I'm in Houston (or is it? I've never been there), talking with someone about the weird skyline--huge pyramidal towers, each with two ears or arms, almost like five-legged starfish standing on their sides! Colossal, bloated, sick starfish...

And this bizarre architectural theme repeats all over town! I'm trying to locate the heart of the city by where the tallest towers are, but with the thick smog, it's hard to tell. They all look huge, and ugly, and gravity-defying.

Funny... I KNOW I've seen those things before, yet I've never been in Texas! Maybe from a distance when I flew to New Mexico? Did my plane really get stacked up so high above Albuquerque that the Houston skyline loomed over the horizon? Doesn't seem likely, does it?

Yet the shape of the towers is so distinctive. I've definitely seen them before... but where? When?

NEXT MORNING

The morning paper comes--the San Francisco Chronicle. On the front page is a story about toadfish, a parasitic fish that sings. It's so loud it deafens underwater microphones near the Golden Gate Bridge. There's a photo of its bizarre mouth parts, a puckered five-part thing full of rasps, looking like a pudgy flayed starfish--the towers in my dream!

Now all that stuff about "I've seen this before, though I couldn't have" makes sense--a precognitive dream joke about precognition.

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER

I didn't know how precognitive. I still haven't been to Houston. But I'm in a band now, and everyone else in the band is trapped there as I write, trapped for two months now, as they buy and repair an old apartment tower in Houston for reasons that seemed oh so sensible when the realtor talked them into it... only now the deal is dragging on and on and on... I'm wondering if they'll ever come back. That's one parasitic town--once its towers get their teeth into you, they won't let go!

FOUR YEARS AFTER THAT

My friends got trapped in Houston for three years. It was like some real-life version of Fawlty Towers. Fraud, theft, lawsuits and countersuits... in the end they lost everything but the house they live in. Thanks to Toadfish Towers.

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