A police investigator?

We were going to investigate an incident involving vandalism and a possible pet poisoning at someone's home.

My partner was Giancarlo Esposito (whose name I had to hunt and found thanks to mixedfolks.com), and he was the one who took the lead. That made it a somewhat typical detective story: smooth veteran stuck with a nerdy white guy who's fresh on the job.

In the dream, I seemed to know that our destination belonged to Mark Dominus (author of the enlightenning Higher-Order Perl), and I was concerned that the crime against their property was related to his children being biracial.

The real Dominus lives in Philadelphia, but the setting of his house didn't seem like Philadelphia: instead it was cookie-cutter suburbia. The big house with its ornate, frumpy furniture, rugs, and wallhangings was better suited for someone's grandparents than how I picture him living.

Giancarlo questioned him about their dog as to whether Dominus encouraged some behavior or other. This was the best part of the dream but about which my recall is disappointingly bad. Imagine Philip K. Dick had written The Jerk: Dominus sat back in his chair and followed down a long verbal rabbit hole about the dog actually being a wumpus who believed he was a house but was really something else and how Dominus himself was a cow who imagined being a man but with similar multi-layer misgivings.

I asked smarmily, "Did you get all that in your little notebook?"

He showed us the damage to the nearly floor-to-ceiling picture window that wrapped around one of the front corners of the house. Many of the panes at the top were shattered. I asked if he knew who might have done it, and he remarked about neighborhood kids (who probably wouldn't stay off his lawn and all). Someone speculated that it may have been "random dumbassery."

I look up again and now the window is stuffed with what appeared to be lots of crumpled disposable drop cloth. I asked if he'd like us to help with more patchwork (I was thinking of a tarp on the outside), but he declined saying the guy coming tomorrow would fix it properly.

But I stopped the pain meds a couple of days ago! Where'd that come from?