Erin Jane Nelson. Dylan

About

Every morning before starting his work, Dylan washes his eyeglasses and his wine glass from the night before. Occasionally, he loses his grip with predictable consequences: picking invisible shards out of the drain for days. The eyeglasses never seem to get as clean as he’d like. To measure where and how badly the lenses are dirty or scratched, he’ll sit in front of his laptop eyes fixed on the screen, and move his head from side to side. One time he tried to put his glasses in the dishwasher in hopes of really crystal cleaning them – the plastic melted and shrank around the lenses. Twirling the new shape in his fingers, he imagined how grotesque a head would have to be to fit them now. Oh well.

Dylan is developing a script that will re-season the syntax of all the schlock he’s forced to look at as he goes about his day eye to screen, thumb to glass. DYnamic LANguage Tea–he hopes–will warp and stitch content to make it sweeter and stranger for the end user. The process has been slow, though, since he can only work in spurts before a long rest. Half a century of banging on a backlit plastic keyboard, staring through a backlit piece of glass has produced rapid early-onset aging.

In addition to psychedelic browser extensions, he is also developing his own tea blends to combat the wrist and vision loss (amongst other bodily shortcomings). He collages leaves, petals, and pods into strange and effective proportions. He was once horrified to discover that the dried roses he’d been buying for an unbelievably good price per pound at the co-op were intended for potpourri. Oh well. What soap and water do for glass, tea [he imagines] does the same for the acidic soup inside the body–astringent and clarifying. Tea for joint pain, for stress, for energy. Tea that’s fermented with a soft mushroom for all these things twelve times over....

One morning, he rolls over in bed to find that the left lens of his glasses has cracked down the middle. Picking up last night’s wine glass, he notices a chip along the rim. Downstairs, his glass teapot lies in a twinkling pile of bits. His phone and computer flocked with magnetized scratches, screens darkened where they once glowed with potential. Dylan takes a deep breath and reaches for the broom.