, with two young daughters in the back. An older white guy wearing sunglasses and a tie-dye shirt, was standing outside the car, and seemed sober and calm.
me: "Well folks, I have to meet someone who doesn't have a key to get in where she's going. I don't really have time, but I can tell you this piece of advice based on copious life experience: you shouldn't be making significant life decisions while drunk in parking lots. Every significant life decision I've made drunk in a parking lot has been a bad one. If you're going to change things or not, change it tomorrow when you are sober."
tie dye man: (approvingly) "And I thought I was the only sane one around here!"
woman: "I'm not drunk!"
me: "I dunno about that."
The tie-dye man walked up to me with a tied together bundle of what appeared at first to be large denominations of money, something like $100 bills.
tie dye man: "Here, you should be the one to take this."
me: "Er, no, that's okay."
He left it with me and kept walking off in the other direction, turning back to yell at me.
tie dye man: "Trust me bro! I'm 80 50!"
me: "I don't know what that means. Did you say '80 50' or '80 20'?"
He didn't answer and kept walking, but I realized what he had handed me weren't currency, but blank checks with the name 'Benjamin Meyer' on them.
When I unwrapped more of the bundle, there appeared to be a lot of documentation notes marked FBI and CIA and some kind of legal proceedings.
Note
It may have been a lot of stuff mixed up, where it was just mentioning goverment organizations as part of a manifesto.
I planned to figure out how to give it back, but something possessed me to flip through it to read to see if I could get any understanding of it. My "weird life event" meter was invoked somehow, so I even thought of taking one of the blank checks as documentation...and maybe anything that looked particularly interesting (he had handed it to me, after all).
My attention focused on something that looked particularly legalistic in nature, and had a signature that had somewhat of a 3-D effect on the paper. It was clearly not just printed flat there--possibly embossed by a machine.
The narrative of what I was reading was a debunking of claims of Benjamin Meyer. He had been successful once and not repeated that success. So it said that despite his claims of genius in DNA or other research he had basically gotten lucky...and that such stories outnumbered those of people who managed to repeat success.
It seemed to go on about the DNA differences between meerkats and humans. I awoke somewhere around this point.