I can’t say if it’s worth trying to track anything in our reality. I know every three winters we have these patterns where it will rain in December and then it’s like someone canceled the weather. January gets all hot and dry and the vegetation seems dead and then in like February it turns green almost in real time. You wonder how something like that could have happened while you were staring at a monitor. 

I remember I went to walk the dog once and spent the rest of the morning packaging images in InDesign. When I let her out again at lunch, everything looked like an oversaturated adjustment layer in Photoshop. Beneath the dead growth there were veins of sage and, across the valley and underfoot, star thistle, and little orange wildflowers I don’t know the names of had come up from the dust in maybe three hours.

I mostly avoid questioning whether we live in a simulation. I also probably play more videogames than most guys I’ve dated. With the way the day|night cycles are accelerated, rapid change seems like a common open-world system. The best algorithms have a way of making existence seem more real and compressed than the actual product, which is the way my life feels, especially when I stop and think about the pace of things.

I was living in inland San Diego that winter. I’d moved out of LA in the fall and was working from home in this place that had once been part of a tract of fishing cabins, which the military built for families on leave from Camp Pendleton. Down the road there was a Depression Era dam and the reservoir they created with the trapped water. I guess at some point after the Second World War, the government subdivided everything into the private sector.

My rental had been converted for fulltime occupation in maybe the late 1950s. The floors were slanted but they were real wood and seemed to glow in the way only real wood will glow versus laminate. The rafters were made of pine and when it was hot the termites would drop their wings and come falling out of the ceiling. The living space was maybe three hundred square feet total. 

 A white barn owl lived out front in the dead fronds of an untrimmed palm tree. The yard was fenced with chicken wire so I could let the dog run around without worrying about her wandering off into the cactus or down to the lake, where there were grebes and a shit ton of coyotes. Essentially the area was quiet and it was kind of an oasis tucked inside the sprawl of Southern California. Except it was also one of the only places in like a fifty-mile radius that got relatively dark at night, and it sat between two freeways and like 1.3 million people, so you had to worry about burglaries, if you went out during certain hours, and about once a year a woman’s body would show up down by the lake with her hands and head cut off, since whatever open space the reservoir created made it a convenient place to unload an indiscretion.

Sometimes I feel like that kind of variance is an extension of this place—with its sun and its palm trees and its concrete and its metal. Or it’s the result of simple demography and the per-capita rate of sociopaths at a certain scale of population. I try not to think about it one way or the other. 

While I was living next to the reservoir, I tried not to think about how the last body had been out there for like three days, picked over by the ravens and the coyotes, before some construction worker found her on his lunch break. Thinking about things has always been my problem. 

Instead I focused on the dog, and playing Sekiro, which was on PS4 and built around a hybridized version of shinobi and supernatural concepts. The overriding game mechanic reanimated the main character from a corpse each time I lost a swordfight, which happened constantly because the enemy AI was insanely proficient. The construct appeared to be a meta way of establishing some sort of explanation for the multiple lives we experience in most video games. It also seemed like the developers wanted you to learn from your errors in each encounter, then apply novel attack combinations and pattern recognition to correct them.

Sometimes I watched the barn owl at night, perched on the telephone pole across the street, tearing with its beak at a rabbit. I also spent a decent amount of time on various graphic design projects. The internet was fast once I had AT&T install new coaxial cable and I stayed employed by obsessively checking a task-management software my coworkers used and applying light but erratic self-discipline.

At a macro scale my firm was in the process of decentralization. It was a corporatized marketing conglomerate and someone had done the math with regard to facilities, insurance coverage, and payroll taxes. The conclusion was that they were able to move most of the creative teams to telecommuter or independent contractor statuses, and save thirty percent of the budget. 

I fell into PHASE III so my conversion was low-hassle. It appeared that during the PHASE II rollout there was a discussion of whether California would allow essential employees to be classified as contractors. The optimization analysts were able to work around it via strategic renaming of positions and job functions. 

Most of us were into the restructure. No one wants to commute through LA or do their hair and sit in fluorescent lighting if they don’t have to. We also ended up with more money in each paycheck without the standard deductions, except we all got slaughtered in April by income taxes. 

The W-9 people I knew were trying to save like twenty percent of each check for that eventuality, though none of us ever really managed. Statistics indicate more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. I can only contribute the data point that three hundred square feet in a Mediterranean climate, even inland with termites and slanted floors, costs a fortune. I compensated by spending less at the grocery store, and I didn’t bother with insurance, and I never went to the bar, really, and ran up my credit card. 

The arrangement was maybe good for my sanity. I can’t remember what I did the night before that day with the sage and the wildflowers. I’m assuming I was awake late since I woke up feeling hungover. I don’t mean I actually had a hangover, I just mean it felt that way, which happens when you fall asleep on a Tuesday night at eight-thirty then stay up on Wednesday playing video games until two in the morning. Maybe a hangover isn’t the right description. It’s more like living permanently with a fucked up circadian rhythm.

I do remember that morning I stood out in the yard blinking into the sunlight. Then I went inside and made a quesadilla in the toaster oven. I ate it at the window, watching the hills, and at some point one cloud, like the only cloud in the sky, passed over the sun and everything went dim for maybe a minute. That’s when it seemed like all the color fell out of the world and this dream I was having was over. I mean the sky was full sunlight again as I sat back down at the monitor, except nothing, no matter how hard I squinted, still looked like a digital print by Kimber Mallet.

At dusk I went back outside and I feel like the dog almost caught one of these ground squirrels that lived in the neighborhood. The people on NextDoor kept claiming they carried fleas, which carried the plague, but I never believed it. The barn owl ate them all the time without a problem. I’d find little regurgitated pellets at the foot of the palm tree filled with squirrel hair and bones ground into slivers.

The bats were out hunting clouds of no-see-ums and it was getting cool and it smelled like sage and dust and, in the distance, I could hear the low hum of the 15 inland, running through Escondido. I walked past the tension wires across from the reservoir and down to the dirt lot with a Mexican restaurant, which had pretty shitty food, but highly decent palomas. 

I sat down in the bar under the Christmas lights that were strung in the rafters, no matter what time of year it was, and the kiva fireplace, which I never saw lit, in the corner. It would be amazing, I recall thinking, if you could make every sip of a cocktail taste like the first one or the last one. The beginning and end of everything are always idealized. The rest of the time we’re just chasing the impressions they leave through interstitial moments.

I kept texting with this guy from work who called any interaction removed from a public-facing platform dark social. Like if I asked him where he heard something, and it was from his friend while they were sitting around somewhere, or even on a private (not corporate) thread, he’d be like, “On dark social.” 

I asked him once if everything in real life qualified and he said yeah probably. He was kind of into pills and had the habit of speaking in vagary like all addicts. I assume the purpose was to keep each response open to interpretation. If the listener didn’t have hard information they couldn’t assemble the truth by comparing iterative versions of the same story.

He still lived in LA and I kind of missed him, even though the beginning and the end of every time we saw each other were, predictably, the only aspects each of us seemed to care about. 

“What’d you do last night?” I wrote and he sent me an image of Eddie Murphy from like the 1980s. In the photo he was eating a steak and frites that were scattered across the small of a nude model’s back, her hips lifted slightly, her body facedown and arranged lengthwise against the rail of a balcony in Paris.

“I didn’t know you liked to travel,” I responded.

“I was somewhat motivated.”

“I bet the menu was expensive.”

“I got the rib eye but I didn’t have the full girlfriend experience so it wasn’t that extravagant.” 

“A decent upside of limiting your options.”

“That’s why I mostly stay in these days.”

“Except you still have to pay for the hardware to entertain yourself.”

“Actually last night I only went out for a little while.” 

“I stayed home.”

“PS4 keeping you occupied?”

“Not as much as the owl.”

When I image-searched the photo later it was clearly a deepfake. According to Gizmodo, it wasn’t even Eddie Murphy in the shot—it was just some dude who sort of looked like him. The earliest iteration of the file was from 2007. 

In the task management software at work, which definitely qualified as a public platform, we’d embed phraseology that only made sense to the two of us. Inside jokes are unprofessional but they do keep things entertaining. And a marketing firm, even highly corporatized, isn’t exactly the most professional environment to begin with.

Everything was delivered in the passive voice and laced with overtones of scientific language, Latinate derivatives, corporate speak, or militarized jargon. He was a copywriter and he told me he’d read a lot of Orwell and Vonnegut in high school, plus this skate writer C.R. Stecyk, and too much George Saunders in his MFA program. I picked up the tone pretty easily. I’ve always been good at appropriation. 

“Assets in the design folder for you,” he’d write.

“Are they Paris-balcony-quality components or genuine holdings?”

“They’re of median quality but genuine. Directive is to leverage them for maximum impact.”

I put my phone down for a while and just sort of stared at the Christmas lights and drank my paloma. He sent me a few more texts which I didn’t respond to. They were nonsense about nothing and I only read them through the prism of his own self-entertainment. I’m thinking he was out somewhere too since they trailed off after a minute. 

The palomas at that place were made with Mexican soda, which was made with real cane sugar, and tasted better, like all Mexican soda. It was still pretty early and I wasn’t worried about them keeping me awake later. I ordered a second drink and checked my bank account and did some math and decided to get a chile relleno. I ordered it à la carte after I realized the entree was like thirteen dollars and the chile alone was five fifty. I ate some chips while I waited and read the news on my phone then made myself stop since everything in my feed felt abstract and pointless. I don’t know why I can’t sit anywhere anymore without feeling like my eyes should be doing something. 

When the food came I ate it super fast and drank the rest of my cocktail and paid and left through the side exit. Just getting my card back I had this feeling like I was being more awkward than normal. Something in me had disappeared but that’s how it always is. 

I cut through the reservoir on the way home because I knew it would be darker and the stars were out and it would be easier to see them down by the water. The air smelled like pine trees from whatever conifers had survived this infestation of non-endemic beetle, which spent the winter burrowing into all of them and laying eggs, then spent the spring killing them with more burrowing from their offspring, which were just repeating the cycle. Maybe it was eucalyptus I smelled instead of pine. The more I think about it they’re more or less similar. 

A little further past the trees I could also smell fresh water. Sometimes I’d find used condoms near the overlook for the dam from the high school kids in Escondido. Actually the dog would find them and I’d have to pull on her leash to keep her from doing whatever she’d do with a used condom if I wasn’t there to stop her. 

I angled under the power lines and walked along the water. Instead of looking at the stars, I imagined what my body might look like after three days in the chaparral. I watched the reflection from the lights on the houses against the surface, and these Vs of motion trailing from the grebes, and floated in my sneakers across the dust, and three minutes later I was standing in my kitchen. 

The dog came over to me and touched my hand with her nose and I sat down on the couch with her. In the dark everything looked hyperrealistic like it had earlier. I guess that’s the impression the chemicals in your brain manufacture if you survive even the vaguest possibility that you might get murdered. 

When I woke up I was laying on the living room floor. The back window over the stove was open and I could still smell the air outside, only it was inside now, and it took me a second to remember where I was and what I’d been doing. I had a pillow under my head and the controller for the PlayStation on my chest and Sekiro was paused and the dog must have put herself to bed at some point since I could hear her snoring from somewhere. 

I stood up and closed the window and it seemed cold in the kitchen and then something white flickered near the ceiling. Any other time I’ve seen a bird indoors, it’s always been like a sparrow in the airport or something. Most people watch them hit the glass and flutter to the linoleum, all confused and erratic, and no one does anything to help, since what can you accomplish without a net and uncommon patience.

I definitely had this impression when I saw the owl on the beam, watching me through its eyes, that I was still asleep, about to wake up in a second. Then it rotated its head along that fulcrum all owls have in their cervix, which makes them look animatronic, and the whole thing was too weird to be anything but legitimate reality.

I slid against the wall and moved sideways against the counter. I considered reopening the window, where the owl must have come in, but I had this vision of what might happen if it misjudged such a narrow vector, and it hit the glass too, and started thrashing across the kitchen. Eventually I backed toward the couch and opened the front door and it dropped from the ceiling. It passed so close to me that I could feel the displacement from its wings, which kept me from really watching as it disappeared over the palm trees. 

I’ve thought about telling that story a few times when I’m out somewhere with people, or whatever, but I know without a photo or a video it would be impossible to convey what it felt like or what really happened. A lot of interactions are pointless if there isn’t an artifact to support them. 

I lived there for maybe three more months, I saw the owl a few more times on the telephone pole, and I beat Sekiro, eventually. In the fall I moved back to LA for this new job that pays better and my life has been pretty much relentless since then. 

I can’t stop having these dreams where I’m in InDesign and it keeps quitting before I can save the layout. I’m crazy busy. I’m always working. Everything keeps moving faster than feels natural.