Sitting around with my family, I introduce my brother Chris to the girl I’m dating, Kasey (!) though they have trouble seeing each other as there’s a column between them.
A brief virtual visit to a terraformed asteroid that’s become very high tech and high density, a beautiful panoramic ground-level view with detailed sculptural high rises and alien beaches, inhabited by a sophisticated race of space orcs.
Skin writing is used as apunishment on someone suspected of human trafficking, marking them for later.
A dog-sized cow is acting menacingly at the property line of my childhood home, just at the edge of the neighbor’s lawn. I walk all the way down the street trying to read its dog tag, with no real plan how to make it go away.
Discover I’ve moved in together in the same ground floor apartment as some people I know in real life, but mainly from Twitter — KC Crowell, Feral, all Oakland peeps. I myself am an observer, but unusually, one with an identity — a hovering presence dwelling mostly in the rafters, where a glowing horizontal level divides my space from the everyday living space. The easily discerned border of the ceiling has curved buttresses, marking its construction in the early 1900s. On one section of old wood paneling, I spot a poster advertising old-timey glassware, lab glass perhaps. My roommates begin reinstalling some authentic hand-blown stained glass fixtures, decorative colored filigrees that have been in storage for almost a century. The landlord likes the residents so much he was convinced to let them haul it out from storage. The square ends of the curvy abstract forms fit perfectly flush against the buttresses.
I finally ask Feral out and she says yes. I spend a decent time planning on her coming over. We makeout hot and heavy for a while, getting familiar with each other. We take a break so I can introduce her to my parents (we may be at their house, I may live there). I poke my mom, who looks exactly like my pet naked dumbo rat Nüdl, and ask if they’re starting to feel sleepy for bedtime. Someone asks how long its been since the makeouts, and I check my watch — which is the same as the actual Galaxy Fit I’ve started wearing daily — and to my surprise it’s transcribed our conversation. Perhaps out of anxiety or eagerness to appear cool, I start telling the story of how I found it in a backpack abandoned on the side of the road on Twin Peaks, how the only identifiable information in it was a doctor’s note, how I wrote the doctor and only heard back several months later and the owner told me to keep it… all this is true, in fact. At some point I ignore someone interrupting me by repeating my own name, which I now sort of wish I hadn’t. I don’t even know if Feral will sleep over, or if we’ll sleep together, but it’s a mature and grounded headspace where we all accept things as they are.