A cat licked my wife’s dish

It was my first day of freedom following the expiration of my quarantine. The others still had a day or two to go.
We were sitting on the terrace chatting after eating noodle soup for dinner.
We were talking about dreams.
We talked about dream architecture. I mentioned my theory that houses in dreams represent aspects of our minds. Generously, no one mentioned that everything in our dreams represent aspects of our minds. Everyone described houses and other buildings they had dreamed of.

Houses I have dreamed of: repeated dream of standing on the street looking at a suburban single-storey green house in which a family has been murdered. Repeated dream of (imaginary) sex club in Seattle that, the last time I dreamed of it, had gone out of business. One-time dream of a friend’s house in which I was fighting a stranger to the death and he Would.Not.Die. no matter what I did, including stabbing him in the jugular with a shard of glass; a frustratingly thin stream of blood sprayed out.

Alpha went inside to talk to someone on the phone.
A cat took that opportunity to lick our soup bowls clean.
I told Gamma that, regarding the shirt-shopping nightmare I had described earlier (two understocked shirt shops that overlapped such that one could not tell where one shop ended and the other began, nor even where the real entrances were, and which carried no really nice shirts, just mostly factory rejects or oddly-styled and funnily-sized strange-fitting shirts with unusual or ugly patterns that I did not want) that I had yesterday been thinking about Uferlosigkeit and Grenzenlosigkeit (and wondering whether there was a significant difference between the two). (Something that is uferlos is unbounded, and grenzenlos would mean without borders).
Inside the house, Alpha said something that sounded as if she were wrapping up her conversation, so I carried the soup bowls into the kitchen and put them into the dishwasher so the cat wouldn’t get in trouble; but it turned out she was not done with her conversation after all.
Gamma asked me how my first day out of quarantine had gone. I said I had forgotten how to drive. When I took my car into the dealer for a check up, I had drifted too close to the shoulder, for example, and was not paying as much attention as I should have. And while at the dealer waiting for my car, I looked at Humans of New York on Instagram and the stories made me cry. I imagined an apprentice mechanic asking the mechanic, Gee did someone give Mr. Living his bill already?
That’s all I did today. Plus a little work. Plus I went grocery shopping and the cashier had to remind me to enter my PIN code.
I was going to take a walk but it’s too nice in the hammock now.
I’ll take a walk tomorrow.
I didn’t gain weight in quarantine (actually I lost a little) but my belly is fatter, which I guess means muscle mass is down.
Washing dishes, taking walks. Life is an endless struggle against entropy.

The god of the office and the god of weather

“How come you let such terrible things happen all the time,” says the god of weather.

“Why is it raining?” says the god of the office.

The god of the office and the god of weather are standing on the balcony watching it rain onto a bunch of May-green trees. May is the best month.

“See, I don’t make it rain,” says the god of weather. “Weather is the expression of a complicated system. And anyway, the trees need a drink.”

“There’s your answer,” says the god of the office. “And anyway, I’m just the god of the office.”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t jump,” says the god of the ledge.

“Ozymandias,” says the god of weather.

“This too shall pass,” says the god of the office.

“Tomorrow shall be sunny,” says the god of weather.

“Everything eventually falls apart,” says the god of the office. “And everything is beautiful, anyway.”

“Those you worship will disappoint you,” says the god of weather. “By sacrificing too much for you and too little for themselves, or too little for you and too much for themselves, or by not making themselves happy when they are your idol and example…”

“…and you will disappoint those who worship you by not making yourself happy. Self-betrayal is not a worthy sacrifice. Sacrifice itself, I don’t know, is it obsolete or just ancient? But love makes up for all of this,” says the god of the office. “And everything is beautiful anyway.”

“These are the ground rules for an earthly existence,” says the god of weather.