This year I’ll sleep in a guest room, maybe on an air mattress. It will be a normal night of sleep. I won’t be waiting for the rumble of the Polar Express, watching for its headlight to flood the walls of my room in a gold glow.
In a world overwhelmed by possibility, sometimes it sounds really great to have someone else make your choices for you and put them in a neat little box.
Maybe it’s a sign of our times that I was waiting for this genuine and heartwarming scene to turn ironic, but it just didn’t ring true.
Euchre has very little variation. Sentinels of the Multiverse, on the other hand, has somewhere between 14 million to 230 million different game scenarios. That’s cool. Really. But those 230 different scenarios have a price-tag of roughly the same amount of rules.
It seems odd to speak of the limits of human intimacy when anticipating our reunion; to record for the world the untold stories which are themselves just fragments of a billowing moment already passed away, to promise that I will fail again to share them fully.
We like Tony C. because he was good, but we love him because he could have been great. We love him for his potential. We love him because we can imagine what he could have been. 100 home runs by twenty-two? He could have been the best player who ever lived.
I have never been good at writing poetry. I don’t have the wit to write metaphysical poetry like Donne. I could never capture the sylvan landscape like Frost. What I am good at is doodling.
I am having a conversation in broken English outside a bar with a man named Matthieu. He brought up the attacks before I did, which is good, because I was terrified to bring it up, and not even sure if I should. “You are from New York, so you understand,” he explained.
D.A.R.E. to explore the unexplored. Here be monsters and suddenly we’re the first ones, wading through myth and legend and finding freedom, happiness, and warmth. We don’t see dragons or lose our grades. We don’t get pregnant. We aren’t shoving suppositories up our asses à la Trainspotting or whoring à la Requiem for a Dream. It’s just nice. Warm and cozy and soft. One of us uses the word “underwhelming.”
“I think Advent is my favorite season, but by the time I’ve finished all of the work and grading, Christmas is here and I never really got to enjoy it.”
