I’ve been living the dream for a year. My absolute favorite thing about this new dimension is that I can drum all night, working rhythms that are impossible on earth.

A normal person can’t do any rhythms effectively at all, at beats faster than about two beats a second, but they might be able to make noise a faster than that. Fastest I’ve ever seen a normie move is about five beats a second, but not uniform rhythm. The beats are uneven, and not in time with anything. A good musician should be able to do about the same, four or five beats per second, but keeping time well. A good pianist is much better. They're able to run two rhythms, one with each of their hands, and thereby double the pace by interweaving two hands independently. Mostly they don’t, though, focusing on keeping the two hands independent, but not so fast.

Drummers are a whole different breed. We expect to be able to do what even the pianist can’t … running ten or twelve beats per second, on a reliable rhythm. Instead of focusing on making sure each of nineteen fingers is hitting the right key at the right time, we work on speed. There’s speed metal riffs that run at 300 bpm, five beats per second, and the drummers are frequently hitting more than once per beat. The drumming record books had Blamkowsky, a top speedmetal drummer, near fifteen hundred bpm--twelve strikes per second per hand.

Now, that’s not including feet, but two feet give us only about another ten or twelve beats per second total. So...full kit, top drummers of the late 2050s running the fastest they can drum can probably manage up to 36 beats per second including kicks; that's a bit over 2000 BPM, using 4 limbs. I was closer to 1800, personally. As a drummer, my hands weren't that fast, but I was better than normal with my feet, and had better multi-limb control.

I move eight times faster than I used to, I have a tail, and I’ve had a year of practice. I’m currently over 14,000 BPM, which is 225 beats per second.

I can play the James Brown Band pieces doing both Starks’ and Stubblefield’s parts. I can play Genesis alone, both Collins' and Thompson’s parts. I can do RadioHead or Bon Iver solo. I can even play the Allman Brothers Band songs doing the three parts for Jaimoe, Trucks, and Quinones. Hell, I can play extratone songs like Gridbug’s Return to Stream without a synthesizer, and without too much work.

And I can do the sound engineer's job too. I can capture five distinct minutes of sound now, and change volume, pitch and pace. I can speed them up by 50 percent. That’s 20,000 BPM music capabilities, and this thaumic dimension loves it. Even better, I can replay it: I’m searing the sound patterns with audiomancy, and I can get the full picture. I can play something like Pachabel’s canon once, updated for percussion of course, and then accompany myself multiple times at multiple speeds

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Gemma and Cad are still coming over once a week to practice. We’re up to thirty songs. We even got Chaim to help out, and he managed the lights when we did our concert.

We had superhuman drumming and sound engineering, a good singer, tolerable guitar, and a good light show. It was the smallest venue I’ve played in a decade, unless you count Tom’s radish patch, but it was awful fun to do a show. Chaim had a lot of fun with the spotlights.

Gemma’s background with gymnastics didn’t hurt her ability to dance around on the stage with the guitar, and she still looks like a redheaded angel from an Axe commercial. Everyone came. Everyone cheered. It was maybe the most normal thing any of us have done since the world ended.

I'd love to complain about Gemma's and Cad's work ethic: they're not improving anywhere near as fast as they should. But I've really enjoyed having a band, even if they're still noobs.

Besides the music, things are good. Twelve months of time with the added expertise hunting together and everyone’s bringing in five or six oranges a day, which makes my take about twenty. Hunting seems to be getting a little harder though. We’ve seen bigger dinosaurs than the allosaurs, and hunted them. It’s not terribly surprising, but Brachiosaurus tastes like chicken. And then the other animals have gotten bigger to match the dinos: think twelve foot tall lions. But we hunters are a lot better too, and our teams are pretty optimized. Twenty oranges for a year plus what I’m bringing in from hunting with Yulia means I just crossed ten yellows.

And then there’s the time with Yulia. It's pretty much still a dream. What does a gentleman say about his time alone with a beautiful woman? For several months there, I have to admit that we may have resembled rabbits in our time together. Our schedules meant we got a lot of time together.

After five months or so, we’d recovered some from our infatuation, and just got our daily time together at the pool. It’s good that we don’t seem to really have seasons here.

Yulia has also made me a much better sticker. In a real fight, I still don’t think I’ve got a chance besides running away, but in a spar where she’s not using her sharpness, I’ve gotten in a love tap in our almost once a week for the last couple months. She sets up very enticing rewards to keep me motivated. She has also done a reasonable job of teaching me to ignore distractions while fighting with her naked-sparring technique. I’m pretty sure there’s gravity magic involved.

When I’m not doing music or Yulia, I’ve made friends with Beef, and he’s got me lifting besides the endurance training that I was doing. In a year, I’m heavier than I’ve been in my life. I went from 6'2" 157 up to 175, and an awful lot of that in my upper body. At my height, that’s up from skinny to almost normal according to the old low-muscle BMI charts from the early 2000s.

Another year of running every day, especially with Beef helping me train has let me move into my-speed ultramarathon territory. I can run a mile a minute for eight hours or five hundred miles. I can manage shorter distances faster.

I'm making music, moving fast, bedding the prettiest woman I've ever known, and getting stronger and less skinny. What's not to love?

Some old dude said it best, though: All good things must come to an end.