The next day, as P.D. James put it, was "one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life." As Jake put it, the next day was cold but not rainy. The utterly uneventful yesterday gave way to an utterly uneventful yesternight and only needed a few trillion pounds of rotational force by the earth to turn it into the day that is now. Jake sat on the couch, accompanied by his cat. The critter never left the couch anymore: Jake wondered if it had been fused to the couch by some sort of fusing machine. This totally unfunny observation at life gave proof that Jake's plan was succeeding. He had gone the entire morning without meeting anyone of his imaginative friends. Well, seven. But it was better than any other morning in Jake's memory. Just yesterday… well… umm… Jake was sure that he'd seen more than seven yesterday. He was satisfied with that and moved on.

Today was Saturday. With no school to look forward to (I know, I kid) Jake moved towards his room. He perambulated the room for his dictionary. Ah! It was under the bed, next to a dog-eared copy of a magazine. Jake picked both up. He looked at the cover of the magazine. 'Seventeen' was the title. It was the ubiquitous picture book that separated today's retarded teens from today's retarded teens that read 'Seventeen.' He threw it away. It landed on the corner of his room, accompanied by an outrageous 'FLOP' that only came from magazines thrown at objects in movies. He could still see it. The cover model was some unknown and/or known person thinking that the level of fame was inversely proportional to the amount of clothing on her. Jake turned his attention back to his dictionary. Why had he opened it? He couldn't remember. He threw it in his closet and went downstairs to find out the word he was looking for. He slid down the banister like some other 14 year old instead of taking the horrible risk of walking down the stairs and falling. Downstairs he saw no one to remind him of the word. Walking from room to room, Jake concentrated on what word he could've been looking up. In the living room he saw a copy of White Fang lying open. Perhaps he was reading it and found a word he didn't understand. Realizing the sheer stupidity of this Jake moved on. A book assigned to eighth graders couldn't possibly have that hard of a word. But then so was Moby Dick. But no one who read Moby Dick in eighth grade actually read it. They took the condensed version from sparknotes or some other place where a pompous bastard with a literary major thinks he (I SAID HE ONLY, SUE ME) could comprehend and explain it in idiot vernacular. Taking solace in the fact (opinion?) that White Fang did not include words he didn't know, he moved into the other living room.

It was just like the first living room, but instead of serving a place where family could congregate at nighttimes, this served as a flagrant reminder of the gluttony of humankind. The average American home had about six too many rooms. Most of these were labeled off as 'guest bedrooms' and only served a purpose to put extra crap that happened to be picked up from garage sales. In America nothing was really thrown out. Stuff one family did not want anymore in their guest bedrooms passed hands into other families' guest bedrooms until it wore out into dust from overuse. This dust from the remains of antique furniture gathered from garage sales would not be thrown out either. It was usually used to cut cocaine. Street name 'Classic D.' And thus the great line of life continued.

The great line of life grinded to a jarring halt as Jake stopped anything that might affect the future in any way. (Butterfly flapping its wings in China causes a hurricane in LA? Maybe if the butterfly was two THOUSAND feet tall with wings that indeed covered half the world in darkness once it unfurled, with enough force behind each stroke to disorbit the Earth into the sun or something, but not any other freaking way) He looked from place to place, desperate to figure out what word he had been looking for. Then Jake got it. He had been bored. Desperate for something to do, now that he couldn't set Lieutenant Skollsfen on fire anymore, he had gone to his room to read the dictionary. Smiling, he went back to his room. Jake looked under the bed for the dictionary. Instead, he only found a dictionary-sized groove with the poor remains of a bug that had been squeezed there by the dictionary. Jake had to wonder if the dictionary posed any other usefulness to most other teenagers. By the time he found the dictionary again, nestled in his closet next to stacks and stacks of Seventeen magazines, he had forgotten why he'd picked it up again. The cycle continued. The dictionary remained next to the Seventeen magazines. They dated back to a time when the things that are popular now weren't popular back then, instead having a whole different list of popular things that gradually shifted down into the not popular things list. On their covers were smiling pictures of nearly identical celebrities. The yellowing cover pictures in Jake's closet were all that remained of their legacy. Among the 136 actresses, singers, and random models they paid 5 bucks for the glory of taking off their clothes on camera that were on the covers of Seventeen, 7 had died of drug overdose. 11 were in rehab. 32 had gotten married. 33 had gotten divorces (According to Seventeen anyway). 66 were hooked on Classic D. 136 had been forgotten.