A thirty-year-old Brooklynite on the cusp of supernatural adventure struggles with the strangeness of everyday life.

"Just a week ago he was on the subway, sitting across from a woman with a tiny dog in her purse, and as he watched her tickle the little goatish beard under its chin he made the mistake of beginning to think about the very existence of dogs in general. People have pets. He repeated it. People have pets. It began to become odd; the very concept of pet began to slide out of his grasp. How did it get to the point where we began to keep animals as, like, accessories? He spent pretty much the rest of the ride staring at the dog, thinking basically: Holy shit, human beings, the shit they come up with. When he got back to his apartment he looked up Dog in Wikipedia and lost the rest of the day. By midnight, he had somehow drifted to looking at videos of fighting Madagascar cockroaches, actually developing opinions on the cockroach-fight-video genre, cold, alone, uncertain as to what exactly had happened."

Jeremy P. Bushnell is a contributing editor to Longform.org.