Jacob, from a recap I read once a week, no kidding:

… Guy gets on a train with a box, airholes in the side. The man he sits down next to asks him about it, and he admits that he’s got a mongoose in there. Dude B is like, “Not something normal, like a bunny or acat?” No, there’s more to the story. “It’s because of my older brother. He’s a drunk, among other things, and at this point he’s just completely out of his tree. He sees serpents, everywhere. Everywhere he looks, he’s seeing these snakes and they make him terrified.” And Dude B is like, “So they’re imaginary?” Yeah. “So then why the mongoose?” And the first guy smiles and looks very meaningfully at the box, which is empty. “Imaginary mongoose.”

Quick takes: Why is it, when boys build a robot, the first thing they have it do is learn to blow them? Honestly, are beejers that hard to come by, fellas? Are you that desperate for oral constantly that upon creating anything, your first thought is whether it’ll suck you off? And your second is whether it’ll punish you? I swear, I think Daniel Graystone’s life might be easier if he just accepted that the virtual world’s true achievements will always be in the field of porn, and he should settle down and make some Tauron-Sagittaron gangbang bukkake flicks already.

Tsattie! I was just bitching we hadn’t seen her. And hey there, Evelyn, doing Joseph’s dishes but then being all, “No, we’re not dating, I always help my boss’s kids get ready for school and stare at him stalkatively while talking about coffee and keys like an OCDI Dream of Jeannie, sure.” So glad that turned into sex, because after she pulled him out of New Cap City they were either going to frak or it would get pathetic, and at first I was worried we were going to the pathetic place there.

How much do I love that this show is pretty much over the different ways people can frak one another and is basically just about exploring the relationships that actually exist? Like, okay, here’s Sam talking about his husband and their arguments, and instead of being a Very Special Tauron Gay Relationship, it’s just … Sam talking about nobody else getting his devotion to the Tauron equivalent of the IRA and Joseph telling him to get bent. Ditto Amanda and Mar-Beth’s conversation, which wasn’t really “So how many penises are involved here, and who sleeps in whose bed, and how does the One True God feel about this?” so much as it was “Who’s in charge in this house?”

So is Clarice working, right now? Is she on some kind of Crazy Leave, which I’ve always felt every job should have, or has she quit in order to yell at everyone in the house that God’s will is absolving her from doing really stupid shit all the time? Like, as Mar-Beth put it, awesomely: Adopting terror mom?!

She’s got a whole farm of imaginary mongooses (mongeese?) all designed to keep her from seeing what she’s done in the name of what she wants, and Daniel’s trouble is he can’t stop seeing it. He can’t even remember what the objective even originally was, which is how you let your work get out of control and eventually get out of your hands. It’s not that he can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s that he burned the fucking forest down looking for one particular leaf, and now he can’t conceive that a forest ever existed.

So he’s getting mad at Virtual Amanda for not helping him clarify that the world was on fire and it was his fault. I get him sometimes so hard it hurts.

A.