I had fallen asleep on the front steps of the school entrance before classes started. “Sleeping again, huh?” I heard someone nearby say. I felt myself being dragged into a car as I tossed and turned. I uncomfortably squirmed around in the back seat as I tried to keep sleeping.

I was staying with my parents in a hotel room which had a TV that somehow knew who was watching. The screen would turn on or off automatically depending on which bed the viewer was watching from. We were looking through some old recorded programs when I saw Super Smash Brothers on the news.

There was a large collection of books that were full of references and production notes for each of Stephen King’s books. One of them was for an adaptation of Spy x Family that he had written. One of the references inside was a survey result reporting that 60% of people would be okay with having a bald partner.

It was late at night and my parents were driving to a pizza place. We not only had a reservation with the place, but had also already ordered in advance. I asked if either of them had ever eaten at there - they had not.

Our school had brought an artist called GREEN to perform on campus but no one had heard of them. We were given a pamphlet about Backpack Battles as we entered the meeting hall. After some extra seats had to be fit into the the hall, I was separated from the rest of my classmates and somehow ended up right next to the stage. The performer came onto the stage and started asking the audience questions about recipes and mechanics from the game. I didn’t feel like answering any of them despite knowing the answers. I started doodling on the backside of the pamphlet.

It was a Saturday afternoon but the campus library was still filled with people trying to finish their projects. I walked through the winding halls of the library, trying to keep in mind how far along the road outside I’ve traversed so I knew which exit would be the most efficient. There was some kind of demonstration in one of the open areas of the labyrinth. Someone commented that it felt like “everyday the performance [was] the same.”

My dad approached me and asked me to help out with an assignment he had for a culinary class that he was taking. I didn’t really feel like I had much of an excuse to turn him down since I wasn’t really doing anything else with my time. He wanted me to do both research and some prep work for a dish to present to class. I started shoveling fried potato wedges from the living floor into my mouth. He and my aunt asked me to stop at which point I stood up and started walking away. I walked along the edge of the rooftop as my body and fingers started to tense up.

I went to the cafeteria after school to meet some friends. They were just wrapping up a game of Magic and I sat next to them riffing through the cards of a mono black deck that was set aside. By the time they were done, most of the gates and shutters had been drawn. We couldn’t turn off all of the lights as we left because the switch next to the counter was no longer accessible.

My friend was messaging me over Discord about how he’d recently found a group for some in-person tabletop sessions. He told me how he was still getting used to the new combat system. He also mentioned that he started playing a new PC game called Tithe 2.

We were fishing by the river and talking about how a group of researchers were recently caught falsifying data for their studies. Their coverup even involved edited video footage as evidence. I was trying to not get tangled up in the fishing lines.