Shit feels like me. The grocery store surrounded me and things in it presented themselves for noticing. Rows on rows of items were in there, and it would take more than rearranging the pronouns to figure out which mammal was which, among the many mammals squinting at the items on the shelves, in the refrigerators (both the tall ones with glass doors that steam up when you open them and the low wide ones like troughs that you lean over and pull white-led-lit stuff out of), on the tables laden with produce. PResumably, each of the mammals had a unique point of view, but when we say “unique,” we have to think of the sense of alternate universes between each of which there is infinitesimal variation; and endless hall of mirrors wherein each iteration of mirror is but one bit removed from the one preceding and the one succeeding. Of no importance to any but the traveler among universes, who, as far as anyone here on earth, where we have grocery stores and mirrors, does not exist. Dude was right. This has become work, and now it’s no longer fun (partially but not completely because there’s not immediate apparent reward) but if the daily seshs quit popping into existence, a sense of loss, self-betrayal, and a familiar slide back into the inevitability of crushing mundanity will reassert itself, will squeeze inward like an imploding soap bubble in one of the universes where the inside of the bubble is the world, and the outside is the ephemeral created space, no sooner invoked by childlike astonishment than erased from ever having existed by wind, gravel, gravity, swatting monkey paws, and that favorite enemy of everyone (in almost every universe, it seems), time. Dum, dum-dum, dum, da-dum-dum, da da, dummmm.... What could be called music insinuates itself into every public space around here. They got speakers outside of premium-mediocrity restaurants, blaring down against the sidewalks. The sour-faced Saturday guy who makes it such a drag to come in here on Saturdays, who somehow manages to drain all vestiges of joy out of the act of walking into a cafe and getting a coffee, drains it like blood out of a headless deer, and sighs while counting your change to let you know that it’s your fault. Are you going to clean up all that blood. But if you’re not a male laboring under his presumption of heterosexualty (along with all the other assumptions that appear to be attached to the presumption) then he’ll talk to you and laugh about your christmas sweater and almost come to life for a second or two by god, who’d’a thought it was possible.