The life partner sneaked off and got some pizza yesterday from this place when he was supposed to be going to the gym. It was some kind of partner alone time with pizza thing that I wasn’t allowed to participate in. I guess he felt guilty, so he brought me some pizza, which was small and cold and covered in onions and not at all keto, and I ate it because of course I did.

Within hours, I was dizzy and felt super weird, so I ate a whole thing of chocolate hummus right before bed because I thought it might help, which as it turns out is ten servings, not five like I thought, but whatever, and then I went to sleep and had disturbung dreams that I did in a disturbing way, which only happens when I’m stressed. I was flying around on my back refusing gravity, sort of superhero-like, but my foe was just some Costco employee who didn’t like neck tattoos with queer messaging.

I woke up and then started back in on the dream before I felt like I was even asleep again. I do not like it when that happens. I woke up again and checked my fitness watch only to see that it wasn’t pairing with my phone. I tried to pair it because I am governed by these technologies, and the phone decided to pair with my walking pad, which started beeping and flashing its lights unsettlingly like a digital presence being birthed into something that approximates being.

All of this of course woke my dog up, who then needed to potty outside, and so here I am, bloated, dizzy, and suddenly playing with my Magic 8 Ball at 2 a.m. and not liking what it’s telling me about poetry while simultaneously watching the news and not liking what it’s telling me about the world.

In the dream, I could fly horizontally really fast in the lavender Converse high tops I had in the 90s, but when I got to the woman from Costco, I would stop suddenly and hover midair, my feet inches from the woman’s face, and I would be mad that something was keeping me from crashing into her feet first. Now, I have to sit with that part of me, a dream part but still a part, and I also have to sit with the fear that my dog has cognitive decline because the walking pad may have woken her up tonight, but she’s been waking up in the middle of the night like this a lot lately. Right now, she’s pawing at me and wanting to play. I love her so much, more than those lavender high tops, and more than flying in dreams without the violent impulse behind the flying, and more than my smart tech that’s got me doing its bidding in the middle of the night, and maybe even more than the moon and the bats and the creek and the laccolith put together.

I mean, I love my dog and don’t know why she’s never in my dreams. It’s always some stand-in, like my childhood dog or a dog I don’t know who’s supposed to be her but isn’t. I want to be able to visit her in dreams every single night so we’re always together now and for the rest of my life.

I shouldn’t have had that pizza. Or that chocolate hummus. I am puffy and emotional, beyond the degree to which I am typically these things. It is dark. Even the walking pad has gone back to sleep. Something appears to be on fire on the news. The Magic 8 Ball says Outlook Not So Good. That should be on all the faces of its floaty thing these days. Outlook Not So Good. Outlook Not So Good. Outlook Not So Good. That floaty thing is an icosahedron, so I should technically say Outlook Not So Good twenty times, but I’ll spare you. Five times is already four times too many.

P.S. I also sat in the pizza somehow. A little of it. Messed up my workout jeans. But I took my shirt off, drank some milk, and listened to Kid Rock, which made everything OK.