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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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My secret is that my borderline-obsequious over-abundance of humility is a defense mechanism. Not self-defense, mind you, it’s there to protect everyone else. When I was a child, I was greedy and...

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Nothing quite like the dog days of summer to make one feel like the most rotund piece of flotsam and/or jetsam in the sea, depending whether one was abandoned to the briny deep accidentally or on...

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“It ends with us,” she said, “I do not know what to do with that.” “Of course it ends with us,” I replied, “we’re closing shift today.” “No,” Jess laughed, “the novel It Ends with Us, the Colleen...

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To say I’m not a morning person is an understatement, understatement so profound as to border on absurdity. Saying I am not an early morning person would be like saying Tom Cruise is only overcom...

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She was on her supervisor’s bad side and she knew it. The exact cause at that particular time was a mystery but, when you’re spending a literal eternity in Hell, there’s a long list of things it ...

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I don’t think she meant anything cruel when she said it, I had little doubt toward her sincerity. “You should run for Alderman,” she said as I left the booth, “your grandfather and dad were both...

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In 2025, CERN’s Hadron Supercollider team announced they’d invented a machine to observe a person’s parallel timelines. I couldn’t say how, something-something string theory, anything past interm...

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Folks are huge on the concept of The Memory Palace, these days. It isn’t anything new, some earliest version goes back to proto-Greek philosophizers who believed if you wrote everything down, you...

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Elaine was not a happy medium. It’d been a long time since she’d been happy if she’d ever been happy at all. She’d been miserable for years, from long before her recent situation, running from th...

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The notion of a wild-life refuge is wonderful, of course. Humans have managed to really bung up large swaths of this planet, chasing slips of paper that don’t mean anything outside the context of...

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Long before you were even born, when he was barely a teenager himself, your father stumbled simultaneously into the best and worst luck in human history. There was a group of older toughs harassi...

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If we were being optimistic, we could say America is defined by its vast natural beauty, purpled mountains majesty, amber waves of grain, redwood forests, Gulf Stream waters, all that maudlin mus...

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“I’ve done your hair and makeup for a decade,” her tone wavered between bemusement and fear, “I would’ve noticed by now if you were a vampire.” “Because of the mirrors thing?” the rail-thin palli...

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He wasn’t always like this. He’d been a middle-class careerist, a suburban dad and husband. The manicured lawn, picket fence, two-car garage, the whole schmear. The good life. He wasn’t rich or p...

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Sarah and Rachel studied the rum cake together, fresh off its third overnight soak in a bath of boozed-up sauce. “Well,” Sarah asked, “do you think we did it right?” “We’ve baked a lot of cakes t...

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“I did it on purpose,” an old man in a rumpled windbreaker told a much younger man with a tape recorder and a notebook, in the back booth of Mudville’s Lazy Lunch Cafe, “I threw the damned game. ...

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Breaking news tonight, regarding the tragic train derailment in northern California, where they are still counting the dead: confirmation of the main suspect’s identity in the disaster that spewe...

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The problem with time-travel is not that it’s impossible. It’s certainly difficult, sure, but far from impossible. Throughout your entire history so far, a few dozen human beings have managed it ...

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“Life has a way of hollowing you out, if you’re not careful,” he intoned to a packed auditorium, faces rapt in honest attention, “you needn’t be a scarecrow for that to happen to you too.” Since ...

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I worry I’m nothing but a totem-pole of affectations, standing atop each other, in a trench-coat. Human-shaped at distance, but the closer you get, the more obvious it is I’m just an exaggeration...

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