I love you, sunshine. Good morning! Thank you for being there for me every day, to wake me up and warm me and force me to buy overly specific lotions and SPF50. I love you!

On a crisp summer day, while blowing bubbles with a straw into a glass of iced watermelon juice, and feeling like a child, I was faced with an adult perplexity. 

I had to choose between two lovers.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the Dasani water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is Dasani water?”

“I bet it’s not real,” I said. “It looks like one of those little rugs you can buy, with a black hole on it.”

My boss Joey caught my bluff. “Oh, yeah, Ollie? If it’s not real, why don’t you step on it?”

I wasn’t going to, and neither was he. Nor were any of the dozen or so customers who happened to be inside Joey’s Creamery on that nondescript July afternoon, seeking some respite from the sweltering heat, when a hole, perfectly round and blacker than any black I’d ever seen, opened in the floor.

Robert was getting concerned. He was floating in the ocean in a glass bottle as broad as his shoulders. Its neck accommodated his own, leaving his head poking out of the top.

He was looking for his hat.