I had arrived. The club was on a sprawling estate where one could indulge in a different pastime every day of the year. It was, in fact, as large as a city, but much better than a city. SO much better was this place that some had elected to never leave. Entire generations had passed in the completion of certain complex board games. Forests were grown, cut down, and used to line parapets, to construct arched minarets within cathedrals that dripped and ran with water from clouds which formed up in the misty dome, a ten mile lens of smoked quartz etched with acids to reveal a monochromatic cosmology of figures, fantastical structures, in scenes of every conceivable dramatic abrogation of my commonplace and forgettable past. The sun cast beams through only certain elements of the carvings, komorebi for the structures below twinkling in long shafts broken by finches, hawks, wrens, kites, robins, thrashers, sparrows, parrots, gulls, storks, heron, and the occasional buzzard. That building housed fourteen hundred people, each within a house shaped like an old camera warmed by focused light through their rooftop lenses.
The cars were all exotic. The people were exotic and yet reserved, like wind-up toys that became animated when you approached them, and they drifted into tapestry at a distance. I was perfectly content and comfortable, but unaware of my own appearance. I just kept finding myself being addressed in languages I had never before spoken by name and title that made me dizzy with admiration. Truthful Earl of Arron-in-Delphi, King Vespa, Hummy Beat Magi Consort, Il Flaminga, stuff like that.
I went through towns by carriage drawn by robots. I had a fleet of gondoliers that had defected to reside in a garland club to my left, a wine tasting behind a ziggurat to my right, and below me, a river made of strawberry wine, the cheap kind, but ice cold and crazy pink.
I was making wreaths of flowers, spider silk, plastic fruit and the carapaces of sterilized beetles. I traded them at a typewriter club for an Underwood. I was doing all of these weird and relaxing things with an unseen companion. I was always waiting for their immediate return, but my consciousness was going between different bodies.
It crossed my mind that I might be dead, but the fontina staircase was so yummy, I climbed all the way down to a cavern of phosphorescent bean bags before I knew it, and found myself in an undead portion of the club.
I realized I was drunk, possibly on absinthe. Everywhere there was music. It oozes from everything, yet far away, there-and-not-there like my dream companions.
I was looking at some old teletype machines with a teletype club at a lounge carved from a single block of olivine when I realized I needed to turn my drone business into a non-profit, and awoke with my cat walking up my body as though I was a sidewalk.
Fifty State Banana 