eat rich chocolates and sleep too close to a space heater on Christmas Eve

I live in a Santa Fe style adobe apartment sometime in the not-too-distant future. A couple of guys I play music with on occasion invite themselves over to drink beer and listen to the radio. They arrive and it starts to turn into a party. Some bitchy girls I know from back in high school are there, taunting me and telling me that I won't have any time for drawing when I go back to school for the spring semester.

Annoyed, I walk into the bathroom, stepping over torn scraps of paper and shards of shattered plastic that were left on the floor by a baby or a misbehaving dog. I look into the mirror and discover that I have giant purple welts all over my face, not unlike the scar makeup that I wore with my Halloween costume.

I mindtravel to a sparsely decorated comic book store. A girl I used to date and her obnoxious, unfamiliar tall male friend are there. The friend harasses me for money, taunting me like those girls at the apartment did and repeatedly asking me to give him $42 in cash. I do my best to ignore him. The girl tells him to stop. I turn away from them and when I turn back they have walked out of the store together.

Back at home I'm reading the Something Awful forums. There's a new thread where some guy is describing a bizarre infection he has. His face is covered in lesions -- "space barnacles" -- that resemble brightly colored 7mm rectangular plastic tiles. Each tile has a raised circular ridge on it, like a condom in its wrapper. The guy sounds smug despite his grotesque affliction. He says he also built a kickass computer and got a new girlfriend over the weekend.

Reading that post gave me a weird feeling. I walk back into the bathroom. Oh. Turns out that the forum post contained a computer virus and now I have space barnacles all over my face and chest. I look like the Elephant Man covered with Legos. Looking closely at the tiles I can see veiny red and blue lines running underneath them. It's a highway map, complete with numbers and city names.