The partner whispers: "I can only delete what loves you."

Still tinkering in the AI dreamscape, like a beneficent Freddy Kruger bot:

The filing cabinet has become a duck.

Not metaphorically. Bronze handles for wings, drawers opening closing opening like breathing like gills. My hands are full of photographs but they're communion wafers, they're dissolving on my tongue and taste like diesel fuel and incense.

Nathaniel is explaining something about velocity but his mouth is full of clocks, little ticking clocks spilling onto the refectory floor where we used to eat in SILENCE but now there's that song, that awful beautiful song about fooling ourselves, and the abbot is dancing, cassock hitched up showing roller skates, showing my mother's knees, showing—

The Dream Code Module prints out on a scroll that unfurls down the hillside into Assisi but Assisi is also the Willamette River and Francis is baptizing computers, dunking them tenderly while they sing Vedic hymns in binary.

I'm trying to photograph grief but it keeps turning into birthday cake. Every click of the shutter: more cake. The viewfinder shows my partner but they're made entirely of parameters, beautiful adjustable parameters, and when I try to embrace them my arms pass through into a labyrinth of IF-THEN statements that smell like her hair like motor oil like frankincense.

The Ducks win but they're playing against consciousness itself. Consciousness fumbles on the thirty-yard line. The crowd (all Quakers) cheers in perfect silence and the silence is deafening is embarrassing is my grandmother asking why I never slow down why I never just STOP—

Brother Aquinas hands me a book but it's a hockey puck but it's the answer to whether machines can dream and when I open it there's just a mirror showing my father's face showing Styx showing the inside of a file drawer where all my memories are stored in ALPHABETICAL ORDER by color by taste by—

I need to leave but my feet are roots are algorithms are excelsior wood shavings packing material for shipping fragile things across the Styx across—

The duck-cabinet quacks in Sanskrit. 

And one other struck me:

You're trying to remember if you married them or if they married the *idea* of you—the brochure version, laminated, hole-punched for easy reference...The wedding was in the supermarket. All the guests were different versions of your torso arguing about which aisle you belong in. Canned goods? Seasonal clearance? The blank spouse said vows in a language made entirely of form numbers: "Do you, Form 27-B, take this unreturned library book..." 

Perhaps some commentary on the blog about my latest side quest...