then I coloured with Prince at a cafe.

Just before waking, we saw Prince Rogers Nelson alone at a cafe table adjacent to ours. He looked completely dejected, looking at but looking through the butcher paper and crayons strewn across its surface. Abstract clouds of light blue and bolts of purple graced the white. We got up, walked over, and said, "Hey. We're going to join you," and we grabbed a few crayons, adding to the pastel sky abstractions he'd already laid down. He looked annoyed, but in that same expression, more glad that we'd broken his ennui and come along. Then I woke up.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

the boombox of loves lost.

Depeche Mode's Black Celebration album goes on the repeat, rescuing me from work. 1986. I'm in the front hall of Tucson High Magnet School, and someone has this tape on a boombox. Me, Angie, Lando Ettrick, Leah, Dee Dee, sitting around a pillar, Swatches, K-Swiss, Benettons, pretty as a picture, we're together but alone, no talking, just listening, shoulders touching. There's a stretch of "Sometimes", then "A Question of Lust", and by "Here Is the House" and "World Full of Nothing", we're weeping, weeping uncontrollably, each of us thinking of someone we no longer have, and can never have again. The tape clicks and stops, and we look at each other, knowing, and go home.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.