Well, of course I climbed atop the slab and I lay down on it

I am having a relatively miserable night, so I have been talking to spatch about various things, including Sherlock Holmes, as one does, and I mentioned the perennial post that goes around about modern AU Holmes and how people are always trying to work out an equivalent for the cocaine habit where the key features are not merely a form of self-medication of which Watson disapproves but also a drug practice popularly considered physically and mentally beneficial and without missing a beat Rob immediately said, "Microdosing." And I hadn't seen that one in the wild yet, so I mention it here.

(In the interests of honesty, he wishes me to add that his first, semi-serious suggestion was kombucha: "It's trendy and people claim it's got super-ass benefits." I have zero difficulty picturing Holmes fermenting his own kombucha, with particular attention to cultivating his own distinctive strains of yeast and bacteria and explaining them to visitors and possibly not warning Watson sufficiently about how much the flat is going to smell like a combination laboratory-brewery, which is in fact what it now is. I don't believe the terrarium in which the vials of E. coli coexisted with the plates of Dictyostelium discoideum to which I fed them ever did cease to smell faintly like hundred-year-old gym socks. I feel nostalgic about it to this day. My parents, considerably less so.)

It was special, it was deadly, it was ours and then it wasn't

Unfortunately, the relatively miserable night was chased by an extremely miserable day, but in between I had the first dream in weeks that wasn't a nightmare, which I record partly for that fact and partly because I don't normally dream in the MCU. For reasons that were jolted out of my head by the phone call that woke me, Captain America was supposed to have died in some heroic effort—not a fight, more like one of those industrial or residential disasters where he got everyone out of the building alive and then it fell in on him and a vibranium shield can protect a person from a lot, but not twenty flaming stories of rubble—which did not prevent me from discovering Steve Rogers, in civilian clothes, in a ditch, looking extremely beat-up and not wanting anyone to know he was alive. Awake, I assume there was some political thriller aspect to his secrecy; asleep, I managed to find him rooms in an apartment building of the red-brick nineteen-teens vintage (the real element of fantasy here is the notion that it wouldn't have taken me weeks if not months on the Boston housing market) and after that the narrative became mostly about Steve in his new digs and the older neighbors on his hall and their curiosity about the reticent new arrival who looks like a veteran and takes the precautions of a fugitive and is usually found sketching in the courtyard or on the roof and since the results reminded me of boarding-house stories from the '30's and '40's, I think they must have been reasonably comforting for Steve, especially when strangers started making sure he was getting enough to eat. I remember one neighbor brought him enough kugel for an entire family and another left him a different kind of jangajji on the side every time. He listened to them talk about their lives and drew portraits of them or the history they told him about. And then I was interrupted and never found out what happened, but apparently my subconscious thinks that if Steve Rogers is going to exist in the twenty-first century, he should just get to chill with a bunch of cool people who are simultaneously older and younger than he is and don't want anything from him except a sympathetic ear, although if it does follow the pre-Code model, he will almost certainly end up matchmaking a couple of neighbors even by accident. I suspect it of coming belatedly out of a conversation with sholio and rachelmanija about superhero narratives that aren't all crime-fighting all the time, but I still wasn't expecting it.

selkie reminded me of Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977) which I read for the first time in the omnibus Biting the Sun (1999) and didn't know until just now were the first two-thirds of a never-finished trilogy, which puts them in the same position as The Silver Metal Lover (1981) and Metallic Love (2005). Our conversation produced the line "Groshing to vada your derisann eek," as I suddenly made the connection between Jang slang and Polari, but the thing that's sticking with me is a passage near the end of the second book, which I had forgotten. It's part of a declaration of love between two people who have known one another in various bodies, genders, and states of miscommunication: "In Four BEE and BAA and BOO the physical side was, in any case, a joke, wasn't it? If you fell for someone, you fell for them, their personality—their—their self, whatever it is—not whatever flesh they happened to have put on that unit." It's a callback to a much less successful interaction in the previous book: "It's not the body that matters; the physical side is a joke in Four BEE and BAA and BOO. It's irrelevant. It's like wanting someone because they're wearing red toe-rings. Oh, ooma, can't you understand?" What's notable is that I don't think it struck me at all in high school, even though it is a major point of contention/philosophy. Even in a world where I couldn't change shape every thirty days give or take a suicide, falling for the person made so much sense as an attitude that I read right past it and focused on things like the city not allowing one of the narrator's friends to customize herself a cat-body that purrs. "The fur's only a compromise, really."

If you have already contributed to the Kickstarter for The Deadlands, thank you dearly for your support. If you have not, please consider dropping a coin through the door of the water to the world below. May is the ghost-month of the Roman calendar; we want to reach it with plenty in hand for the restless dead.