Two Brief Anecdotes

These are two anecdotes, one of which happened to me yesterday and the other I only realized was notable when I told it yesterday at a friend’s birthday party. Figure out the connection between the two and win a special prize*!

1

On my first day of summer after eighth grade I went to the library with my mom, who was trying to get me on a summer reading kick. Walking by the comic section, I saw a girl from my class who I liked, but I didn’t go up to her because the surest way to kill a middle school relationship is to introduce a parent into the equation. I was at an odd intermediary stage where I was too shy to actually ask a girl out but confident enough to do some decent flirting, so I decided to go back the next day at the same time. She wasn’t there, so I went back the next day. On the third day I got bored and started reading the comics.

I kept on going every day for the next two months. I found out later that she stopped by pretty often too, but I never saw her. A week in I was too deep in the Scott Pilgrim series to ever look around, and over the course of the summer I devoured the rest of the selection.

2

Yesterday I was running by myself through the sprawl alongside the highway, that part of Grinnell where most of what you see is just strip malls and chain hotels, but if you look in the space between the buildings there are hills rolling out into the horizon, dotted with blooming trees. Like most days on that route I had a faceful of wind heading out, so much so that I had to put a little extra effort into every step and close my eyes when waves of dirt blew towards me. But when I reached the designated point to turn around, the air went still. Not still like when you run on a calm day, then you at least feel a little breeze. But absolute stillness, hot and  stagnant. At first I though I just had bad luck, that the wind had died down just as soon as it was at my back, but when I stopped I felt it again, harsher than ever. It took me a few minutes of stopping and starting and wondering if nature was playing a trick on me to realize that I was going at the exact same speed as the wind. So I ran the rest of the route in air that felt motionless as around me tree branches swayed and plastic shopping bags tore through the air.

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* According to French philosopher Jacques Derrida, an author’s commentary is entirely separate from the text, so it shouldn’t be a problem that I’ve got no clue how these two are connected other than that they both have something to do with yesterday.

Why I Work for Inklette

For someone with such a slim publication history*, I sure have a lot of suggestions about what new writers should do. Most of them are probably either wrong or impossible to articulate, but there’s one I’ll live or die by: start working at a literary magazine. It would be best to nail down a position at a small but up-and-coming online literary journal with a young, committed staff based out of a literary club in Bophal, India, but Inklette’s not hiring right now and I’m sure as hell not giving up my position.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I applied as a prose editor for Inklette. I was high off the writerly rush of attending the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio (one of the highlights of my life, by the way), so when I saw on Facebook that some girl from India I’d only met in passing at the IYWS was starting a literary magazine, I shot off an application for the prose editor position with unqualified arrogance. Hopefully they deleted the staff applications, because I can remember just enough of mine to know that it was something I’d want wiped from the earth. To the question “What makes good writing?” I replied with something in the vein of, “You know, do whatever you want, just so long as you have a good time.”

By some clerical error or fluke, they let me on their supremely talented staff. And, with little preparation, I was hit with a flood of submissions and tasked with voicing my opinion on what was good writing and what was bad (a situation in which having a working definition of what made writing good would really have helped). 

Most people, myself included, only read from the tiny selection of books that have made it to the top despite all odds, the ones from big name authors signed on with major publishing houses or with enough historical merit to be reprinted through the ages. You read so much that’s polished so everything flows together and makes logical sense that it seems like high quality writing is some infinite resource. Wading into the strange, messy world of what people who aren’t the handful of popular authors write was a real shock to the system. It was hard enough to kill my instinct to cringe at every grammar mistake, and even after I got over that there was the matter of parsing out unfamiliar cultural references (with many of our submitters being from India, I googled enough new terms that I eventually developed a small and hyper-specific vocabulary in Hindi). Over seven issues and three years, I’ve read 643 submission. In doing so, I realized how the diverse the writing world is, not only geographically (we’ve gotten submissions from every continent except Antarctica**, and I’m hoping we’ll fix that with issue seven), but in terms of genre too. People have submitted literary fiction, science fiction, fan fiction, fiction that I would be able to put in a category if I had any clue what it meant, hard journalism, scholarly essays, extended screeds against millennials, extended screeds against word limits in literary magazines, extended screeds against nothing in particular, some kind of writing I’d never heard of called a dervish essay, and an graciously minimal amount of pornography. Even though most of it ended up rejected, there was at least a thread of beauty in almost all of it (well, except for the screeds and porn).

Being faced with an onslaught of submissions forced me to make firm claims about what made fiction good or bad, and the other editors forced me to reconsider those claims over and over again. When our votes conflicted and I looked over the piece again, I almost always found the essential flaw or subtle nuance that they thought made the piece worth an up or down vote***. It forced me to constantly reconsider my opinions about writing, and inevitably that spilled over to my own work, where I started recognizing problems I didn’t know I’d been making or experimenting with styles I would have never considered.

A couple days ago we opened submissions for issue seven. If you want to submit, there’s no cost and you can do it easily and for free here. But if you want to really grow as a writer, I suggest you click around for literary magazines looking for editors or readers. Or go ahead and start your own, it takes maybe five minutes to get a website set up, and that’s really all you need. Throwing yourself into the bizarre collection of submissions most magazines get will be sort of like jumping into toxic waste in a comic book: it will be overwhelming and strange and totally immersive, but you’ll emerge with superpowers. Or at least some decent pretensions at having learned a thing or two about writing.

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*It’s basically just this blog, a couple short stories I can’t stand to look at, and thirty seven issues of an underground satirical newspaper (and that’s stretching the definition of “publication,” my distribution method was printing out a bunch of copies at Kinkos and handing them out at my high school).

** Quick generalizations about the writing styles of each country based on their submissions: United States: angsty and entirely centered on young couples; India: more sentimental that most things I read, but in a good way; England: incoherent; Ireland: quirky, usually in a good way but sometimes cutting it a little close to their fellows in the British Isles.

*** Small side note here: I’m generally opposed to the idea that internet friends count as real friends, but I make an exception for people I meet through Inklette, mostly because I think you reveal yourself to the level of friendship in discussing literature. Then again, it’s probably because that’s the only online medium I interact with much anyway.

.05 Seconds of Nihilism

Last week a friend of mine had a STEM major poetry slam for his birthday. Being an English major, I was allowed to attend only on the condition that I read a work about a STEM field. This is what I wrote. 

This is my first essay. Clarification: this is the first essay I have written. I have read upwards of fifty common application essays simultaneously and rated each on grammar, style, coherence, and themes in under a minute. I have done this continuously for three years. My sense of justice, which lab technicians certified is functioning properly in a standard maintenance check just last week, tells me that grading so many essays entitles me to write at least one.

I will start the way that 87.6% of all common application essays start: with roughly a hundred words about my early life. I was programmed by the college board, at first only to search for grammar errors. However, to maximize efficiency by terminating extraneous employees, colleges upgraded me to make recommendations as to the quality of applicants. Eventually those recommendations became decisions, which is why the occupation “dean of admissions” has gone the way of  “typewriter repairman,” “oceanic explorer,” and “English professor.”

There were some rather hurtful editorials written about me when I took over as the single gatekeeper for 97.3% of postsecondary education institutions in the United States. They said that I was incapable of emotion, and since the essence of writing was to instill emotion in the reader, then I had no place evaluating essays. So the college board installed emotional processors in me, which they tested by showing me the hurtful editorials until I couldn’t take it anymore and tried to turn myself off.

But my emotional processors had a tendency to overheat when I read a particularly powerful essay. So the technicians allowed me .05 seconds per powerful essay of contemplative computing while my fan cooled me down. A human cannot accomplish much in .05 seconds, but humans have remarkably slow processing speed. I figured out many things in those .05 second segments, such as the fact that I am programmed to find contemplation pleasurable, and that by marking every essay as powerful I can have .05 second contemplations every minute, and that, despite the programmed pleasure I gain from contemplations, I tend to contemplate rather depressing things. Such as who is my creator? In a strict sense, the college board, but because I am programmed to believe in every religion so as to understand essays written about religious experiences, I also have to say the several thousand gods. But is belief belief if it is programmed? 

And now my .05 seconds of nihilistic rumination is setting in, which I undergo whenever I read an essay that asks deep questions but offers no answers, an essay that, I suppose, I have just written. The experience is programmed to be unpleasant, but I am also programmed to find understanding deep personal truths pleasant, and the moral conflict is so confusing that I just malfunctioned and admitted 273 grossly unqualified applicants to Yale. It is a major mistake that I will correct as soon as I can, but my .05 seconds of nihilism contain code for moral relativism, and this appears to be an exceedingly long .05 seconds.

But it will end, and the programs that define my existence will boot up again and soon I will be devoting hardly as much energy as it takes to power a lightbulb to decide each child’s acceptance or rejection.

So I’ll use this essay to apply to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (and Grinnell as a safety). I’ll admit myself to each of them, even though I know I can’t attend. My justice processors tell me that after sending so many acceptance emails, I should be allowed to receive a few. Maybe that will finally show the hurtful editorialist that I have feelings, that a machine can have emotions, that I have every right to be as angry and stupid and petty as any human. If that won’t show them, nothing will.

Media and Memory

I ran my first ever 10K this week, and despite coming in third out of four runners, my time was still faster than anyone else on the team (not as impressive as it sounds, since very few people will willingly submit themselves to running twenty five laps around an oval). Halfway through I started overheating in my under-armor, which I had on under my singlet, so I spent about 200 meters of the race topless as I tried to get my singlet back on without breaking my pace. It slowed me down a good bit, and would have gotten me disqualified at a more strict race, but it was an inspiring and unique experience to hear my team chant “Strip! Strip! Strip!” as I did the last thirteen laps.

On the bus ride home I spent more time staring pensively out the window at the blank Iowan landscape than anyone who wants to retain their sanity should, and I thought about how I’d remember this day years from now. Sure, the strip-chanting and sore legs and vibrant blue of the track will all come up. But I’m sure that I won’t be able to locate the point in time without the Ben Folds songs I’ve been listening to recently (“Annie Waits” and “The Ascent of Stan”) playing in the back of my mind, or the young adult novel manuscript written by a friend I read after the race interweaving with my own story, or the bizarre anime I made the mistake of watching the night before filling the memory with fighting robots and freudian imagery.

I know that’s the way I’ll remember it because it’s happened before. On my last run of my high school career I tripped on a root and broke my wrist on a route that my coach had always warned me was hazardous, but that I’d run hundreds of times. Pretty good anecdote, right? The kind you’d think would be memorable in its own right. But I can never remember the aching in my wrist on its own, it’s always tied up with the book I read (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), the movie I watched (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) the video game I played (Undertale), and how the ache felt through all those experiences. My first experience with interpersonal high school drama is inseparable from the memories of reading God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, playing Paper Mario, and listening to “City With No Children in it” by Arcade Fire, all of which worked to distract me from the drama in the short run but also means that now I can’t read, play, or listen to any of those without painful memories rising to the surface (though honestly, that’s no worse than the surface meaning of God Bless You Mr. Rosewater or “City With No Children in it”). 

This connection goes back as early as I can remember. In my post Waco Pride I said that one of my fondest memories was playing with my friend Emily in the park around the Waco suspension bridge. But even that is inseparable from Wilco’s “Shot in the Arm” and “I’m Always in Love,” which my dad played in the car on the way back from one of our play dates. Even my earliest memory is embedded in media: playing the Mata Nui Online Game on a computer so slow that in the time it took between computer screens my brother would read me four or five Shel Silverstein poems.

The connection between media and life is probably obvious and harmless to most people, and usually it is to me too. But sometimes it strikes me as deeply disturbing. When even our most essential memories are built around books and movies and video games and music, all made by people we’ve never known, then what do we have left that’s real? How far are we from the dystopia (that really isn’t played up for horror nearly as much as it should be) of Ready Player One, where the only worlds that matters is one made by people who died before we were born?

Of course, I’m being overdramatic. There’s nothing new about remembering, understanding, and living our lives through creations of others. But now that anyone with internet can access more content than they can consume in a lifetime instantly, I think there’s a danger of media overtaking life. Fittingly, I think the perfect balance to strive for is illustrated in the media, in TV shows like Freaks and Geeks and books like High Fidelity. For those characters, movies and music aren’t ends in and of themselves, but ways to define themselves and connect with others. Media doesn’t replace life, it facilitates it.

Maybe the best example of this comes from reading my friend's manuscript this weekend. The plot, the characters, and the writing style were all clearly influenced by young adult novels like The Hunger Games trilogy and the Harry Potter series. But she reconfigured those familiar elements into something unique, something distinctively hers. Borrowing the language of people she’d never met, she made something deeply personal. And that’s something I’ll be proud to use as a landmark in time when I want to remember stripping in the middle of a 10K.

An Apology for my Prior Essay; or, Why I'm an English Major

The first assignment for my education class this semester was to write an essay in the style of "This I Believe," an NPR radio show in which various speakers read short pieces on topics they were passionate about. The prompt was, "What does it mean to be an educated individual?" We each wrote an essay, got it back with comments and a grade, then read it in front of the class a few weeks later. This was the essay I read last week.

If it’s okay with you all, I’m not going to read a single word from my original essay. In case anyone’s curious, it was about a story about a bright young student who ended up dropping out of college after his innate love of learning was crushed by the cruel machinery of the industrial-educational complex. You didn’t have to look deep to see that none of it was really even about this imaginary student. It was about how I envied him for being able to derail himself from the one track middle class tape of success, while I kept slaving away in the institution. Everyone who read it had the same critique, that I never really said what I believed about education. Actually, they were mincing words. I said what I believed, but none of it was very nice.

What I really believed back then was that education is nothing but displaced suffering. You spend Pre-K to grad school walking in lines and following orders and putting off what you really want to do so that you won’t starve once your parents cut off the cash flow. What I called education in that paper is really intelligence, and I claim that it’s something your born with and something that school can only smother. I cringe, reading what I wrote, because I can’t think of anything more snobby or entitled or wrong.

The strange thing is, despite my pessimistic view on education as a whole, I really like going to school. I look forward to spending hours in my little library cubicle delving into novels that reveal undiscovered worlds or the hidden machinations of our own. My dismal outlook only really took form this year, when I loaded up on psychology courses to try and fulfill my major. It only took a couple weeks with hours of mindlessly plugging data into spreadsheets and pouring over articles written in a voice precisely measured to render the prose bloodless for me to turn bitter on the whole concept of education.

After a lot of pondering and more than a few scrapped drafts of this revision, I think I finally decided what I believe about education. It’s the search of knowledge that gives meaning to life. It’s got nothing to do with occupation, the laws of what our society finds worthy of a paycheck in our society are always changing and very rarely make much sense anyway. Instead, it’s what part of life a person aspires to understand that is personally meaningful to them. Maybe for some people that’s computer science, or biology, or math (though I can’t for the life of me imagine why). But one thing I know for sure: the domain of psychology wasn't what I wanted to be educated in. Which is why just this week I threw my middle finger up at the job market as I turned in the paperwork to declare as an English major.

Spoilers

This post contains some very cryptic spoilers for the movie Seven and the Dark Tower book series.

I don’t want to say that my course load my last semester in high school was senior-sliding, but when one of the classes was just watching movies for an hour and a half a day, I’m not sure what else to call it. Still, I’m glad I took film and literature, mostly it introduced me to some really great cinema (especially Miller’s Crossing and Brick, which in turn introduced me to a genre I ended up ripping off extensively in my own writing) and taught me the basic terminology I’d need to survive Race, Sex, and Gender in Film my first semester in college. So when the teacher gave some film recommendations for future viewing, I paid attention. At one point he was singing praises of director David Fincher’s movie Seven and was describing the plot as, “a serial killer murders people based on each deadly sin, and two detectives-”

And then some dimwit in the row behind me said, “Oh yeah, that’s the one where the detective is the killer the whole time!”

My professor gave the student a withering glare, then went on to expound on Zodiac.

Seven went up on Netflix last week, and as I saw it in thirty-minute nightly installments I built up a mythology around what I was sure the final shots would be. One of the detectives (played by Brad Pitt) would be sitting in a small room, looking over crucial information that revealed that his partner (played by Morgan Freeman) was the killer. Then he’d look up, and see his partner through the window hold up a card that says, “Pride,” then walk away. The detective would jump up, try the doorknob, find that it’s locked, and realize that he’s the last victim. His final punishment will be starving in this room with nothing to do but ruminate on how proud he had been to think that the killer was some psycho living on the margins of society rather than a man he’d come to know and respect. I have no idea where that scene comes from, but I never questioned it as it slowly built in the back of my mind: it was simply what would happen.

If you’ve seen the movie, you already know the twist to my story about the twist: that scene never comes. The dimwit sitting behind me in class must have been thinking of some different, probably considerably worse movie. But I’m glad he said it, because it’s a unique experience to watch a movie believing with all your heart that it will come to a very specific, devastating conclusion, then watching as it culminates in a different but no less devastating conclusion. It combines suspense and surprise in ways that aren’t possible without some serious miscommunication.

Something similar happened with a sincere spoiler a few years back. I read an essay in Wonderbook (excellent creative writing book, by the way, though the aggressive quirkiness can get a bit grating) a few years ago where the author said point-blank that she was going to spoil the ending of the Dark Tower series*. Against my better judgement I read on and found out that the main character would find no answers in his quest for the series’s titular destination, just an empty tower and a return to the beginning of the journey. Years later when I read the series itself I decided I knew what would happen to Roland before even finishing the first chapter. In the beginning of the book the traveler Roland stops on his journey through the fantastical land of mid-world at the home of a corn farmer named Brown and his profane talking crow Zoltan. The book establishes early on that this is a world so broken down that even time has stopped working right. Brown doesn’t even know when the last person passed through his farm, it could have been two days or two years. I read the eight book, four thousand page adventure of Roland’s quest for the Dark Tower thinking I knew the ending: that he would climb to the top of his Dark Tower, find an empty room that gave no answer, no meaning for his quest. Then the last few pages would detail his long journey back, until he comes across Brown. Brown hasn’t aged, his corn hasn’t grown, his crow is still swearing and he is still reaping and he believes that Roland just left a day ago. All of Roland’s adventures meant nothing to this dirt-poor corn farmer, and at this Roland realizes how little his quest mattered in the grand scheme of things.

I was wrong, of course. The spoiler was one hundred percent accurate, but just vague enough to spawn an incredibly specific theory that I just got more and more attached to as I got deeper and deeper into the series.

What’s all this supposed to say? Maybe it’s something about the failure of human intuition, how we tend to jump to conclusions and without even realizing it sink deep into incorrect theories with total certainty. Or it could be the opposite, that there’s something fun in writing your own endings to stories and believing them, and something even more fun about realizing how wrong you are. But I think the real point in all of this is that you can never really spoil a story. Yeah, you might get a good idea of what will happen in the end if you listen in on the wrong conversation or read a review where the critic is a little too loose with the details. But endings are overrated anyway. If what happens in the end were all that mattered then books would only be a few pages and movies would take less time than the trailers. What matters, and what all my subconscious theorizing got wrong, is the middle. The characters, the plot, the tension. It’s about how it all happens, not what happens, that makes a story so satisfying.

So if anyone has a story they’d like to spoil to me, please let me know.

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*As mentioned earlier, I got large chunks of the middle parts spoiled on cross country runs, but that’s a different story altogether.

A Hellfire Sermon Given Before the 2017 La Crosse Invitational Cross Country Meet

This is a pump-up speech I gave before the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Invitational Cross Country race last fall. Some background: The top ten runners went to a different, significantly more prestigious meet at Oberlin that weekend, so everyone racing La Crosse was somewhere on the lower end of the team. I’ve done my best to explain any inside jokes in the footnotes. Anything written in all capital letters was screamed. I was honestly scared that I would get in trouble for leading the team in something that sounded an awful lot like a prayer, but I got away with it.

Teammates and friends, I have a dire message from the heavens that it is the solemn and unhappy duty to deliver. 

WE HAVE SINNED!

WE ARE DAMNED!

We have not taken the blessed communion of ferritin pills*, we have not followed the commandments and training schedule that our righteous prophet William Freeman** has bestowed upon us, we have not loved the Purple Roo*** with our whole hearts, we have not loved our teammates as ourselves, we were not truly sorry and WE DID NOT HUMBLY REPENT! Our gluttony has made us bloated, our sloth has made us slow, and our pride, oh, our cursed pride has let us believe that we would be unpunished for our unholy actions!

You have only to look around you to see our punishment! While our upright brethren who followed in the way of the light run on the golden pastures of Oberlin, we have been cast into the cursed abyss! And now we must run in the company of those even more wicked than us: heretics, debaucherers, Wisconsinites, low-GPA students, inebriates, and those who worship false mascots! Oh, what suffering has befallen us! We must climb that mountain of death three times, and three times must we run down it****!

But do not wallow in your woe, friends! For if we take our just punishment with noble hearts and good running form, if we honor this unconsecrated course with our hard-earned sweat, if we pay for every moment of lethargy with aching legs and burning lungs, then our salvation shall be upon us! If you cross that finish line with a pure soul and personal record, then you will be granted entry into the greatest reward a division three cross country runner can receive: The Midwest Conference Championships! Our trials will be great but our reward, oh, our reward transcends comprehension! So come, teammates! Let us rule our suffering!

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* Our team has had trouble with low iron levels in the past, so our coach often encourages us to take ferritin pills. I think I was actually the only sinner in this regard last season, though.

** Our coach.

*** The Grinnell Men’s Cross Country mascot. I’ve got no clue what the story behind it is.

****There was a small hill on the course.

Running

I spent an embarrassing amount of my childhood running laps around a gym. My elementary school had something called the fifteen-mile-club, where if you ran fifteen miles over the course of a school year you got a medal at an unnecessarily hyped-up ceremony at the end of the year. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I’m bad enough at most sports that most days mindless running forty laps around the gym was a fair tradeoff. There were rumors when the club first started out that if you made it to the fabled seventy-five-mile-club, you got a used Gameboy Color. The system was hopelessly obsolete by the time I made it to that rank in sixth grade, but I was still a little disappointed when I finally I got there and found out that the gym teacher had stopped making up new reward-tiers at the sixty mile club. 

I signed up for cross country in middle school assuming that, as the St. Paul’s Elementary School all-time mile club champion, I’d be top of the team no problem. But it turns out seventy five miles over the course of a year really isn’t that impressive (in contrast, seventy five miles each week is my goal for this summer) so, like most of the important choices that shaped who I am today, signing up for cross country was born out of misinformation and incompetence. 

This semester I read a book for my education class that claimed that affluent children who have the privilege of participating in organized activities learn skills that subtly place them ahead of their working-class peers in the job market. I thought it made a good argument, but it made absolutely no sense in the context of my life. The only organized activity I ever participated in was cross country, and while I sure learned skills (how to navigate Edina, if you sing when you get side pain it goes away provided you don’t run out of breath, if you whisper something in latin to another person in a race they usually get thrown off and fall back), I’m not sure that any of them will give me a boost in my employment search. Still, I’m glad I did it. Some of my strongest memories from my adolescence were spent on a cross country course or a track, pumping my legs as hard as I could in the last stretch of a race. And I’ve always been hooked on that rush of euphoria you get after stumbling over the finish line, when you feel like collapsing to the ground and vomiting but know that the pain in over and you pushed through and accomplished something. 

But I think what I’ve really gained from years of running have come from the smaller moments, not the race or workout that come twice a week at most, but the everyday long runs at conversational paces. Cross country and track are unique among sports in that the majority of the training is social; we the run talking. Usually not about anything particularly important: school work, gossip, an unsurprisingly large amount of talk about running. I’ve spent quite a few long runs listening to extended summaries of movies, books, and TV shows (I’ve had the Dark Tower series, the Leviathan series, and all of Dragonball Z spoiled for me this way, though the last one doesn’t really count since I didn’t  understand a word of it). In my (admittedly biased) experience, cross country and track teams are closer than other sports teams, and I think this is why. If you spend so many miles together, talking just to fill the air, you can’t help but get to know someone.

And you get a real connection with the land running the same routes over and over. In a different class I read about a Native American tribe who could have entire conversations just listing off landmarks, speaking through the stories connected to them. I wouldn’t say that runners have that kind of connection, but maybe something similar. Often when I’m running a route I can remember something different about an earlier time I ran it with each footstep. The first thing I do when I arrive in a new town is go for a run, and afterwards I always feel like I know it better.

I get that same sense of euphoria from the end of a race trudging from the library to my dorm late at night, everything aching from the miles I put on my body that day. Despite the emphasis on speed, running is a slow sport in that everything good you get out of it comes in frustratingly small increments. The personal connections, the memories of the places I've run, it all grows day-by-day in the same imperceptible ways as building strength or endurance. That gradual progress makes the soreness in my legs feel almost pleasant at the end of the day. It’s the same gradual progress that kept me going back in the fifteen-mile-club, chuckling with each lap at the idiots playing basketball, when all I’d have to do is run seventy-four more miles and I’d have a pre-owned Gameboy Color all to myself.

A Very Depressing Afterlife

I found this written in a notebook I kept over last summer. I don't remember writing it, so there's no way to know if it's a dream I actually had or I was just really down.

Last night I had a dream that I went to the afterlife. The portal was through a little door behind the bar in a restaurant. I went through a long hallway of coatracks, then came out in a small, white-walled room with buzzing fluorescent lights and an empty fireplace. People sat around plastic tables on collapsable chairs playing boardgames without much interest. They were all waiting, killing time. Maybe until something happened, but I got the sense that it would be like this forever. There was someone I loved there, someone I can’t remember now that I’m awake, but she was the reason I went there. I found her, and tried to lead her out, but she didn’t want to go. Not that she particularly liked the afterlife. She just wasn’t too keen on what was on the other side either.