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.

Sometimes when you’re typing, your wires get crossed up and you make a mistake, and then all of a sudden you’re thinking about where your fingers go. Slows you right down, it does. But then muscle memory does its job, and you’re back. Those slow moments are so interesting, though, because normally when you’re typing, you don’t think about where your fingers are going. You just hit the right letter at the right time. It’s almost like it’s a blur. But at those slow times when you’re uncertain, it can feel downright weird to type those keys. And you have to concentrate to do it. And then after a second or three of that, muscle memory kicks in, and away you go. I don’t know. I just thought it was interesting. And I’m not wrong.

That all refers to touch typing, incidentally. I learned to touch type in 1998, and it is the single most useful skill I have ever learned in my entire life. There’s no competition.

One time, in a professional setting, a guy asked me how I learned to type. And I told him, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. And he was like, “I didn’t know people actually used that.” I thought it was kinda funny. I don’t remember how he said he learned to type. Back in those days, recall, they used to give you a buncha software when you bought a PC. Most people threw most of it away. There was usually like maybe one “big” product, that you might actually use, but the rest tended to be garbage. Mavis Beacon was almost always in those packages. So it’s no wonder the guy thought it was garbage. To be perfectly honest, it was a little bit garbage. But it was an effective way for me to learn to type, which is the whole point, really.

I tried a version of Mavis when I was helping Marnie learn to type, and they didn’t do so well with it. They didn’t like the games. ‘Cause there were games. Games in which you typed things. And if you hit the wrong letter, the mouse falls off the block. Or whatever the fuck it is. The frog falls off the lily pad. Shit like that. Sometimes you had to type things quickly, and Marnie really didn’t like those ones. So we switched to a different program, I think it was web-based and free, and Marnie did a lot better with that. Did it work? I can’t remember when I had Marnie learn typing, but several years afterwards, I asked them if they still used touch typing, and the answer was basically, “Sort of.” They organically developed their own thing, which combines elements of touch typing with elements of hunt-and-peck. I think that’s probably how most people type. It’s an approach that works. Marnie said they were glad to have had the typing training, that it was helpful to them. So that’s generally positive.

It is discovered that lice (head, genital, etc.) are actually self-aware, sentient, sapient beings, and as such, killing them is illegal because duh, that’s like totally murder and shit. So now when you get lice, you have to just leave it in there, unless you can find a volunteer’s body to transfer them to. This becomes a service that some people provide. The transfer process is time consuming and labor-intensive, and therefore inconvenient and expensive. ‘Cause you gotta get each nit onto a new hair safely, and that takes delicacy and precision. And time. And lice techs are paid by the hour.

Terrariums are created that can support ongoing, population-stable lice communities, and can also facilitate communication and cultural exchange between humans and lice. It turns out, lice are unbelievably cool and groovy people. The lice-human communication tech becomes portable, and not long after, the in thing to do is to harbor a lice colony, providing yourself as a living area and using the tech to communicate with your parasites. Who, as I said, are just really great fucking people. They are wise well beyond their humble status as vermin. And they have culture out the butt. It becomes unusual _not_ to harbor a lice colony familiar. Those who don’t are those who are allergic, or who aren’t good at carrying lice for whatever reason.

With the help of the communication tech, an agreement has been reached where lice will obtain consent prior to infesting a new host. So those who can’t support lice (or choose not to) won’t get infested without their consent. Lice become non-contagious. Or I mean, it can spread, they just have to obtain the consent of the new host. Which is impossible in most circumstances. So the lice just don’t spread like they used to in the old days. Like I said, they’re really cool people.

Hosting a lice colony can be less physically comfortable than not doing so, but it will enrich your life in all sorts of ways, and, assuming you take care of it, it will be a loyal, lifelong companion. So what do you say? Will you host a colony? I’ve got several available to choose from, all with ancestry and genetics and stuff. You won’t be getting mongrel herds from my showroom. And we’ll throw in the installation as part of the purchase price. I assure you, sir or madam, you won’t find a better deal anywhere else in town.