Posted on Monday, 08/19/24.

A white middle-aged man in a baseball cap sips what appears to be a glass of milk. He’s sitting at a tall two-top across the Starbucks. It may be a very pale smoothie, or a weak latte, I guess–it seems a hair too thick to be just milk.

Yesterday was spent gathering more items and specifying that they be shipped to the apartment for which I have not yet received the key This happens tomorrow afternoon; entry is not permitted until the following morning.. Everything that rises must converge, apparently, to the 21st and 22nd of August, during which I will do little but stand in a mostly empty apartment while strangers, each with no knowledge of the others’ arrivals, periodically enter and drop their wares, or calibrate meters, or give brief introductions to the dangers of gas leaks or water ingress. I look forward to it, honestly–to the idea of a small space in constant flux: one which mandates only that I wait for a knock on the door.

At the second branch of the used-goods store I bought a generic fridge (on the small side), a Panasonic washing machine, a flashy microwave-cum-oven, and a small, pink-paneled Zojirushi rice cooker This one is the humble NS-NF05, though I covet, some day, the beautiful, almost spherical ‘Neuro Fuzzy’ NSZCC-10 from 2011, specifying all to be delivered Thursday afternoon. There was marginally reasonable furniture at the second branch as well, though in the moment, maybe paralyzed over spending an additional couple hundred dollars, I chose not to include any of them in the order. The more I peruse used furniture the more I seem to start desiring specific form-factors. A low pale wooden bookshelf without vertical dividers. A low two-wide loveseat done in pale un-patterned upholstery. A modest rug. A low table for the front room and a more standard one with two practical chairs for the kitchen. A lack of social obligation must encourage consumption–something behind the reason that some men in their thirties own huge numbers of Funko Pops–some weakly insidious redirection of energy away from accommodating individuals and towards constructing a space where More obvious examples of this substitution being the scourge of Facebook-adjacent games of the 2010s, Second Life, The Sims, Minecraft, Habbo Hotel, etc., against which for all their uselessness this writer cannot hold an honest grudge, not really. individuals could be hosted and persuaded, if only there were any around. I consume in wait of a time where the consumption is vindicated–not even actually and individually appreciated, but forming the background mood of someone else’s experience, all at once, of the life I have been constructing exactly to appear as if it had been being lived in the meantime. Something at the horizon of this makes me worry I’m going to realize something like the annoying things all people approaching thirty realize, and which make them quit their jobs and get bitter and teach themselves guitar at strange hours for months on end.

Last night I dreamed I was being made to move out of my childhood home in California, assembling carefully through hurriedly a suitcase of only essential objects. Alternately in the dream it was the middle of the night and daytime, with no attached reason. My room was both what it was when I was very young (with a bunk bed for my brother) and as it was when we finally did leave (at which time I was sleeping in another room entirely). Somehow outside the window was not our yard but some mixture of my elementary school and middle school black-top spaces, broken up by stranded basketball hoops, grey-washed walls, a grass-covered play-field far off, and a large group of students being corralled by an unseen teacher. Before leaving my room, having returned to retrieve something realized to be missing (now forgotten), I took photos with my cellphone (my cellphone so rarely appears in dreams, and never for communication). The schoolyard and students could be seen through the windows of the room on the phone screen, periodically capturing a photo. The dream after this is unclear.