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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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