Another year of watching all the neighborhood children prepare for the annual #Gumbification ritual by boring ballistic compensation vents in the shallow wood of the trees. The adults are all harnessed in to the rooftops, laying the traditional Fresnel mirror array.
All so that when the clock strikes midnight the mass of vitreous aether stockpiled in the layer of porous crust sealing this layers of time can erupt through the treetops without the recoil damaging the still-fragile, still-gelatinoid skin of the coming year; and the aether beams are focused efficiently enough to unseat the temporal gasket at the apex of the spinal column sealing this year's skeletal system inside our essence.
If there is one thing we can all still agree on as a culture, its that it's necessary to take advantage of the one time of year that the magnetospheric lattices align to shuck us all out of our crablike bodies and leave us gumbified, capable of sequestering another year of nutrients.
Reminder that it's no longer considered polite to lap up a small portion of your neighbor's essence while you are both suspended in the cryonic soup phase between time planes. In the past it would remind us all of our continued existence, but so many people began to lap more than their share that most people who have made adequate preparations have an automated, titrated autolap system. If you perceive someone with a pneumatic hum tuned to 48kHz, don't worry, they aren't at risk of premature evaporation into the intertemporal space and you don't need to slurp or lap at them