In the shallow ocean, I’m lifting mussels and sea-snails from the bed. Multicolored, shiny, they swim away, extending thin pneumatocyst filled anemone strands, like little Cthulu tentacles reaching for freedom. They roll in and out of the shells, extending with great length and gracefulness, gliding around the water.
“Look at that.” I point to a bright orange one I just picked up.
“When do we get to dive into the water?” Says a member of the group. I’m teaching a diving course and for some reason everyone thinks I mean Olympic diving rather than scuba diving. I give in and drag a tall diving platform out into the water and everyone climbs up to the top. It’s just floating on the water, somehow buoyant, unanchored. I check the water level and note that we are still too shallow to have someone dive off the platform. They would certainly see some great shellfish but too quickly and with an abrupt end.
I push the platform further out into the ocean and then realize that we aren’t tied to anything on shore. We could float away with the tide. There is no tide. That is the strange part about this ocean. Perfectly calm, it has no waves, like a vast and open salt-water swimming pool. I tie the platform up to something on the shore, but only a little bit. The divers are so eager, I don’t have time to do it properly.

In a restaurant above the water, it’s valentine’s day and a couple celebrates. Their food is terrible and their service is worse. I am waiting tables there.
We are playing a board game and I put all the pieces in the wrong place. “It’s a game like Roborally but with bots”. Nobody is very excited because they don’t like Roborally.

At my grandmother’s house, a band wakes up early to jam. They are playing Beatles songs with a punk overtone and I wish I brought my accordion because I could certainly jam with them. They record on Protools and sing like demons. I worry that they will wake my grandparents but then I figure they have already left for the day.

I’m killing time in a book store. The shop keeper has several old and valuable books for quite reasonable prices but I cannot get them because I am moving. I’ll get them later, I promise myself. The back half of the book store is a comic shop. I step in to kill a few minutes but it’s closed. As I open the door a short punk girl comes over and asks if she can help me.
“I was just seeing if the comic store is open.”
“Oh, no it’s closed today, didn’t you know?”
“Oh, right, it’s Sunday,” I mumble, “or, no, it’s Monday but it’s a holiday, right…”
As I’m leaving a guy is pointing to some comics on a shelf in the bookstore. It’s Elfquest and he says he has digital copies of the series on his iPhone, but he says it in a French accent so I expect his comics were in French too.

Taking the bus home, I get off later than usual. I want to head further north. I take my shirt off in the summer heat and I grab up at a Thai style tree branch. There are countless birds in the trees and they swarm away from me from tree to tree.
Soon, I realize that they are not running away but leading me. They fly closer to my head and I reach out. They land on my shoulder, my hands. They try to teach me the best way to approach them but I’m slower than they are. Suddenly, I’m looking down at someone else. He’s acting very slow, some might say moronic. He doesn’t get the birds perspective–the birds-eye-view. They try to communicate but he doesn’t understand. They show him a calendar they made and he reads it wrong, looking at the French instead of the English side. He doesn’t know any french and thinks they must have invented a new language. He reads it horribly aloud. He becomes their protectorate knight. He recruits a half dozen followers, some of which think he is insane. He stays with the birds until the great bird Armageddon, wearing a knight suit and carrying a great sword.