There were jazz pickup bands playing everywhere, along a promenade. Someone onstage—not a musician—had two faces, one on either side of her head. She turned to show them both, and both were smiling.

I was watching an Eagles game. There was a tremendous first down on the final drive, the receiver running after the catch and stretching for an extra yard when he was tackled. But they lost.

We were at Lime Rock for races, with M. P. We found a place to park and then got beers from a stand up on the hill where I used to go when I was a kid. The track was near the ocean now. A giant tidal wave came in and swept me off my feet. After it receded I asked the bartender what she had and she pointed to a single tap of IPA. “I’ll have that then.” S. came over and decided it was best we buy a pitcher.

My older sister bought a guitar and strung it up weird. I was trying to fix it.

I had befriended the sixth man on the New York Knicks. I was walking with him from practice to the locker room. I don’t know if I was a reporter or what.

My colleague was trying to reach me in the middle of the night, telling me there was work to do. I replied with some difficulty, the email breaking up as I wrote it. I was practicing guitar in bed. My parents each came in and told me to stop, that I had to sleep.

The band was recording in a house somewhere—not the band house. I forgot my guitar of course. We worked on a song of mine. I wanted it to have a loungey feel. C. W. hummed a bit of “The Girl From Ipanema” and I said yeah, that’s it. As I was demonstrating the song I had the disconcerting feeling that I was making it up as I went.

My workplace was a chatbot development shop. We hired someone new and sure enough, I’d worked with him somewhere before. It was the type of thing where we barely recognized each other, but we did. We were in a large and sinister building, with several levels deep below ground that we didn’t have access to. Who knows what went on down there. One of my colleagues was talking about a new book by Wally Lamb in which the protagonist is a writer who tricks the entire community of writers’ agents somehow. I was testing one of the bots I had coded and the word “almost” was synonymous with the word “home.”