Day 14, #ssac2024 “The Lottery” by Adam O’Fallon Price His one redeeming trait was acknowledging that his wife was smarter than he was. “One in 300 million is another way of saying that something is not going to happen...”

Day 15, #ssac2024 “Down Burned Road” by Jacqueline Baker Had trouble connecting with this story, thought I did appreciate the author’s descriptive powers. “Turing seemed to Carrie to have come from nowhere, from no place and no time. Attached, it seemed, the nothing.”

Day 16, #ssac2024 “Conversation Over The Holidays” by Jessica Westhead Timeless in portraying the middle aged experience, the anxieties, and banalities, and small graces. “everything around them and beneath them felt so solid and sturdy, but now it wasn’t like that anymore.”

Day 17, #ssac2024 “You Again” by Seth Fried This story was like the perfect cup of tea or your favorite song, a tiny slice of perfection that you futilely hope will last forever, but know that it’s fleetingness is part of it’s allure. “Mistakes would need to be embraced.”

Day 18, #ssac2024 “The Exhibition” by Alexandra Wuest So much packed into one story: art, appropriation, empathy, anxiety, apathy, boredom, and much more. “Instead it reminded her of a sunrise, which on second thought, she realized, must be a pretty nice way to see oneself.”

Day 19, #ssac2024 “Chris Cornell” by Damian Tarnopolsky “The Russian soul is a dark place.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky “Later on I served time as an editor, and discovered the compromised way books came into the world with their teams of midwives.”

Day 20, #ssac2024 “The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself” by Carmen Maria Machado An entertaining Monty Python-esque parable about our unchecked modern consumerism and the unfillable void. “The jump between murder and cannibalism is, somehow, smaller.”

Day 21, #ssac2024 “Wars and Winters” by Hannah Pittard Entitled, toxic ‘masculinity’ with the inevitable side of insecure fragility. “He hadn’t even given me a noun.”

Rocky Flop…

Buckeye Beatdown

Day 22, #ssac2024 “The One With The Multiverse” by Josh Riedel Are memories and nostalgia the actual multiverse?? “It’s easy to forget where you are in towns like this. You can be in one place and believe you’re somewhere else.”

Day 23, #ssac2024 “Anaheim” by Jennifer Croft Masterclass in the potential of the form…four or five short stories alone within this single story, bravo. “Misuse was the wrong kind of waste. Use and abuse. The right kind of waste was lavishing everyone around you with life.”

Day 24, #ssac2024 “The Thieves Who Couldn’t Help Sneezing” by Thomas Hardy A perfect little Christmas Eve tale with adventure, peril, wit, and a hero’s triumph. “I can conjure up a tempest in a cupboard…”

Day 25, #ssac2024 “The Leaf-Sweeper” by Muriel Spark The unexpected story of the short lived Abolition of Christmas😎 “But perhaps you don’t know how repulsive and loathsome is the ghost of a living man.”

As Meta announces the end to professional fact-checking, please -please- accept finally that social media is not a viable way to get factual information. It was a noble experiment. It failed. Traditional journalism, while imperfect, is the way. Please pay a little bit and use it.

Colorado Rockies City Connect

You can take the Cardinal out of Chicago….

#REM #Old97s #ToadTheWetSprocket