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I had finished up a tour with the new company—new-ish because I seemed already to be familiar with the place and know many of the people there, maybe they were a local customer—and got to join former colleague Steven Xie as he was preparing for his entry exam. The administer was a gruff American who wasn’t capable of accommodating his applicant’s language and personality nor cared to, and told him he’d dock his score if he wouldn’t “shut the fuck up” and said a single thing while taking it. After hearing Steven repeat that abrasive instruction without the least bit of sarcasm, I stayed to help him refrain from outburst while he retrieved five small fish out of a tank with his choice of available tools, a shovel with a flexible scoop. His future department teammates gathered afterward to congratulate him, going so far as to wear T-shirts with Chinese characters on them, which I am sure made him feel as welcome as one might surrounded by smiling people adorned with halves of words. (One had five on his and claimed it spelled his name.) All employees were rounded up for a slideshow presentation and I took the opportunity to bring it up with the mostly-Asian Accounting girls, who nodded in embarrassment. The projector looked 8mm and the initial picture was tiny, then spread across a messy wall; my test was to save the movie to digital and insert some captions. After the screening, I was handed what appeared to be a VHS cassette and was confident in my ability to accomplish the task, even if I was no professional like in that recent Netflix casualty; would my old rig with a USB dongle and Microsoft Photos be enough?

Surely the inspiration for my pre-AR AR-idea, though every once in a great while I’m blessed by a real-life reminder, like the other evening when after hundreds of 全力坂 runs the Universe manages a confluence of upper-echelon specimen from the local demographic and timing along that stretch of Clydepark where my last sighting of one in cut-offs and cowboy boots I’ve come to dismiss as a mirage.

Redditor’s work is all the more remarkable because it was done from scratch and not with Mars money (as eye-opening and welcome as it was, on this anniversary of my last job change—what a segue to my upcoming meeting with a former employer, who’s threatening us with an opportunity to return to family office drama). And uncanny valley or no, I’ve always liked multi-angle portraits.

Dream the other night had all my usual conundrums, debilitating fear of heights, frustration with commonplace expectations, and one that a quick search reveals I haven’t mentioned much if at all despite being a fairly regular concern, my slavish observance of the bus schedule. My return ride was always around 8-ish or else I’d miss a transfer and face a long walk home, never mind modern conveniences such as Uber. (I wonder if in a few-odd years when drones will come pick you up anywhere, my subconscious will update then?) The others in my group led the way to a higher platform, effortlessly traversing the gap over a ravine of white stairwells, while I froze; the steps on the other side were so narrow, I wasn’t sure I would land on them safely before attempting another leap upward—it was a wall-jump, fucking videogames! Eventually I determined my only solution was to be forced onto the ledge, which I somehow managed by inserting myself in front of another uninhibited procession. The balcony opened into a dark hall lined with warmly lit, classically decorated sitting rooms, each occupied with well-dressed snobs who seemed offended by my inspection. Lurking in the shadows beside me was Peter Capaldi the Doctor, looking a little worse for wear, but amenable nevertheless for a selfie, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the phone not to overlay dinosaur stamps on the camera.

This morning I found myself in an office building among a band of survivors of an apocalypse. Three of them who looked like members of the high school chess club decided that a Vietnamese girl Binn present would satisfy their pent-up urges. She complied and completed her duties promptly, and I tried to find her to express my sympathies, but instead I ran into an old colleague who seemed to remember me and called out my name. He wasn’t anyone I knew from my past, but he did seem familiar, like an actor who played the role of computer salesman in the 80’s, except his hair was gray and he was missing his right arm. We sat down at a table and he explained that he had been drafted for his expertise with the “Lexor-9” system, whose pre-Internet standalone capabilities made it especially useful in these times. I left by telling him to contact me if they needed help with the modems, which was apparently something for which I myself had a reputation… but as Silver Spear reminds us, “some reputations are false.”

I still hold to the idea that Lynch packaged his rejected Twin Peaks follow-up with the “it was all just a dream” finish as an FU to the studio.The night terror Ben’s experiencing in Evil (which reminds me a lot of Millennium) has got way too much of the demonic makeup for me: my latest one was just a dark outline of a face pressed against the small window in the door. It seemed pointless keeping it out, because the back of my apartment was always open to a stairwell shared with my neighbors, so I tried a frightening demonstration of martial arts. The door knob turned and the figure entered, still only a shadow.

At least it wasn’t like the kind I’ve been having the past few nights where all I’m doing is looking at screens, watching football on TV—surely a low point of my imagination, even if it was from my perspective as an unprepared player—scrolling through map locations between San Diego and the Mexican border, monitoring the child’s video content that included a Monty Python-narrated skit in which bodies chased one another lewdly inside a couple’s coat, and playing a Pokémon game together. There was a Chansey to catch, but I missed her.

Rebound after the Line of Duty series (6) finale, police drama in the other part of England that give or take an iPhone, looks like it hasn’t changed in 50 years. I couldn’t find but the last episode of the second season—er, series, but it seemed more of the same, protagonist and criminal bumbling along, no grander scheme in mind other than self-preservation. Which I suppose is alike everywhere, even at work, where I was in my dream, fulfilling more of my staple IT duties, stopping with my bundle of paperwork at various stations throughout the office to take short naps, my way of distributing them without overindulging and maintaining the all-important appearance of industriousness. One of the characters jumped to his death at the end of Happy Valley, which carried over to a sad fellow who did the same in my building, except he did so with a bomb strapped to his chest and triggered it just as he passed my window. The explosion sent me flying headfirst in slow motion toward the remaining wall and I hoped it would at least be enough to get me out of the rest of the day.And if I were ever to return to a desk that’s dusted by the cleaning staff at night, I’d like to resume my reputation for techno-macabre with a faux body mod like this attachment, which reminds me of Zaphod’s third arm being used to operate a digital watch スマホ while my left could be free to help open sauce packets.

Got stumped by the following question, which I paraphrase: “Two bookcases have a total of 173 books; if you were to remove 38 books from the first, then the second would have 6 more than twice as many in Bookcase 1. How many books are in each bookcase?” The answer (81 & 92) we eventually distilled to the following equation, where x = the number of books in Bookcase 1:

          x + (2(x – 38) + 6) = 173

                       x – 70 = 173

                            x = 81

Of the two I do remember from my recent week off in Boston, or rather, wrote to my ever-shrinking or corrupted RAM, the first was likely fueled by my paranoia about us all leaving the house and the usual kind where I’d stare out the window into the night to spot intruders. These I’d almost always debunk as dreams, and this time because my view of the backyard shifted to overhead and my assailants converged into a huge old school shooting videogame boss. Gun still in hand, I saw a younger version of my son appear at the top of a wide flight of stairs in white robes, mouth agape but silent, and certain it was only a ghost (last year it was The Raid, and now Chris kept insisting we watch The Conjuring), I pulled the trigger, but that, too, was a fake.

The other involved Ben’s father Evan, who apparently had a duplicate of himself or the ability to create one, and I wondered how both could hold separate conversations. Would his perspective switch back and forth like changing TV channels? We had to somehow defeat this genius, and my plan was to let him know that we knew, but be subtle about it, by inserting the message only in the background of one of his fields of view, like on a small sign in a crowd.

The other night I watched a child interview Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—truly the worst possible title for a film due on the 75th anniversary of the first issue of World’s Finest—director Zack Snyder and he was surprisingly generous with the information he revealed: a look at a new character who at first resembled Green Arrow, but a bug was visible on the side of his mask, and the narrator screamed, “The Zipper!” embarrassing me for not making the connection.

An enterprising Reddit hacker hijacked the popular sub and spoiled much of the remaining season (had to double-check about Hot Pie, because if anything that was a squandered opportunity to bring up Lady Stoneheart instead), proving not only is it not what you know and others don’t, but what they don’t want to.

I was to say the least disappointed that the villain’s convincing argument for order fell apart with a classic Hollywood dealbreaker, because I hadn’t envisioned one to conclude a similar story I had begun writing in high school, about a Ford Prefect-like alien who passes himself off as a student and learns that other extraterrestrials were behind the scenes, guiding the course of young minds on the planet. As embarrassing as they may read (I actually thought the name “Entrepreneur Transman” made a clever acronym), I should transcribe the Selectric-typewritten pages of the few chapters I had finished if I ever come across them while cleaning up the garage, because if I did save them, like Cheat to Win, on the 200MB hard drive in the Gateway 386/33, they’re as lost as the wonderful Star Trek After Dark screensavers in Windows 3.11 on there, too.