Sweet and worried in a town called Loofah, everyone drank yerba matte and kept their hair dry. They professed confusion in all relations, from global on down to interpersonal. Too hung up with existential anxiety to feed their dogs, their dogs wandered off to Dunkin’ Donuts, where they got jobs as dishwashers and rose to management. The dogs introduced mandatory bacon on all donuts. Sometimes their former owners came into Dunkin’ Donuts late at night, drunk or high, ordered a dozen bacon cinnamon puffs and ate them with a pleased awareness of the irony. "We're vegetarians," they told their former dogs. "$8.99 a dozen," the dogs said.

In the town of Loofah, it was considered a felony to take a picture of someone if they didn’t have their sunglasses on. There was a bulletin board in the Square where people posted the names of those who got all bitchy and mopey-faced when you slept around. Loofah wasn't perfect, natch. Plenty of people were still struggling to wrest themselves from such manifestations of the patriarchy as "monogamous relationships" and "sweatpants."

Girls got tattoos they'd show you only if you didn't ask. People installed iTunes in their babies. Men walked with a certain tentative deer-ish lope and adjusted either their messenger bag straps or their mustaches. Women spoke with a practiced wide-eyed vacancy. When people got happy, they got sad, because they didn't trust being happy, and they said so out loud. Most conversations entered quickly into the analysis of feelings: deep feelings, swirly feelings, choo-choo feelings, feelings stacked on top of other feelings, feelings with the water on, antique Gold Rush era feelings, feelings in lime juice, partially aborted feelings, feelings with names like Feelie McFeelie Britches.

No one was quite sure what it meant to have a body but they kept giving each other head. One girl buzzed her hair off and moved in with a homeless man. They slept together in his car, a 1980s era Toyota parked permanently in the Whole Foods parking lot. He spoke in prophecies of Patrick Ewing, claimed Patrick Ewing would soon descend from his terrible height to save us all. People agreed: that girl had it made. Chic as shit. "'Chic as shit,'" they said. They drank beer water spiked with caffeine water. They walked slowly along the railroad tracks in summer, wearing cut-off jean shorts, dreaming of the infinite self and what if you could stretch a self the whole length of a railroad track? What if you could feel every feeling at once?

They drew their legs up to their knees and smoked on their couches, staring out the window, ashing into an empty beer bottle. They had imaginary conversations before they had real ones. They considered and decided against. Someone had a spot near the river where he kept a recliner. He flicked cigarettes into the river and bought new ones. He walked briefly into the water and then walked right back out.