Ethan Abides

I wish interaction could be reduced to an exchange of lozenges. Everybody has a small orifice on their forehead, out of which lozenges are dispensed. Give someone a lozenge you’ve dispensed, and if they eat it, they’ll totally get who you are, where you’re coming from, and where you’re going. Or at least, a snapshot of that from when you generated the lozenge.

The popular thing has always been for two people to exchange lozenges and then have sex, but lozenge exchange is nonsexual almost as often. It’s easy to see how useful lozenge exchange could be in a nonsexual context.

A trick is to dispense a lozenge when you’re really fucking happy, and then save it, and later in life you can eat the lozenge and enjoy the circumstances and happiness anew. You find lozenge jars at gift shops in tourist spots.

People getting married will sometimes both dispense lozenges at the culmination of the ceremony, and then they share the lozenges on their first anniversary. So of course there’s nuptial lozenge storage jars, and they get all dolled up, as you can no doubt imagine. I mean, they’re often tasteful, too.

In the lozenge section of the grocery or drug store, they’ll have more practical storage solutions, ones that enable you to label and sort your lozenges. They usually resemble pill cases. Not to imply that you can buy lozenges at a store, a crass notion. But you know how the grocery store will have like a stationary section, office supplies? It’s that kinda thing with the lozenge merchandise. And then at the drugstore, you’ll have the same merchandise, but a few more options, and maybe a couple nice options.

How many lozenges you make is a matter of circumstances and personal choice. Some people make several a day, and some people never make one. Your lozenge dispenser needs time to recharge after dispensing a lozenge. Say about three hours? But when it’s ready again, you won’t feel like you “need to go” or whatever. You can make another lozenge at your leisure. Lozenge generation is purely voluntary. Nothing bad will happen to you if you never dispense a lozenge in your life.

Lozenge generation is instinctual and kicks in sometime during puberty. You don’t need to learn how to dispense a lozenge; you just do it. Everyone’s lozenge shapes are slightly different to everyone else’s, but always the same from the same person. So if somebody knows your lozenge shape, they could pick your lozenge out of a collection.

If you eat more than one lozenge at a time, they all taste like shit and have no effects. One at a time, people.

Lozenges vary in color. There are exceptions, but usually a blue lozenge is generally positive, and on orange lozenge is generally negative, but that’s just a rule of thumb. There are positive-feeling orange lozenges, and negative-feeling blue lozenges, and sometimes you get weird colors from left field. They could be literally anything. Legend tells of someone who dispensed a candy-striped lozenge once. They saved it for years, and then finally one night they had it before bed and died in their sleep. Don’t eat the candy-striped lozenge! Not unless you’re ready.