The deep afternoon fever dream was characteristically vivid.

In the beginning there was something about an intellectual who wanted to paint a girl he’d created first in a poem. It wasn’t going well, and it was tormenting him with the megrims. Cut to a loading screen.

A relative I don’t know well brought me a gift. It was physically the most beautiful computer I’ve ever seen, a big seventeen-inch laptop in shny chrome.

He said it would have to be replaced due to some unspecified inner flaw, but that the even better one hadn’t shipped yet, so I could use this bulky beauty until then.

We updated the Java on it, god only knows why. It’s probably a coffee metaphor.

Then he needed to mail a package, so we wandered into town for errands.

One thing I noticed about him was that everything that was his was physically and functionally perfect. Like the laptop only still more refined. His clothes, his car, the things he carried with him were all beautiful tools, and I felt this was the real gift he was giving to me.

Live like this, he was saying. Live like me.

One thing I noticed about the people around us was that they sucked at social distancing, just like real life.

There was more. A courthouse bathroom I found to use for the usual reason, except I was distracted by the wild-eyed boyfriend of the defendant, who did magic things via the medium of folding paper.

Later, I caught a ride with another relative, this one long dead. The road we drove was clear and dry, but then it intersected with a different one that was completely snowpacked. She took the corner too fast, and we banged around inside the cab of the little truck for a crazy long time.

Somehow though she managed not to roll it. A true miracle.

So for the rest of the day at least, here is my new catchphrase.

"You should have let me drive, Darlene.’

As I began to wake up I was thinking about talking to the dead, and in this hypnagogia I conceived of a film where this was accomplished through the use of a computer terminal.

Sort of a supernatual cyberpunk My Dinner With Andre.

It might look like this: