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Page 5 of 11

When I’m gone, I don’t want anyone going around lying about me. Not by omission and not by commission, either. I don’t want death turning me into something I’m not, I’d rather not have entropy gi...

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In my dreams, I’m always drifting. Drifting off the road, drifting off to sleep behind the wheel, to dream within a dream. I drift into some second sort of sleep while I’m highway-driving and the...

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To you, it might seem like a superpower to see what we can see but I swear that it’s the opposite. You’re the ones with the powers to not see it, to not have to deal with it, to not bear witness ...

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“Look before you leap,” she cooed seductively, “and you’ll never leap at all.” “Just do it,” she would howl if you didn’t jump immediately, hovering in mid-air twenty feet off the ledge over the...

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When you’re young and everyone’s so inexperienced and insecure, it’s a minefield trying to talk to whoever you’re dating about your exes. Are they going to feel like you’re comparing them to some...

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It was all over but the crying, that’s what they say. It usually isn’t literally true, though. That day, that time, that place, it was literally true. He was only kept alive by a respirator, brai...

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We pretended we were in a movie, that’s how innocent we were, how dumb. We walked up to the perimeter the teachers were holding away from the school then we moved in slow-motion away again. As if...

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“You may be able to hold your liquor,” the bartender said, “but your liquor isn’t ever gonna hold you. Might hold you back, I don’t know, that might be me undercutting my own business model, but ...

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“Clearly,” the lecturer pointed at the projection of the photograph, “it was a holy site for peoples’ of its time, though the fact there seems to have been two competing groups with differing rit...

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Everyone wants the easy way out and I’m no different. I have a ticket for tonight’s lottery, even though the odds are six-hundred-million-to-one. Someone has to win eventually, why not throw two ...

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If you’ve ever seen someone who isn’t American try our chocolate for the first time, you might be surprised to find they say it tastes like puke and truth is that they’re right. The standard form...

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“Gimmie the real stuff,” the old man said each and every time he ate there, “not the fake crap they gave us in ‘Nam.” Whenever he was in that diner, he ordered the pancakes and eggs and whenever ...

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“The Hands that touched the Hands” is the Catholic tradition that fascinates me most. The idea the mandate for their clergy, from pope to parish priest, is derived from an unbroken chain of conta...

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My generation didn’t ask for those participation trophies, you know. That’s the thing the stories get wrong, we didn’t want an awards ceremony for next-to-last-place in the youth soccer league. W...

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She stared at him in disbelief, which is to say she stared at her boyfriend in Disbelief, Nevada. Disbelief, named as such since no one believed its founder’s claims he was building a shining cit...

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Your failure saved the world, you know. Yes, you. The one reading this. This message has been distributed publicly so you won’t end up targeted, like shortwave broadcasts available anywhere but d...

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They say the place is thief-proof and that’s fair, it probably is, at least for certain definitions of “thief”. Even if you’re the greatest thief alive, as some say of me, which is also fair, I p...

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Autumn sneaks up and pounces like lightning, like a starved lion looking to fangoriously devour a gazelle caught unawares, one moment you’re daintily lapping at some idyllic pond, the next is all...

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Pete Best never got the chance to be full-on “Beatles” famous, he never got to be one of the four coolest dudes in the world for a handful of years, never chased by mobs of screaming girls, eithe...

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We can’t say, with any modicum of certainty, that prominent talk show host Rachel Ray has ever dined upon a human being’s flesh. That would be patently absurd to state, of course. Absolutely unp...

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Casinos have no clocks upon their walls, casinos have no windows at all, ugly carpets forever force us to look up at pretty blinking lights demanding we press our luck. It isn’t accidental, libra...

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When I was a young boy, the only thing I found interesting about my hometown was that we had an affiliated minor-league baseball team, the smallest city to have one. The lowest affiliate of the N...

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For a while before the COVID times, I worked in the one fancy-style coffeehouse within a wide radius, in a small farm-town along the Mohawk. I wasn’t great at the beautiful latte art part of it b...

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Our neighbor Walter seemed born-old to me, of course, because I was three when I met him. He lived with his father who may as well have been Methuselah, gnomic, Yoda-like, smoking a pipe on that ...

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Sophie would wander out, sometimes, to the holler in the countryside at the edge of town. It was the kind of place the old folks spoke of fondly, where she and her friends had run wild when they ...

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