The 2008 Glenbrooks Review

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The 2008 Apple Valley Review

Sometime over the next seventeen weeks, there will be a major crisis. Nobody knows when or who or how or whether it will interfere with the Young America’s Foundation Valentine’s cruise featuring John Ashcroft, Ed Meese, and other right wing luminaries. Even if you booked your tickets months ago, you may never have the chance to watch the sun set over Vieques while listening to Ashcroft croon a lounge version of “Back That Ass Up.” That’s the nature of crises: like felons, they’re wily and unpredictable; like hooligans, they cause shenanigans—and cockamamie ones at that.

This crisis will be the first major test of Barack Obama’s ability to lead our country. Some say he lacks the experience to lead. Some say his recent comments aimed to deter young men from extensive pants sagging are disingenuous at best. Some say he is a Marxist communist socialist anti-American hater of freedom. We will finally find out when this crisis arrives.

When it does, real Americans will do what they always do: form a line from here to Wasilla and pass buckets of water down that line to extinguish the flames of the crisis. Or some metaphoric equivalent of that. Until then, real America can enjoy itself at the many fine big box establishments in suburban, urban, and exurban areas. What I love is that I can go to Cedar Rapids, or Coon Rapids, or Rapid City, and there will be Chili’s, and Applebee’s. There will also be Red Lobster, but I have a serious shellfish allergy so I normally try not to go there.

Although there are so many big box restaurants I love, I must say my favorite of them all is Old Chicago. Although there are 72 Old Chicagos in 20 states, the one in Apple Valley is special to me for three reasons. First, my favorite waitress, Shellsea, works there. She’s the one with the Sarah Palin hair and accent. Second, it’s where I completed their World Beer Tour, sampling 110 different beers from all over the globe, including Germany, in order to earn a plaque that is proudly displayed on their wall of fame. Third, without checks on government, democracy becomes impossible because the state can ignore or override what people say, making it a prerequisite to all other criteria.

Friday afternoon, I could barely contain my excitement as I headed south on Cedar Avenue. I imaged Shellsea waiting for me, holding a big grilled chicken Caesar with my name on it, and a suggestion from their exciting list of seasonal beers. Unfortunately, though, there was an accident just north of 125th Street: a minibus driven by a sad clown had collided with a school bus filled with chickens. The highway was down to one lane, and it took me 45 minutes to go 20 blocks. I would have to head straight to Apple Valley High School and wait until dinner for OC.

Apple Valley High School is unique among Minnesotan suburban schools in that its design is heavily influenced by recreational psychedelic drug use. Its interior is an explosion of angular, bright-colored design from some forgotten era in the 60s or 70s, created by a team of hippies influenced by the Source cult from Southern California, who practiced vegetarianism and poorly produced free-form psych-rock before it was co-opted by Modest Mouse fans, fashion environmentalists, and gay homosexuals. Not that I have any problem with the gay; like Sarah Palin, some of my best friends are the gay, and as long as they aren’t allowed to get married and Ted Allen is gainfully employed, I’m as happy as a former felon allowed to vote again for the first time, rejoining the community and making a positive difference in the world.

I was privileged enough to spend the day watching and judging fantastic high school debate rounds. I got to hear the brightest young minds of our generation flaunt their extensive knowledge of SAT words, foreign languages (the term “a priori” comes to mind), and that most important skill of all: the ability to present four contradictory positions in seven minutes without wasting time responding to the opposing argument directly. Needless to say, it was a spiritually and emotionally fulfilling day.

To make matters even better, I got to see some of my greatest friends from all over the country. Debate is just one of those activities where you form strong bonds with people; because everyone in the activity is fascinating, unbelievably intelligent, and pathologically competitive, these are the bonds that last a lifetime. During the off-season, we swap shirtless pictures on Facebook, chat on MSN about the housing commission whores and stray Jews in our lives, and wait for the days when we will finally be able to see each other face-to-face again.

When we do meet in person, we exchange hilarious stories about the arguments we hear in debate rounds. These are truly some of the most entertaining stories you will ever hear in your life. One time, we were debating this team from another school that we sort of have a rivalry with, and they tend to run this kind of weird argument by this one post-modernist philosopher. Their cases are based on random books or something. The argument is okay, but we just think it’s weird. Anyway, the story goes on for another 25 pages, but I’ll leave it for another day.

One of my oldest debate friends was judging a very competitive round, and I playfully told him not to fuck up the decision. Immediately, a stunningly fat man wearing a gray Adidas tracksuit ran up to me and said there was no room in the debate community for toilet language, that garbage mouths like me should go back to Mexico to keep America’s children safe from our pernicious influence. “Where are you from?” he asked, threatening to report me to the tournament’s ethics committee.

“St. Louis Park.”

“What a frickin’ surprise,” he said sardonically irreverently.

Even in the face of poorly dressed obese school administrators, hungry for food and power and always trying to impose their formal rigid moralism on us normal debate folks, debate is still the best thing next to arcane Japanese animated erotica.

As the last round of the day concluded, I was sad that the tournament was already half over, but very excited to be minutes away from Shellsea. My last round was in a classroom belonging to a teacher who, like Obama, apparently was consternated by the sagging of the pants, as well as other revealing clothing. The area above the whiteboard was covered in a row of signs with cutesy poems warning children that provocative clothing has no place in a learning environment:

If we can see your thong, you’ve dressed yourself wrong!

If too far you sag, you’ll make them gag!

Keep your ass in your damn pants.

I have to agree with this teacher. Teenagers are already sexually frustrated as it is, but at least most of them can wait until they’re home alone to spend hours surfing the web in a porn cycle, fantasizing about transsexual dwarf amputees or whatever kind of perverse filth is popular with those hairy-palmed adolescent hornbags these days. To them, I say as long as it’s done behind closed doors and does not in any way involve real animals—although stuffed ones or Animatronics are fine—then I don’t care about it and I don’t want to know about it and I don’t want to talk about it.

And don’t get me started on those emos.

Luckily, all these distractions floated away as soon as I entered Old Chicago. It was dreary outside—the coldest day of the year by far with a mix of rain and snow coming down—but entering OC was like returning to the womb, the ultimate homecoming. Shellsea had new lowlights that went well with her uniform, and she enthusiastically hugged me before showing me to my favorite spot at the bar.

“It’s a real chiller outside, isn’t it?” she said. “That’s what ya get living in Minnesota though. They say that under all this Minnesota nice is a real tough cookie.”

“Preach it to me, sister! Now let’s hear about your seasonal beer specials.”

“Ooh, we’ve got some real exciting choices this time. There’s a Winter Warmer from Rooftop Brewery in New Ulm, and of course Autumnal Fire’s always good for what ails ya.”

“Especially if what ails ya is sobriety!” I said.

She cackled with laugher as I chose a stout from Wisconsin. I once knew a man who married a stout from Wisconsin, and boy could I tell you stories about him.

Digressions aside, the evening was as great as I expected—at least until a rowdy group of high school robotics coaches came in. Apparently there was a robotics tournament at Eastview High School. Those damn robotics people always show up to piss on your fiesta. They take money away from debate teams, and they treat us like doo-doo. They’re so classless, too. All the coaches were slamming Purple Hooters and loudly talking about their favorite techniques for pleasurable robot programming. I don’t want to hear about some robot scaring burglars away when I’m trying to focus on enjoying a chicken Caesar.

So I ignored them. Dire Straits was on the stereo, the food was enticing, and I anticipated another day of stimulating debate rounds ahead. After returning home, with a full belly and some leftover buffalo shrimp fettuccini for a midnight snack, I was thankful that real America was still just what is was: real! I fell asleep immediately and had dreams about Sarah Palin baking a variety of dessert bars for an American Legion meeting.

Next day number two: It was colder than Fred Phelps at a Bette Middler concert outside, but that didn’t dampen my spirits a bit. Apple Valley High School was abuzz with competitors and coaches anticipating the first round of the day. As the preliminary rounds come to a close, there are always many epic battles, debates so good that judges have to periodically stop taking notes and simply marvel at the pure logic and intelligence saturating the atmosphere.

After round seven, the novice and junior varsity debaters returned from their respective off-site locations, and instantly the cafeteria was crowded with little kids screaming and crying and biting each other. I escaped to a remote corner of the school to talk about poker strategy with my friends. Stories about poker are almost as prevalent—and certainly as interesting—as those about debate rounds when you’re with forensics people. I was reminiscing about the time I had a big chick in the pocket and everything was looking fantastic until the river delivered a bad beat.

“That totally sucks, man.”

“Speaking of total suckage, I have a hilarious story about what happens when an open limp and a nut hand come together.”

“Is that the one with the donkey with the pocket rocket?”

“Oh, damn! I’ve already told you guys that one. That was my best story.”

And it was a great story. Real America is filled with real Americans and their great stories. If you don’t ask, though, they might not tell them.

After a delicious lunch of walking tacos and juice boxes, it was time for the announcement of which debaters had fought through the field and earned a spot in elimination rounds. The tension was incredible, but it was delightful to see the joyful reactions of those who made the cut. A novice from Scarsdale screamed out in thanks to his Rabbi when his name was announced, and another debater collapsed and started speaking in tongues.

Naturally, the elimination rounds were exciting to watch, difficult to judge, and took place in rounds filled with hygienically challenged kids. The temperature rose to Old Chicago levels, but instead of the delicious smell of pizza and beer, it smelled more like the locker room at a gym for gutter punks.

The rounds progressed toward finals, a match between two debaters that I had no interest in, so I left with my friends for our big night at Old Chicago. I always like to spend the first night there myself, for the pure experience and to reconnect with Shellsea, and save the second night for a communal blast. We sat at our usual round table, ordering several pitchers of Autumnal Fire and the app sampler with onion sticks, freedom fries, broccoli shooters, popcorn beef, and their famous spinach-artichoke dip with bacon, ranch, and corn nuts.

“Remember that time when that one debater had a value of that of teamwork?”

“What a retard!”

“Dude, I know. I haven’t heard anything that stupid since someone went for four-minutes straight Malthus good after the NC ran a spark blip after three Stav off-cases and a phil spec.”

“I haven’t seen a dump like that since the morning after my last dinner at Fogo de Chao!”

“Ho ho ho ho ho ho!”

“That reminds of the time when someone was running felon voting leads to nuke war with that Berube card, and they dropped a McIntyre a priori but still picked up two judges who thought the magnitude was sufficient or some shit.”

“That’s like when the brink overwhelms uniqueness with Wittgenstein hits someone running the gift K in front of mommy judges from Alabama.”

“Or like Mouffe. I mean, how can you take it seriously if her name is Mouffe. What’s next, Wang?”

“Better yet: Schlong.”

“Ho ho ho ho ho ho!”

It was a night to remember, a night in real America, the America we real Americans live in, where we drink American beer and eat American pizza and listen to good old American rock and roll. We are young and old, smart and smarter, men and women, straight and bi-curious, but our love of debate brings us together and keeps us that way forever.

That’s why I know that a year from now, despite how many crises occur in the interim, I will be back with my friends, my Shellsea, my grilled chicken Caesar, and a big smile on my face.

Dedicated to all my boyz in the community. Be real 4ever. Keep your RFD’s straight and your sexual relationships straighter. LOL & pz out 4-reals—

-Gelf-Dawg ‘08

The 2008 Iowa Caucus Review

On Halloween morning, a group of students and adult supervisors from the Twin Cities area met in the parking lot of St. Paul Central High School. They were expecting to spend an enjoyable holiday weekend in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, The City of Five Seasons. This seemingly paradoxical motto is, in fact, a reference to the Chamber of Commerce’s belief that time spent in their fair city is “a time to enjoy life, to enjoy the other four seasons.” Whether or not this makes sense is a question for the ages, like the chicken and the egg, or the Jew and the Cocker Spaniel. What is undoubtedly true, though, is that Cedar Rapids is all about enjoyment: enjoy your time, your life, your friends, and yourself. Since at least some of those are activities high school students tend to enjoy, the trip was a highly anticipated one.

That excitement only mounted—no pun intended—when their bus drove up. It was a futuristic, stainless steel bullet with white leather upholstered seats, individualized flat-screen televisions, and a talking toilet seat in its bathroom. The windows were so advanced that the diagrams instructing riders how to open and close them were completely incomprehensible. They may as well have been in Swahili. For all we know, maybe they were in Swahili. The right side of the bus had a pulsating LCD screen advertising the name of the bus company, Bus Daddy.

Before setting off toward central Iowa, the bus driver, whose nametag simply read “Justice,” laid down the ground rules. “What you got here is more than just a nice sturdy bus, the kind of bus a family could call a home away from home, away from the gridlock and shenanigans of the rat race. It’s my home away from home, and when you’re in my home or my home away from home or my home away from home away from home, you gotta follow three rules. Number wonderful, don’t throw any women’s products—if you catch my menstrual drift—in the shitter. Number two, put your garbage in the bags or the cans or up your craphole for all I care; just don’t put it on the floor. And the most important rule: for the love of all things holy, do not bring any beverage on the bus unless it is in a container with a screw-on top.”

That syntax elicited a flurry of giggles from the younger students, who misinterpreted the phrase “screw-on top” as something salacious. Just before the bus pulled away, a late straggler ran onboard, holding a large handbag and a Stein of Oktoberfest beef. “Stop it right there, young man. You are in blatant disregard of the rules. You gotta finish that drink outside before you get on the bus. Only screw-on tops!” The confused teen stepped back outside, quickly drained the rest of his brew, and threw the stein into nearby bushes. “Thank you,” Justice said, and the journey began.

The sights, sounds, and smells of late autumn in Iowa entranced and occasionally repulsed the group, or at least those who were unable to sleep through the waves of skunk odor, piercing morning sun, and horrible classic rock emanating from the laptop of some idiot who thought it appropriate to impose his taste in music on everyone else.

Just before noon, the bus pulled into an empty parking lot near the corner of 16th Street and 1st Avenue, near Pizza Daddy, a particularly ghetto Hy-Vee, the rollerblading dart players’ club, and Tobacco and Liquor Daddy, a popular store among the area’s college student and hobo populations. After a restorative meal, everyone regrouped to check into their hotel, the downtown Crowne Plaza, before heading to their tour headquarters, Franklin Middle School. One of the ninth graders attempted to get on the bus with a canned martini from Tobacco and Liquor Daddy, but Justice made him finish the refreshing cocktail before joining the rest of the screw-top rule followers.

Guy, one of the adult supervisors of the group, led his group of students to their room and quickly unpacked his various silk turtlenecks for the weekend before returning to the bus. Their departure was briefly delayed by a child wielding a juice box of wine, but Justice was vigilant as ever and the screw-on rule remained unbroken, much like the spirit of a wily felon having finished his sentence, a punishment that was necessary to respect the moral agency of the criminal, who doubtlessly chose to commit the crime knowing full well he would be caught and deservedly punished and disenfranchised, since there are no socioeconomic factors that could possibly problematize the view of crime as a totally autonomous internal choice.

Franklin Middle school was smack dab in the middle of the west side of the east half of Cedar Rapids, not far from Pizza Daddy, Washington High School, and a golf course ringed with upscale homes, decorated for Halloween with plastic glowing skeletons, devils, and Democratic politicians. Come election day, while felons are rightly reminded that they should not and do not have a say in elections, we’ll see who will ultimately, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, get the very final last laugh. Mark my words: we will see.

Built in 1923, Franklin was originally a junior high school, then a high school, then a junior high school again, and finally transitioned to its current role in the mid-70’s, after the explosive growth in the colonic health industry brought so many jobs and dollars into the once-suffering city. A stately brick building with neo-Gothic concrete details and entrances still marked separately for boys and girls, up and down staircases, and shadowy nooks and corner, Franklin’s eerie charm was undeniable.

The group convened in the theater, which was decorated for the fall musical, “Life: A User’s Manual,” based on the classic novel by Georges Perec. The stage was trimmed with large jigsaw puzzle pieces, and decorated to resemble a gracious drawing room inside an affluent apartment on Paris’s Boulevard Housemann. Ernestine Crawford, a lifelong Cedar Rapidian and feisty octogenarian with the gravelly voice of a woman not inexperienced with unfiltered cigarettes, introduced herself as their guide.

“My parents named me Ernestine after my great uncle Bootsy, who died in the great flood of 1934, when I was younger than any of you are. It happened exactly 74 years ago, this very weekend. Families were homeless for weeks, wishing the government could come in and give them a nice sturdy boat. When Katrina hit New Orleans, us survivors here knew just how they felt: like us, but far, far less white.”

Speaking of racial politics, Cedar Rapids has become quite diverse in the past couple of decades, and fully 26 percent of their black male population are unable to vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws, but there’s no way to stop racism because you would have to dismantle the entire government, and that would lead to anarchy.
“We’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon,” Ernestine continued, “watching a film about the history of Cedar Rapids, narrated by 90’s dance music star Gilette. Then you’ll have time to explore the city before you go back to your hotel for whatever illicit activities you stupid kids do when you’re away from your parents. Damn out of control juvenile delinquent fuckers. In my day, you would have been hung from a post in the town square for a fortnight, and that’s just for starters.”

The video was indeed stirring. Guy hadn’t seen anything this engrossing since the finale of Season Three of “Australia’s Next Top Model,” when Jane showed her roots as a lesbian dark-haired bitch. She and Steph H. were soy bad at modeling. A teen couple in the back of the auditorium were not as rapt, focusing instead on caressing each other’s perfect hips and thighs. Soon enough, they crept out of the theater, heading to the top floor of the school to find a deserted staircase where they could sex.

Near the end of the film, Guy thought he heard a piercing scream, but he wasn’t sure if it was coming from somewhere in the school or the video, which was covering the FBI raid of the notorious Irish strip club O’Boobigan’s, the scene of the most filthy vice Cedar Rapids had seen since the Prohibition era.

After the video, the group returned to the bus, which was finally not delayed by someone brashly violating the screw-on rule, but instead by the absence of two students: the very two students who had left the film to sex. Attempts to phone them proved fruitless, much unlike a Cher concert. The supervisors split into teams and searched the school, a search that ended with a gruesome discovery of two exsanguinated bodies. Their young lives, so full of potential and spirit, had been crushed like a pound of pancakes.

The next morning, two obituaries were prominently featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. One of them read: “Congratulations to Tina for a lifetime of accomplishments, including once going 3-3 at a high school debate tournament as a freakin’ junior, and finishing third in a statewide coloring contest at the age of eight. Tina is succeeded by her parents, Christi and Christ, and her older brother Bubba.” The other obituary was in Swahili.

At the morning meeting at Franklin, the mood was somber, tense, saturnine, sinuous, and somewhat inquisitive. Ernestine assured the group that everything was being done to find the evil killer, but there was a hint of disingenuousness in her voice, although that could have been a stray tobacco chunk lodged in her soft palate. Guy raised his hand and asked, “This situation is dead serious, ladies and germs. Riddle me this: How are we going to find who, or what, is responsible for this abortion of that of justice?”

“I made it through the Great Depression, the Great Flood, and the Reagan Era. I can make it through this, and so can you,” Ernestine said.

“Dude, that doesn’t answer my question. Stop trying to weasel your way out of a sticky wicket and—damn it, woman—put your money where your mouth is.”

“I’m getting there,” she said, sounding less than confident. “But right now, I have a more pressing need.” She excused herself and hurried to the female bathroom. A shoe, presumably attacked to a prone body, peeked out from one of the stalls. “Damn elbow-benders and their Halloween hijinks,” she muttered under her breath, expecting to find a passed out drunk bitch. But when she opened the door, what she found was far more troubling: the third victim, exsanguinated, white as a sheet, dead, gone, murdered, killed, gone to a better place, to meet her maker.

Seventeen minutes later, the police arrived on the scene, still with no leads on the first two murders. Sheriff Troons departed from his minibus and surveyed the scene. There was no visible evidence of horseplay or other shenanigans, so his deputies bagged up the body to take back to headquarters. Feeling angry and endangered, Guy asked for a ride back to the hotel, and Troons was happy to oblige. As he sped through the streets, nearly killing a jogger and taking out a lamppost, he told Guy something fascinating: Franklin was rumored to be haunted.

“To be perfectly honest,” Troons said, “I always thought it was hooey, but my daughter said she heard weird noises there, and three of her friends saw the ghost of an old woman in a wheelchair. It scared the living shit out of them, and they really seemed to believe it was real. Sometimes I don’t know what to believe.”

“In an age where felons retain the right to vote in some jurisdictions, I don’t believe anyone who doesn’t say they don’t know what to believe. But riddle me this: why the haunting? Did something happen on that site?”

“That is one darn tootin’ good question.”

“Fuck the hotel. Take me to the library.”

Troons immediately swung a u-turn, causing a hearse to careen into a ditch. “Ironical, that!” he said, laughing maniacally.

Guy spent the next several hours reading old issues of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, determined to find a story about Franklin that would explain the alleged paranormal activity there. His breakthrough came from a 1974 issue, commemorating Franklin’s 41st anniversary. It was just a sentence, a simple reference to something that happened there during the flood. “Things lost in flood” had to mean something. It had to hold the key.

With trembling fingers, Guy fed the October 1934 roll of microfiche into the machine, and scrolled to October 31. There was nothing there, so he tried November, and everything became perfectly clear.

During Prohibition, a bunch of sots and hoochers started a speakeasy in the basement of Franklin Middle School. Its unlikely location led to great success, particularly among the elderly and infirm residents of the enormous Mercy Care Center on nearby 1st Avenue. The weekend of Halloween 1934, the speakeasy was packed with drunkards, dancing and singing and having a generally gay old time, but when the flood started, the emphasis was on “old,” because the able-bodied ran for the hills—literally—while the incapacitated elderly citizens were deserted. With no way to escape, they shrugged and poured another round: a farewell toast to life, and to the great beyond.

Guy turned off the machine and realized he was ravenous, so he ordered a cab from Taxi Daddy and headed to Gringo’s Mexican Eatery for a margarita and a sizzling fajita platter. Before he could finish his drink, the phone rang with more tragic news: there were five more victims, and for the first time, an eyewitness survivor: a young girl in shock, muttering about a posse of ghosts chasing her down the hall in wheelchairs.

It was obvious there was only one thing to be done: get Troons, the police’s ghost hunting unit, and Ernestine, and make the ghosts show themselves. But first, there was a sizzling fajita platter with Guy’s name on it, written in fresh guacamole and queso, and it was time to take a big bite.

Later, at midnight on the dot, the ghost hunting posse crept into Franklin Middle School though the girls’ entrance, thinking that might be the first way to disturb the ghosts. That explained why Ernestine was wearing a men’s suit and a rubber Richard Nixon mask. They stuck together, walking down the stairs leading to the basement, shouting disparaging ageist and anti-alcoholic remarks in the hopes of getting a rise out of their nemeses.

“You dirty old boozehounds deserved to die!”

“Washed out in a flood of booze, and then a flood.”

“No offense, but I seriously hate all old people.”

A piercing noise, like broken glass and guitar feedback played backwards through blown speakers, ripped through the room. The hunters all froze in terror. A pale green light appeared from the top of the stairs, and an old man on a flying wheelchair slowly descended. Drops of water from his hair and his chair left a trail on the floor.

“We knew you would come, you who dare taunt the victims of the flood. All we want is peace, not a bunch of stupid kids walking all over our territory. We’ve shown you fair warning, yet you didn’t listen. So now you must die.”

The walls began to crumble as dozens of wheelchairs surrounded the group, creeping ever nearer. It was like the “Thriller” video, only not as popular with Filipino felons, whose disenfranchisement reflects the government’s need to exclude citizens who fail to respect the social contract. Guy opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. A pale, bony, moist hand approached his throat.

*

“Wake up, Guy,” a cheerful voice said. It was Tina, Christ’s daughter, a frickin’ junior who was riding the bus to Cedar Rapids with him. “We’re already here. It’s dinner time.”

They had stopped on Collins Road to enjoy a variety of big box options before their first night in Cedar Rapids. The Perkins Guy chose was handsomely decorated for Halloween, and Sasha, the waitress, served up soft drinks and chicken Caesars with élan.

After dinner, the bus was about to leave when a latecomer ran aboard holding a goblet of red wine. “For the last time, finish that outside. The screw-top rule is not optional,” Justice said.

The bus dropped the group off at Franklin Middle School, where their tour of Cedar Rapids was to begin with a historical video followed by a Halloween derive. But Guy was too disturbed by his dream to pay attention to the video, and left to check out Pizza Daddy. There was a full moon outside and the streets were empty, save two masked trick-or-treaters running away from 1st Street.

Guy turned onto it, crossing 19th, which took him to the Mercy Center. Outside the building, behind a wrought iron fence, a row of men and women in wheelchairs, wrapped in white blankets, stared silently at Guy. The wheelchairs were lined up, single file, and spanned the entirety of the long block: behind, ahead, and right where he was. Their dead eyes stared not at Guy, but into him.

Ten Halloween Movie Suggestions

Unfortunately, Killer Workout (AKA Aerobicide) is only available on VHS and very hard to find, but here are 10 horror film suggestions for the upcoming holiday weekend:

1. SLEEPAWAY CAMP

The transcendent Felissa Rose stars as Angela, a quiet camper hiding a secret that may or may not have something to do with her deranged aunt, a tragic boating accident, or the unbelievably tight and revealing clothes the male campers at Camp Arawak wear. Her cousin saunters into the mess hall in a cowboy hat and gets in a slap fight with a bunch of guys. A boiling cauldron of corn kills a pervy cafeteria worker. Did I mention the clothes?

2. MASSACRE IN DINOSAUR VALLEY

Sometimes labeled incorrectly as a sequel to Cannibal Ferox, this questionably dubbed tropical trash-fest focuses on a somewhat random group of people whose plane crashes in Indian territory. Will the Vietnam vet with the alcoholic Julie Masking-lookalike wife snap? Will the brothers who look like Zagat from Street Fighter II resurface? Will someone explain why there is so, so, so much unnecessary nudity? Will that obnoxiously repetitive steel drum soundtrack go away?

3. PIECES

This Spanish delight, directed by Jean Piquer Simon--whose oeuvre also includes Slugs and Mystery on Monster Island--centers on a college campus where someone is killing and chopping up young women. Featuring the most riveting delivery of the word "bastard" ever captured by celluloid, Pieces is also a brilliant psychoanalytic text, a quaint commentary on homosexuality in the early 80's, and very unusual clothing, a recurring theme in its genre.

4. THE SEVENTH CURSE

A truly surrealistic Honk Kong fantasy horror movie from the director of the unimpeachable Riki-Oh, The Seventh Curse is a rare opportunity to watch Maggie Cheung and Chow Yun-Fat together before they were superstars. The convoluted plot involves a jungle tribe, supernatural flying monsters, the fantastic Old Ancestor, and too much more to mention.

5. THE GRUESOME TWOSOME

A crazed wigmaker who talks to a stuffed cat terrorizes coeds who spend their days at the beach and their nights eating buckets of KFC at slumber parties. It's 1967 and these are the contents of Herschell Gordon Lewis's brain. As usual, he's put together hilariously incompetent actors, overlong gore scenes that are almost shockingly unrealistic, and inexplicable stylistic flourishes like an opening discussion between two bewigged foam heads in a shop window.

6. THE BEYOND

Lucio Fulci's New Orleans zombie gross-out experience features poisonous spiders, eyeball scenes, acid corroding skin, and a spicy soundtrack.

7. NIGHT OF THE COMET

Valley girls navigate immediately post-apocalyptic Los Angeles and remain totally bitchin'.

8 and 9. NIGHTBEAST and SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED

One has the most unrealistic laser effects and thick Baltimore accidents. The other has full frontal male nudity. I won't tell you which is which.

10. TROLL 2

Jaw-dropping.

The Antichrist

The 2008 Valley Review

Here’s something you might not know: This year, Edina debate is a group of imposters from an imposture. Our administration made a deal to make an extracurricular team swap between schools. The deal, the first of its kind as far as we know, took the Edina team to a new community in the heart of Minnesota’s worst skid row: the dirty south of Minneapolis. Instead of a gated community, it is a barbed wired community, a povo demarcation designating our embrace of the historical hobo community “Shoeless Ditch” located just east of Pearl Park.

Shoeless Ditch was a place where hobos went to drink moonshine, sell buggy parts made from appropriated scrap metal, drink hooch, and put on pseudo-vaudevillian performances combining moonshine, scrap metal, and hooch into a toxic brew of hilarity. The hobocamp declared its independence by electing a mayor, “Junkyard” Jack Roland, in 1907. Shortly thereafter, the corrupt state government—led by Governor John A. Johnson, known as “John A. Hole” to those witty hobos—laid siege upon the village. The hobunards tried their hardest, but they weren’t willing to give up any hooch for Molotov cocktails, and the camp was destroyed in less than six days. Many innocent people were killed, and the end result was not a moral dilemma justifying the application of agent-relative interpretations of the action/omission binary (that is/n’t one(?)) in a universalizable manner.

Now, 101 years later, the city of Minneapolis collaborated with a group of New Urbanists to recreate Shoeless Ditch. The most famous vaudeville hall, Chuckle Me Silly, sits across from the honorary statue of “Junkyard” Jack, shown surreptitiously tweaking a pretty young thing while signing an ordinance to implement a minimum age of nine for hooch consumption. Across the street, the famous bordello, The Boozy Floozie, is back, too, its fringed, semi-breastular awnings beckoning passersby to tip a slut on a Saturday night.

Needless to say, all of this history is far beyond revisionary, but since the telematic age has made consensus truth as impossible as finding a question that Sarah Palin is able to answer coherently, no one really cares. They are proud to embrace their inner hobo, dress like their inner Olsen Twin, and hooch it up. There was a problem, though, in Shoeless Ditch. Problem with a capital “P;” that rhymes with “R” and that stands for the robotics club at Shoeless Ditch High.

Now, everyone knows hobo stew and wine go together like vegetarians and homosexuals, and contra-positively and conversely, hobos do not go with intelligent, technologically advanced high school activities. The administration was sick of the nationally competitive robotics club and its head, Gary Garrison, given the affectionate nickname “Mr. Gary” by his students. Last year, their robot TransX had won second prize at nationals and was awarded “most innovative” by Roboteen magazine for its ability to scan a person’s brain patterns and instantly email them a list of the internet sites that best suited their personal tastes in erotica. I tried it out myself; if you had asked me a year ago whether I would ever bookmark a website devoted to close-up views of luxurious kitchen flooring materials, I would have called you “crazy as a bag of uvulas.” But you live and learn. Specifically, you learn that whatever your neurons want, your neurons get. Think dropping a pen “on purpose” destroys the determinist truism? Then rethink “think,” you curly-haired lesbian slut.

With Mr. Gary and his students receiving statewide publicity, it was time for something to be done. Clearly, this endeavor needed to be moved into the wealthy suburbs where it belonged, and replaced by a gritty activity better suited to the hobo climes. Since hobos have to learn to heckle, bicker, and coerce in order to get by in this big bad world, it was only natural to swap the robotics club for a suburban debate team.

So, to make a long story short after telling the long story—which is a narrative form worth embracing like a good stand-up comic embraces the drum-flourish—we’ve been relocated to Shoeless Ditch High, a school filled with povo skanks and crap bogans, while their robotics club flourishes in the marbled hallways, the lofted gold-leaf ceilings, of Edina High, our temple of education. I was chosen to speak for the team at the first school Shoeless Ditch High assembly, and I informed them that while people think suburban schools produce better citizens, I think suburban school produce better educated, dressed, bred, and neuroned citizens. The vast majority of hobos and homos come from the inner city, while most suburban high school graduates go on to become investment bankers and proctologists.

While I spoke, I noticed just how fugly these city kids were, the try-hard emos and housing commission skanks; “bogan city” was no longer a contradiction in terms; that’s a priori because it’s just logical because it is. You can’t contest that without using logic, so any counter-argument ironically appeals to logic, too. Got you there!

The next week, auditions began, and you can only imagine the kind of people that were trying out for spots on the team. There were emos, Christians, lesbians, and even a burns victim. These types are used to failure, so I was sure they’d understand when we didn’t accept any new members on the team, but our bitch principle Ms. Gillespie didn’t believe my industry-level intuition, and forced us to take on every single one of the kids. All I could think to myself was, Make a note: long sleeves and ramps.

Our first topic was already out, and it was about killing an innocent person to save more innocent people. The few students who had ever heard the word “innocent” only associated it with a Britney Spears song, and she’s not that innocent. True enough, but that definition cannot be extended to take out all negative arguments advocating side-constraints, so we needed to go further. We needed to go further than they had ever gone before. I decided to embrace a radical new pedagogical ideology: a combination between the Socratic method and sadocriticism. I call it Sadocratics—a portmanteau word that makes “chromatose” look like “webinar” or “wolphin.”

“Riddle me this,” I asked a group of borderline emo skanks. “If there’s a trolley headed straight toward the robotics team, and the only way you can stop it is by pushing a fat person off a bridge onto the tracks, would it be morally permissible to push the fat person, knowing full well that he or she will be splooshed like an overripe peach?”

“Are there any fat people in your family?” a girl asked me.

“Thank God you asked. What’s wrong with you, bitch?” I shouted. “I have been trying for over fourteen minutes to get you IQ-challenged retards to understand what is surely one of the founding hypothetical scenarios of the entire field of analytic philosophy, and all you do is laugh because you hear ‘anal’ in ‘analytical’ and think I’m talking about what your whore mothers do for a living.”

It was going nowhere fast, unlike the trolley. What’s worse, the parents were complaining left and left to Ms. Gillespie, saying that their precious little children shouldn’t be called “brainless plonkers” or “bodgy ockers.” In the face of nonsense, I did all I could: I organized a mentor program where our experienced debaters had the opportunity to work one-on-one with the challenged beginners. At first, they were hesitant to deal with a bunch of rangers with man-boobs and crap screamers with two-toned emo hair sculptures. All of that changed at the annual swimming carnival, but that’s a story for another day, a day when we have hours to linger over a glass of Thai iced tea and discuss what will perhaps replace the trolley problem in the analytical cannon, the Budgie Smuggler Incident.

What you must know now is we came up with a failsafe solution to scare the Shoeless Ditch kids away from debate for good: We would force them to attend a prestigious, nationally known tournament. And this tournament was not held just anywhere. It was held somewhere, and the somewhere was the cosmopolitan capital of our urbane neighbors to the south: Des Moines. We would subject them to a car ride filled with esoteric noise music and rambling discussions of the liberatory possibilities of poststructuralist ufology. We would throw them into rounds with debaters who talk faster than a skank in a bag of doodles and watch them lose and lose hard, and get subjected to a verbal smackdown (or spankdown, whatever’s more damaging under the moral framework created when the act/omission binary collapses like a breast implant in a pressure cooker) by some of the most intimidating judges in the country, judges who should be universally struck but return to popularity despite their best efforts to the contrary. And, in between days, we would subject them to highbrow and midbrow cultural experiences that would forever alienate them from our post-enlightened ways.

Last Friday, we set off in a van covered in portraits of Chairman Mao juxtaposed with bags of Baked Lays, a meta-commentary on the problematization of the concept of possession they were unlikely to understand. We stopped in Faribault, a crap bogan town, for Starbuck’s—they usually got their caffeine from dumpstered instant coffee residue—and took a brief break for a dérive that revealed the psychological implications of having Quizno’s and Subway in the same strip mall. Their mouths gaped wider than the carbon footprint of the CEO of Monsanto.

When we got to West Des Moines, where the tournament and its home hotel were located, they were clearly shocked by the opulence and brilliant suburbanness of it all. There were fountains across the street, there was a Perkins in walking distance—their chicken Caesar scratches a culinary itch that lingers in me like dormant herpes type two simplex—and the hotel rooms had air conditioning, hot and cold water on tap, and luxurious quilted bedding so unlike the burlap rags they flopped on top of their soiled mattresses—or if they were less lucky, piles of old tires.

We converged in one of the suites for a last-minute strategy session. It was my time to demonstrate how a true professional does what he does best. “Mark my words,” I said sagely, “you will be faced with intelligent, responsive, explicitly impacted arguments all day tomorrow, and you will make a fool out of yourselves and your fat bogan asses will be kicked hard, and often, and resoundingly, and it will leave a mark and it will sting and you will not be able to sit down comfortably for several fortnights.”

They were not deterred by that last one. Stupid me failed to realize that not being able to sit down comfortably is a quotidian occurrence for residents of an imposture hobocamp.

“There is only one thing to do,” I continued, strapping on a mask turning my face into that of a majestic wolf. “Hit it, Natalie!”

On cue, Natalie turned on the iPod hooked up to the high-volume, ultra-compact Yamaha audio cube, blasting the song “Bitch Track II.” I demonstrated several argumentative techniques, ranging from the howling extension of PIC implications of death to the whirling sheeted six-point theory violation on positivity about positivism, finishing with the pièce de résistance, the dance of the fourteen impact turns with impacts that outweigh on magnitude, time-frame, predictability, obesity, speed, and political irrelevance.

They were overwhelmed, just as I knew they would be. I turned off the music, took off my disguise, and addressed them as frankly as I felt I should have: “You are all failures. You have been failures all your lives. When you fail in life, you fail in the afterlife, and that’s failure—metaphysical failure. Metafailure. Tefa. Ef. [Silence.]

I left the room and retired to my king-sized bed, where I instantly fell asleep and dreamt I was subjecting Frances Kamm to the most insidious form of torture: a lifetime forced to watch Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist again and again with only the guy from Creed and Rachel Zoe for company. “I didn’t know my analytical philosophical revelations would turn into such a shitstorm,” Kamm (’08) elaborated in her defense.

“No warrant, bitch-assed bogan skank!” I shouted triumphantly, turning up the volume just as Michael Cera proclaimed his love for Tillie and the Wall.

I awoke laughing maniacally, as I am wont to do. And, of course, my predictions were right. They were fully and thoroughly humiliated. Judges’ comments included “AFF should quit debate” and “the case needs a standard” (at least I think that’s what it said). Meanwhile, I tested the limits of academically justifiable frivolity by phrasing my decisions in haikus, sestinas, sonnets, and finally in the style of Mark Leyner:

“The waitress at Makudonarudo (that’s what those Japs call it and I don’t mean the Jew kind because that’s an acronym and it would be spelled differently)—after they experience the assault of Harajuku J-pop divas and candy-colored girl accessorized to the point where their toenails are ripped out of their Crocs; transforming the burden structure into a mass of grease in which arguments come out crisp and glistening but not expendable like you know the grammar of the modern at its most so—voted affirmative.”

That night, we ate at a Lao restaurant. The hot chilies and unpronounceable foreign words reduced the hobocampers into quivering masses of gelatinous bone marrow custard, but not the delicious kind I enjoyed heartily. My fortune cookie fortune read: “A mate’s discount in the hand is worth two dropped case-turns in the mystery bag.”

Needless to say, the next day was a short one for our idiotic ones. After round six, they were done. It wasn’t even necessary to make them watch elimination rounds; what needed to be done had been done. And what needed to be done was morally permissible. Back at the hotel, they collapsed, unable to be awoken even by our unnecessary and altruistic offering of things they know, like processed cheese and cases of Stampede Light Plus.

Tonight, they are back in their shacks, having cold Dinty Moore stew for dinner in a room reeking of poverty—which smells not unlike rotten gum nuts—while the robotics team members douse themselves with Axe Vice and chat on MSN while eating takeout from the Big Bowl.

How will the administration react to my fantastic trickery? Only time will tell. Only time will tell. But this is what I will leave you with: the song of Shoeless Ditch High:

They’re povos and they know it
They’re all just dipsticks and dags
They can’t help slamming down grog on a Saturday night
They can’t help cracking a fat on a Saturday night

All of these bogans
They suck at life and then they die
Everyone knows at Shoeless Ditch High
On days like these
It’s a skanky bitch high
Skanky bitch high
Where goodnessness dies

The 2008 Greenhill Review

It started with a natural disaster. Will it end up in a body bag? If so, how many do you need? Don’t you want to dance (say you want to dance)? Can the precarious navigation of the homosocial resist deteriorating into an “event”—whatever that means—that will foment the galvanization of a new form of what could only euphemistically be called “kinship” with the potential to subvert several academic disciplines? Can you hear someone say “discipline” without laughing uproariously? Where do we go from here?

These are only a few of the many questions that linger beneath the tempestuous surface of the new year. Of course, newness has always-already ended; we have (only?) what we have inherited. We are aporias, held aloft by the thinnest lines of narrative coherence, dangling above the abyss that is the post-temporal social in its contingent entirety. Or have I got it backwards again?

We do not need Shirley Phelps Roper or even someone exponentially less unattractive than her to tell us the end is nigh; the signs have been unmistakable since the beginning. Now is the time to declare that the end has already happened, and move on. Forget that we may be cursed with four more years of a vice president whose agenda is about as secular as 770 Eastern Parkway and not nearly as interesting. Messianism is out; it’s over.

Instead of prophets, today we have pundits. On Friday night, we watched one of them holding onto a telephone pole, blown literally horizontally by raging winds, struggling to give a candid report of the weather situation to the news. We were in a moderately priced Italian restaurant, waiting for house-made taglierini, watching a flatscreen television over the bar.

I stabbed my crostini, launching a piece of porcini mushroom into the distance, and sighed. “It’s pathetic what passes as ‘news’ these days.”

“I disagree,” a high school debater replied.

“That’s what you always do. But life isn’t a debate round. All these created spectacles are clearly designed to trick us into imagining an emergency situation and then forcing someone else to deal with it. I don’t understand why they try to make it so realistic. People were fooled by Forrest Gump.”

“That’s because of their mirror neurons.”

I nodded thoughtfully, then poured my glass of Limonata on a man wearing an ascot at the next table. “Oops! My neurons made me do it!”

He laughed and said something in Tagalog.

Back at the hotel, a sense of emergency permeated the lobby, exemplified by an obese woman with a placard that read “Save Yourself Now—With Refreshing Snacks from Our Gift Shop.”

“Is that just a Schlotzsky’s sign turned inside-out?” I asked.

“How can you tell?” she said, clearly potentially embarrassed.

“Shut up and dance, bitch!” I ordered. She complied, but her running man was quite disappointing. I don’t think she’s going to be on the next season of ABDC, that’s for sure.

In the gift shop, a couple wearing Hazmat suits examinined novelty T-shirts, admiring one with the Dairy Queen logo but with “Dallas” instead of “Dairy” written on it. “Wasn’t ‘Dallas Queen’ your nickname when you were in the army?” the woman wondered.

“Don’t ask; don’t tell.”

“You know, in the aughts, being a Dallas Queen doesn’t mean being happy and free. It means you are exactly what you are.”

At that moment, the hotel fire alarm went off, and we hurried outside, finding a group of friends also from Minnesota. We reminisced about the time in Des Moines when a guest at an out-of-control bachelorette party dropped a lit cigarette onto the carpet in her room. It was total chaos as strange combinations of half-dressed people emerged from hotel rooms together. The shame! I was alone with my economy-sized bag of Kettle chips, the best roommate there is.

“Was that the time when there were male strippers in the hotel dressed like firemen?” someone asked me.

“It was one of the times,” I said, “but that’s another story.”

It was. Yet another story was the Atlanta ice storm, where two inches of slush terrified everyone but orthodox Jews and Greeks so much that they didn’t leave their houses. When the electricity went off, a woman from Texas had a nervous breakdown and only recovered after a plate of bacon was placed directly under her nose. Amazingly, she immediately recovered and used the down time to plan structural changes to the national circuit high school debate community.

So many disasters, so much tragedy . . . Why do we put up with it all? And the situations keep getting more and more extreme. It’s like there’s a trolley with five people coming straight at a sad clown whose rainbow-colored hatchback is stalled right on the tracks, and there is no easy solution. Some would call it a moral dilemma; I call it unbridled hilarity.

This time, an overactive sizzling fajita platter in the hotel restaurant apparently caused the fire alarm. Fajitas are so random.

The news reports were still dire. We were to expect two to five inches of rain on Saturday, and wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour. That night I dreamt I was caught in a tornado, whirling above the sprawl of Addison, Texas. I stopped to feed a Korean meatball to an airborne peacock, then adjusted my body so I could drift over to admire Blueprints at Addison Circle, the sculpture in the roundabout at the town center. I was nearly maimed by a plastic tub, but I made it to Blueprints just in time to see the entire sculpture uprooted, joining the swirling matter. Would I be the latest victim of death by public art? I shuddered, remembering the giant “Man With Hammer” sculpture in Cleveland whose mechanism had gone haywire, resulting in the pounding to death of a small family of small people.

The alarm clock went off before my fate was determined. The news forecasts hadn’t changed, and I prepared for the year’s first day of debate watching footage of destruction, wind and waves ruining shoreline communities. Sarah Palin was planning on speaking in a few hours; I wondered if she would repeat the hard-line conservative response to Katrina and say Ike was holy revenge on the sinners, those brazen enough to believe in and even practice pre- and extramarital sex.

Outside, it was cloudy and humid, windy with a hint of dankness—very similar to what I imagine it would be like if scientists recreated the climate of a human womb for an exhibition or perhaps a theme park type of thing. I braced myself, trying to prepare for an event that is arguably psychoanalytically similar to leaving the womb: facing, for the first time in months, the debate community.

Yes, I had seen some of them in June, when we converged upon Las Vegas to witness crazed dance advertisements, unit-related commerce, exxxotic bowling, and masculine transsexuals creating traffic disturbances on Tropicana in 115-degree-weather. And again in August, I spent two more weeks with some debate people in Los Angeles, watching out-of-control small Asian children destroy elliptical machines, soft-serve ice cream dispensers, and the spirit of diversity and acceptance manifested in not only the otherwise liberal debate community, but also the coed high school cheerleading community.

During these summer debate activities, I obsessed over ethnic food, became a more astute and practiced observer of the AmJack subculture, gave Whole Foods an inordinate amount of my disposable income, and came to lament the lack of In-N-Out in the Midwest.
There were to be no such distractions in Texas. No bowling with strippers; no rabid packs of unsupervised children; no animal style. Instead, it would be boys talking about their speaker points out of rounds, talking about morality and McIntyre in rounds; it would be coaches of all sorts: the vicious ones, the vicarious ones, the Chinese ones as well; it would be, in a word, random.

Even with the anticipation of historically bad weather later that afternoon, I quickly fell into the same routine: pretend to listen to people talking about Heidegger and cognitive science; observe social rituals not usually seen in our own little corner of the primate community; lather, rinse, have some pizza. I was idly contemplating the inner workings of a sea salt grinder between rounds when an unfamiliar face approached me.

“Excuse me, but are you Mr. G?”

“I’m not usually called that outside the community theater community,” I said.

“I thought so. Anyway, my school wants to honor the victims of Ike by writing and putting on an original musical revue.”

“Do you live near Galveston?” I asked.

“No, central Missouri.”

“Well my first thought is call it ‘Ike Can See Clearly Now,' like about how people get through the storm and it makes them reevaluate their situations.”

“Oh, cool! How they appreciate the little things now?”

“Actually, I was thinking more that they’re violently angry at the lack of an organized official response to the disaster and inspired to organize a post-Maoist insurrection aimed at the overcoming of oppressive social apparatuses and technologies of control. But appreciating the little things would work, too.”

“Thanks. You’re given me a lot to think about.”

I promised to write some lyrics for a song by the end of the tournament, but there was no time just then because the last round of the day was released. After one more hour thinking about a fat person being pushed off a bridge to stop a trolley from going off a cliff, it was time to again navigate the Addison dining scene. Someone once told me that Addison has the largest amount of restaurants per person in the country, or maybe it was that Addison has the largest people in the country. It was something impressive, though.

We opted for Tex-Mex. Enchiladas were consumed; stomachs were upset; that insufferable Spin Doctors song was on the jukebox, which made me so angry I crushed a bottle of Shiner over my friend’s head and took out my anxiety on a potentially undeserving piece of tres leches cake.

It was at that moment, in the throes of rage, that I realized the horrible weather had never materialized. It rained a bit, and there was a peacock in a tree, but nothing worse or weirder than that. This really made me think, and when I think it is usually never a good thing. That night, as my stomach churned from the enchiladas, my brain churned along with it. So many ideas were coursing through my head: passivity, disaster, Nietzsche, trolleys, the homosocial. I knew I would be able to come up with a brilliant song about Ike.

The next day, while the debaters were stupidly trying to win their elimination rounds, I strapped myself to the beast—the Roland keyboard in the electronic music classroom—and experimented with chords, melodies, and finally words. By the time the awards ceremony was over, I had my original ode to the hurricane victims. It’s called “After the ‘Cane,” set to the music of “After the Rain” by Nelson.

*

After the tragedy, we’ve suffered such pain
We’re drowning in a tidal wave, soaking wet with rain
You’re submerged fully from your toes to head
Your dog, your cat, your mailman and your grandma are all dead
Now you realize the corruption of the state
After the ‘cane it’s a chance to reflect
And insurrect
Only after the ‘cane
Can you live again
I know your house was ruined by a tree
Now you’ll fight off oppressive ideology
Your children lost all their precious toys
Come on with me and we’ll subvert and destroy
It’s time to take down technologies of control
After the ‘cane it’s a chance to reflect
And insurrect
Only after the ‘cane
Can you live again

[Singing saw solo]

Anarchists will appear to light the way
Only after the ‘cane
Can you try to smash the state again
You know the time has come for you to face the truth
After the ‘cane it’s a chance to reflect
And insurrect

[Repeat chorus and fade]

*

So, we’ve survived another one. But there will be more. Even if you only need one, you get more. Life is random like that. But if we stay positive, we might just learn to live together, to share things together—food, rooms, beds, the planet. Our lives.