Briefly, Anyway — I’ve been procrastinating on doing one of these for long enough, so here goes. My name is Ben and I’m a 26-year-old writer living in Philadelphia. I love to write. Some of the authors that have had the greatest impression on me are Tom Robbins, Khaled Hosseini, Neil Gaiman, Christopher…

An interesting feature of the present is that we’re all-time travelers now. I can’t believe we’ve spent over two entire years like this. None of us can. I’m hardly the first to point it out, but the “Tiger King” phase of Corona feels as though it was a decade ago…

Here I am again, walking through my old high school. Everything seems just the way that I remember it. I’m dreaming. I recognize that, though, this time; it’s a lucid dream. A sense of equanimity seems to pervade everything as I examine each feature of the hallway carefully. I wonder…

A Lucid Dream 6 — I’m in my high school. I’m sitting in a back room talking with an old acquaintance. We’re no longer high school students and we both understand that. It’s not really an interaction I want to be having and I get the impression that he feels the same way. But we…

A Vivid Dream 7 — I’m walking through a forest with my girlfriend by my side. In real life, we’ve already broken up. But sometimes in my dreams we still spend our time together. Sometimes my sleeping mind hasn’t fully wrapped its head around the notion that we’re gone from each others lives. But as…

Letting the Algorithm Be My Guide — I see in my feed that an older Facebook friend of mine has commented “so ridiculous” on a video captioned “Clever way to clean your toilet.” The person who posted the video appears to be a helpful looking young mother. I decide to watch the video myself. An anonymous hand…

Our Algorithmic Overlords — One of the strangest features of social media is the algorithms that control the experience we have. In the early days of these apps, they were noticeably more personal. The news feeds we would see were determined almost entirely by the people that we friended and followed. Tweets, posts, images…

A Tribute — I wrote this piece two years ago today when my dog passed away. We got you for my eighth birthday. Days later as I ran down the hallway you gleefully mirrored my motions. That was the first game we ever played. We named you “Boo.” You were too small for…

A Lucid Dream 14 — I’m sitting in my bedroom with my good friend Isaiah when my old dog, Boo, ambles into the room. I realize suddenly that I’m dreaming. “Did you know she died two years ago?” I ask him. He looks at me a little confused as Boo greets him and brushes past…