RIP, sir

I used to hang out at this bar with a bunch of married guys. I didn't notice it at first, as I was actually there to see my bartender, and we mostly just talked about baseball. He would complain about the customers and I would laugh at him and we had just about all we needed. But I started noticing that there were other guys there trying to talk about baseball, and eventually I tried to think of things to say to them. There was this one guy who came in pretty early from work and pretty much stayed until his wife called and the bartender looked at him and he did the "I'm not here" gesture, after which he pretty much had to go home. Then there was this other guy who was always checking on the snake and finally I thought, well there's something I could talk to him about. Turns out he wasn't really a snake guy, he was more of a fish guy, so I said, "Really? I've been thinking about getting a fish.", which actually meant "I saw a picture in a magazine of a hotel where they give you a fish for your room when you check in, and man, it was pretty, but I haven't been able to keep a fish since that one time in elementary school when I had one and forgot to feed it and after I discovered him dead I had nightmares for months where I was lying in bed and he was starving to death and couldn't communicate with me."

Anyway he brought me a fish, and I said, "oh, no" and he said, "no, it's great!" and I got a fish in a bag from a bar. He died, so then this guy felt bad and brought me another one that he swore I couldn't kill.

Well, it took almost six years, but Mr. Met was found floating head-down near the far edge of his new bowl around 10:40 this morning. He will be missed.

a possible explanation for why people are either fascinating or infuriating

but you remember the feeling

I'm starting to think my taste for bizarre, abstract, absurd, or experimental literature was cultivated over years of reading only a few chapters from each book I encountered—that my preference for prose style over plot is due to a lack of experience with the "tying things up" part.

credit and concern elsewhere this time

Imagine what happens when the subjective experience of time (speeding up/being consumed unnaturally) collides with an actual facilitation—the moving of deadlines; changing of time-zones; sleeping inordinately more than usual, for example. Mustn't there inevitably be a corresponding distortion of our experience of reality, and how might that affect one's sense of general agency /control /connection with the outside world? How quickly one's sense of 'true' and 'valid' could be eroded in favor of 'mine' and 'seeming'.