Stories We bathe in them. We always have since the boredom of the cave on a rainy day. Later these stories were infused with learnings, or mystery or ritual. Lots of little ones now. Stories about ourselves and each other. The strange compulsive tales of reality television. Streamed, binged, pulped and kindled stories. Interviews and news and infotainment in long and short formats. Stories told with music or rhyme. Eloquent and thought-provoking porn stories. Documentaries, mocumentaries or shockumentaries. Stories in games and little, teeny tiny story fragments that get swiped through. Or our stories of availability and hope that get swiped through. Fictions and non-fiction and fictitious non-fiction. Stories in so many languages and some naked stories spread only by oral tradition. Now they’re pouring out from everywhere. Drenching us and burying what went before. Billions a day. There are stories for everyone and stories about nearly everyone. Now we consume stories on a huge scale. And yes, we need to shit them right out of our brains and flush them away to make room for more stories. We forget them. Even when we wish we could keep them. Some They help us to feel things. Understand differences and diversity. Provide insights into other worlds natural and human. There isn’t space for them all. But for some, there is a place forever. Unforgotten stories. Imagine being without them. No stories of any kind. Imagine if there was the equivalent of a story famine and they all died at once. Where would we be? Sometimes stories distract us from a story we may not care for so much sometimes. So we’d get story gardens growing all over again. And so these are my little contributions to the vast, heaving story ecology. Swim away little baby stories. As daddy makes his final check to make sure his little story looks presentable before it crashes out of the nest, he frowns at some of these stories and thinks to himself. ‘Who the fuck wrote that?’ They’re falling over a giant waterfall to join a story ocean whose memory reaches back to antiquity. And gazes forward, perhaps with a little trepidation. Many of the stories that ever were are floating, mixing while some sink and rot. Literature with nouveau narratives. Some of which will be dated soon. Very soon. All we need to do is find a good place for us to leap into what is an unimaginably complex ecology. And bathe in stories.