Seamless and even the flow of assets into assets into stocks into bonds into liquid into…

He wakes up inside of this neon dream surrounded by $$$$$’s and $$$$$’s of personal affects. He is inside of a polystyrene freak show and this clutter of “urban survival gear” is his bedroom.

He was sleeping…

Rhythmically breathing from within the neural confines of his vacant, subconscious.

He slips back into his slumber like the sandy tide into the open blue ocean…

…His eyes open and hundreds of tropical fish surround him. The sea floor is a network of interlaced coral, the color’s range well outside of our known spectrum. Beautiful fish dart about the phosphorescent mesh, and he stares out at them, floating in the buoyant tropical water as you would in the zero gravity of outer space. Bodies neither sink nor rise. No up and no down.

Just floating.

Captured between judgments. Somewhere between right and wrong. No sense of accomplishment and no fear of admonishment for anything that he thinks or does or says or expresses. Suspended from the opinions of anything else in the whole of the universe. Just his mind and his self... Together. Two lovers eternally grateful for the other's company, alone within each other.

This is the ultimate act of sensory masturbation.

…He feels a large cold hand close around his neck accompanied by an annoying voice, shrill and unintelligible, coercing him away from his utopian loneliness. An alarm reminds him to get up and as he stutters back into his conscious mind he can hear the alarms actual meaning: “.R.e.t.u.r.n. .t.o. .t.h.e. .s.t.e.a.d.y. .s.h.i.t. .s.t.r.e.a.m. .o.f. .f.i.s.c.a.l. .d.i.a.r.r.h.e.a. .a.n.d. .f.e.c.a.l. .s.o.c.i.a.l. .d.e.s.i.r.e.” it repeats.

“…I have my SUV and my bills and my children and my acquaintances and my wife and my mortgage and my DKNY shirts and I have all of the shit that money can buy…” – A consumer report.

Here, among the animate, he has everything that he is supposed to have. Here among the animate, he doesn’t have his self.

Walking through these crowded streets among hundreds of other people among hundreds of individual consciousnesses he feels completely alone; a refugee in an unknown land. Unsure of why he ran away and where exactly it is that he ran to.

Again he finds himself huddling close to his empty overcoat, fighting against the cold and overbearing nature of reality… Fighting against everyday and like everyday he is fighting to return to his self.

To return to his sleep…