I was attending a game conference and was asked to the introduce someone onto the stage. I turned down the invitation and stayed in my seat. They went on to show off a prototype for a 3D platformer. The placeholder art was made out of orange and gray spheres in a grid environment. The game mostly revolved around physics puzzles and maneuvering through the stage with various kinds of jumps. There was a puzzle that involved swinging a weight attached to a balloon to get across a gap. At the end of the demo I wanted to ask how they planned to differentiate this game from all of the other physics-based platformers but I held back for too long and missed my chance. The voice actors for the upcoming game were apparently all close friends from Nanaimo.

I barely moved as I watched a match of Starcraft in front of my computer. My screen was set side by side with my brother’s but apparently I had been sitting so still that he didn’t realize I was awake the whole time when I finally adjusted my posture.

I woke up to the sound of my alarm and saw that I had overslept. I wasn’t going to make it to class on time even if I’d left for transit right out of bed. In addition, we were supposed to dress up for some kind of school event. I was trying to fashion an arm cannon out of black foam boards but I couldn’t fit my arm comfortably through the shoulder holes. My dad came into the room to check how things were going and I had to put some things embarrassing things away.

I woke up to find out that I had nearly slept through my entire work break. I was looking for a friend and someone told me to ask for her at an assembly happening in the gym. I had a feeling they just wanted to make fun of me. I took a seat at the top of the bleachers which were quickly filling up. I saw a couple of friends a few seats over but it was getting too crowded to try to swap places with other people. We were kind of far from the stage and I couldn’t see what was happening very well. At the end of the first song performance, a stranger tried to grab my hand, only to let go when I turned my head to give him a look. I suddenly remembered that I was still on lunch break and took out my phone to check the time. It was nearly 15:45. I excused myself from the assembly as I needed to clock back into work.

We were many months into the zombie outbreak and it was now the middle of winter. A group of people trudged through the snow in the backyard and told us that we had been squatting in their house. “It’s a strange feeling, isn’t it?” I asked, “we’re just doing the best we can.”

Someone was getting my laundry out of the dryer and asked why there was a bunch of microplastics in my jeans. I emptied out the pockets of the pants I was wearing to find that it was stuffed with rubber bands, safety pins, and paperclips. The pair of jeans from the dryer also had a small bottle of liquor and an ashtray.

I was trying to catch a frog in the garden by slowly following it. I eventually cornered it near a flower bed and pulled it out of the dirt like a weed. Someone remarked that they never knew that compost was made from putting “raw stuff” in the dirt. “What do you mean?” I asked, unsure what else they could’ve thought compost was made from.

When I woke up all of furniture had been moved out of my room and now I could clearly see all of the hair on the floor. I went downstairs and my housemate said they had taken my desk to use in another room. I needed to get ready for class. My friend had just pulled into the driveway to let us use his car.

I was late to the Christmas party and there was still some cake left when I got there. I got myself a plate of a s’mores cake and sat in on a conversation about wedding songs. The Town Inside Me was playing while the conversation shifted to a family friend who had recently gotten pregnant.

I was in the car with my dad and we were looking for a theme park. The road signs appeared to be leading us in circles around the countryside. We eventually found ourselves driving down a heavily forested road and it became hard to tell if we were actually on the road or in the swamp next to it. We passed by a desiccated bear carcass draped across the foliage before finally getting to a clearing.