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“So,” he asked gently, holding her hand in his right hand and an engagement-ring box in his left, “what do you say?” She stared blankly, clearly in shock. He couldn’t tell if it was good shock or...

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“It wasn’t a dream,” a voice called from the darkness, “we had to pretend it was for a while but we’re sorry nonetheless.” As Dorothy opened her eyelids, vibrant colours made it clear this was in...

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The heart is a palimpsest. That’s a sentence as difficult to explain as it is to spell or pronounce. Explaining what a palimpsest is, that’s actually the easy part. It’s the original recycling s...

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Someone once asked John Lennon an obvious question, as to whether the song “Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds” was actually about drugs, because yes, of course it was about drugs. The initials were L...

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I don’t collect things because I think they are worth a lot of money or are going to be worth a lot of money someday. Far from it. When I was a child, I suppose I thought that way about some of m...

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You can’t judge a book by its cover, they say, whoever the hell “they” are. And far as aphorisms go, it’s mostly true, at least literally so. A book’s cover isn’t made to reflect its contents, ra...

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The Clio Awards are an annual awards program recognizing innovation and creative excellence in advertising-related fields, according to some basement-dweller weirdo writing on Wikipedia. Sort of ...

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There are some things we will never know. If you consider the vastness of this universe, how long it’s been and will be around, the percentage of things-knowable by the human race is so infinites...

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He’s afraid he needs to be perfect. He doesn’t need that. It’s easy as putting a disc in the slot and hitting a button on the remote control. I know that even if he made a mistake, it’d do no dam...

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Power, most acutely power over others, seems to be our universal human allergen. We all react so badly to power. With concentrated enough dosage, we begin to lose some of the most useful tools th...

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You may have noticed a growing emphasis inside what’s left of our shared culture on alternative Earths, parallel dimensions, multiverses. Roads not taken, what-ifs, mulligans for all regrets. You...

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We’d been waiting on it for weeks: my uncle’s yearly request for a Christmas tree. He’s a virtual shut-in due to mental illnesses, has lived on the third floor of my grandparents’ house nearly-fi...

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Michael Cecconi of Little Falls, forty-four, shuffled off his mortal coil Monday December 4th, tumbling down three flights of stairs in a Victorian McMansion converted into a library while attemp...

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While most can find a few traditions they enjoy associated with the American secular winterish holidays, the truth of it is that even the holliest or jolliest of us also have a few Yuletide custo...

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I’ve taken two driving tests in my life and passed both by the exact minimum. A slim point each time. At twenty-two, just out of school, I barely scraped through the New York exam. I couldn’t aff...

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I was sitting at the High-Catholic funeral for the grandfather of two of my oldest dearest friends, thinking how much he would’ve appreciated the rituals. The singing, the incense, all the milita...

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When I was just a teen, back in the Nineties, video stores shadowed the firmaments, swarmed in great thundering waves, much as the buffalo teemed the American prairie before Columbus came along a...

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There’ll be kids dressed as Pokémon, all around on Halloween, their moms dressed-up as the sex bombs they rarely ever get to be. Toilet paper hastily festooned from the trees, once rare as hen’s ...

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In most ways, it’s best to be diminished like this. Insubstantial. Little-known, even to academics. No worshippers at all. The height of godly powers, gorging on your adulations and supplications...

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“Look,” the administrator said, sitting in the desk hovering above him, her authoritative pantsuit brought neatly together by a slender purple neck-tie, “you came to us well-regarded, MXY-944.” “...

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I’m often disturbed by the knowledge the internet provides me with about the worst parts of the sickest human brains. Reddit basement-incels apparently waste their life-times dreaming of the Roma...

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We’ll cut to the chase: we’re sorry to inform you that you’re dead. You’ve been dead for a while now. We’re not certain how long exactly but we’d love your assistance in figuring that out. Once y...

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I wasn’t trying to acquire my one-and-only no-doubt concussion, but if something seems once-in-a-lifetime, I lurch into its wake and see what happens. My existence is mostly long stretches of dul...

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I had always kind of thought the Herkimer Pizza-Hut would manage to survive the heat-death of the universe. Cock-a-roaches and tardigrades collecting Personal Pan Pizzas from the Parents As Readi...

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Consider the cautionary tale of two early humans, Thogg Grainsmasher and Chudd Stuffowner. Thogg’s family’s tradition of pulverizing grain for bread with a stone club went back beyond all tribal...

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