NEW INFO 5 Results from share redemption are posted. Less than .2% redeemed. Very bullish as investors are showing extreme confidence in the future of PLBY.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/playboy-mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-120000721.html
NEW INFO 4 Definitive Agreement to purchase 100% of Lovers brand stores announced 2/1.
https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Playboy+%28MCAC%29+Confirms+Deal+to+Acquire+Lovers/17892359.html
NEW INFO 3 I bought more on the dip today. 5081 total. Price rose AH to $12.38 (2.15%)
NEW INFO 2 Here is the full webinar.
https://icrinc.zoom.us/rec/play/9GWKdmOYumjWfZuufW3QXpe_FW_g--qeNbg6PnTjTMbnNTgLmCbWjeRFpQga1iPc-elpGap8dnDv8Zww.yD7DjUwuPmapeEdP?continueMode=true&tk=lEYc4F_FkKlgsmCIs6w0gtGHT2kbgVGbUju3cIRBSjk.DQIAAAAV8NK49xZWdldRM2xNSFNQcTBmcE00UzM3bXh3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA&uuid=WN_GKWqbHkeSyuWetJmLFkj4g&_x_zm_rtaid=kR45-uuqRE-L65AxLjpbQw.1611967079119.2c054e3d3f8d8e63339273d9175939ed&_x_zm_rhtaid=866
NEW INFO 1 Live merger webinar with PLBY and MCAC on Friday January 29, 2021 at 12:00 NOON EST link below
https://mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/press-release-details/2021/Playboy-Enterprises-Inc.-and-Mountain-Crest-Acquisition-Corp-Participate-in-SPACInsider-ICR-Webinar-on-January-29th-at-12pm-ET/default.aspx
Playboy going public: Porn, Gambling, and Cannabis
!!!WARNING READING AHEAD!!! TL;DR at the end. It will take some time to sort through all the links and read/watch everything, but you should.
In the next couple weeks, Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp is taking Playboy public. The existing ticker MCAC will become PLBY. Special purpose acquisition companies have taken private companies public in recent months with great success. I believe this will be no exception. Notably, Playboy is profitable and has skyrocketing revenue going into a transformational growth phase.
Porn - First and foremost, let's talk about porn. I know what you guys are thinking. “Porno mags are dead. Why would I want to invest in something like that? I can get porn for free online.” Guess what? You are absolutely right. And that’s exactly why Playboy doesn’t do that anymore. That’s right, they eliminated their print division. And yet they somehow STILL make money from porn that people (see: boomers) pay for on their website through PlayboyTV, Playboy Plus, and iPlayboy. Here’s the thing: Playboy has international, multi-generational name recognition from porn. They have content available in 180 countries. It will be the only publicly traded adult entertainment (porn) company. But that is not where this company is going. It will help support them along the way. You can see every Playboy magazine through iPlayboy if you’re interested. NSFW links below:
https://www.playboy.com/
https://www.playboytv.com/
https://www.playboyplus.com/
https://www.iplayboy.com/
Gambling - Some of you might recognize the Playboy brand from gambling trips to places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Cancun, London or Macau. They’ve been in the gambling biz for decades through their casinos, clubs, and licensed gaming products. They see the writing on the wall. COVID is accelerating the transition to digital, application based GAMBLING. That’s right. What we are doing on Robinhood with risky options is gambling, and the only reason regulators might give a shit anymore is because we are making too much money. There may be some restrictions put in place, but gambling from your phone on your couch is not going anywhere. More and more states are allowing things like Draftkings, poker, state ‘lottery” apps, hell - even political betting. Michigan and Virginia just ok’d gambling apps. They won’t be the last. This is all from your couch and any 18 year old with a cracked iphone can access it. Wouldn’t it be cool if Playboy was going to do something like that? They’re already working on it. As per CEO Ben Kohn who we will get to later, “...the company’s casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth.” Honestly, I stopped researching Scientific Games' sports betting segment when I saw the word ‘omni-channel’. That told me all I needed to know about it’s success.
“Our SG Sports™ platform is an enhanced, omni-channel solution for online, self-service and retail fixed odds sports betting – from soccer to tennis, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, motor sports, racing and more.”
https://www.scientificgames.com/
https://www.microgaming.co.uk/
“This latter segment has become increasingly enticing for Playboy, and it said last week that it is considering new tie-ups that could include gaming operators like PointsBet and 888Holdings.”
https://calvinayre.com/2020/10/05/business/playboys-gaming-ops-could-get-a-boost-from-spac-purchase/
As per their SEC filing:
“Significant consumer engagement and spend with Playboy-branded gaming properties around the world, including with leading partners such as Microgaming, Scientific Games, and Caesar’s Entertainment, steers our investment in digital gaming, sports betting and other digital offerings to further support our commercial strategy to expand consumer spend with minimal marginal cost, and gain consumer data to inform go-to-market plans across categories.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tMDAA1
They are expanding into more areas of gaming/gambling, working with international players in the digital gaming/gambling arena, and a Playboy sportsbook is on the horizon.
https://www.playboy.com/read/the-pleasure-of-playing-with-yourself-mobile-gaming-in-the-covid-era
Cannabis - If you’ve ever read through a Playboy magazine, you know they’ve had a positive relationship with cannabis for many years. As of September 2020, Playboy has made a major shift into the cannabis space. Too good to be true you say? Check their website. Playboy currently sells a range of CBD products. This is a good sign. Federal hemp products, which these most likely are, can be mailed across state lines and most importantly for a company like Playboy, can operate through a traditional banking institution. CBD products are usually the first step towards the cannabis space for large companies. Playboy didn’t make these products themselves meaning they are working with a processor in the cannabis industry. Another good sign for future expansion. What else do they have for sale? Pipes, grinders, ashtrays, rolling trays, joint holders. Hmm. Ok. So it looks like they want to sell some shit. They probably don’t have an active interest in cannabis right? Think again:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/09/24/playboy-gets-serious-about-cannabis-law-reform-advocacy-with-new-partnership-grants/?sh=62f044a65cea
“Taking yet another step into the cannabis space, Playboy will be announcing later on Thursday (September, 2020) that it is launching a cannabis law reform and advocacy campaign in partnership with National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Last Prisoner Project, Marijuana Policy Project, the Veterans Cannabis Project, and the Eaze Momentum Program.”
“According to information procured exclusively, the three-pronged campaign will focus on calling for federal legalization. The program also includes the creation of a mentorship plan, through which the Playboy Foundation will support entrepreneurs from groups that are underrepresented in the industry.” Remember that CEO Kohn from earlier? He wrote this recently:
https://medium.com/naked-open-letters-from-playboy/congress-must-pass-the-more-act-c867c35239ae
Seems like he really wants weed to be legal? Hmm wonder why? The writing's on the wall my friends. Playboy wants into the cannabis industry, they are making steps towards this end, and we have favorable conditions for legislative progress.
Don’t think branding your own cannabis line is profitable or worthwhile? Tell me why these 41 celebrity millionaires and billionaires are dummies. I’ll wait.
https://www.celebstoner.com/news/celebstoner-news/2019/07/12/top-celebrity-cannabis-brands/
Confirmation: I hear you. “This all seems pretty speculative. It would be wildly profitable if they pull this shift off. But how do we really know?” Watch this whole video:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/playboy-ceo-telling-story-female-154907068.html
Man - this interview just gets my juices flowing. And highlights one of my favorite reasons for this play. They have so many different business avenues from which a catalyst could appear. I think paying attention, holding shares, and options on these staggered announcements over the next year is the way I am going to go about it. "There's definitely been a shift to direct-to-consumer," he (Kohn) said. "About 50 percent of our revenue today is direct-to-consumer, and that will continue to grow going forward.” “Kohn touted Playboy's portfolio of both digital and consumer products, with casino-style gaming, in particular, serving a crucial role under the company's new business model. Playboy also has its sights on the emerging cannabis market, from CBD products to marijuana products geared toward sexual health and pleasure.” "If THC does become legal in the United States, we have developed certain strains to enhance your sex life that we will launch," Kohn said. https://cheddar.com/media/playboy-goes-public-health-gaming-lifestyle-focus Oh? The CEO actually said it? Ok then. “We have developed certain strains…” They’re already working with growers on strains and genetics? Ok. There are several legal cannabis markets for those products right now, international and stateside. I expect Playboy licensed hemp and THC pre-rolls by EOY. Something like this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/842996758/10-playboy-pre-roll-tubes-limited?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=pre+roll+playboy&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1 Maintaining cannabis operations can be costly and a regulatory headache. Playboy’s licensing strategy allows them to pick successful, established partners and sidestep traditional barriers to entry. You know what I like about these new markets? They’re expanding. Worldwide. And they are going to be a bigger deal than they already are with or without Playboy. Who thinks weed and gambling are going away? Too many people like that stuff. These are easy markets. And Playboy is early enough to carve out their spot in each. Fuck it, read this too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimosman/2020/10/20/playboy-could-be-the-king-of-spacs-here-are-three-picks/?sh=2e13dcaa3e05
Numbers: You want numbers? I got numbers. As per the company’s most recent SEC filing:
“For the year ended December 31, 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s historical consolidated revenue was $78.1 million and $101.3 million, respectively, historical consolidated net income (loss) was $(23.6) million and $(4.8) million, respectively, and Adjusted EBITDA was $13.1 million and $21.8 million, respectively.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Licensing segment contributed $44.2 million in revenue and $31.1 million in net income.”
“In the ninth months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Direct-to-Consumer segment contributed $40.2 million in revenue and net income of $0.1 million.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Digital Subscriptions and Content segment contributed $15.4 million in revenue and net income of $7.4 million.”
They are profitable across all three of their current business segments.
“Playboy’s return to the public markets presents a transformed, streamlined and high-growth business. The Company has over $400 million in cash flows contracted through 2029, sexual wellness products available for sale online and in over 10,000 major retail stores in the US, and a growing variety of clothing and branded lifestyle and digital gaming products.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
Growth: Playboy has massive growth in China and massive growth potential in India. “In China, where Playboy has spent more than 25 years building its business, our licensees have an enormous footprint of nearly 2,500 brick and mortar stores and 1,000 ecommerce stores selling high quality, Playboy-branded men’s casual wear, shoes/footwear, sleepwear, swimwear, formal suits, leather & non-leather goods, sweaters, active wear, and accessories. We have achieved significant growth in China licensing revenues over the past several years in partnership with strong licensees and high-quality manufacturers, and we are planning for increased growth through updates to our men’s fashion lines and expansion into adjacent categories in men’s skincare and grooming, sexual wellness, and women’s fashion, a category where recent launches have been well received.” The men’s market in China is about the same size as the entire population of the United States and European Union combined. Playboy is a leading brand in this market. They are expanding into the women’s market too. Did you know CBD toothpaste is huge in China? China loves CBD products and has hemp fields that dwarf those in the US. If Playboy expands their CBD line China it will be huge. Did you know the gambling money in Macau absolutely puts Las Vegas to shame? Technically, it's illegal on the mainland, but in reality, there is a lot of gambling going on in China. https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/10/19/magic-johnson-and-uncle-buds-cbd-brand-enter-china-via-tmall-partnership/?sh=271776ca411e “In India, Playboy today has a presence through select apparel licensees and hospitality establishments. Consumer research suggests significant growth opportunities in the territory with Playboy’s brand and categories of focus.” “Playboy Enterprises has announced the expansion of its global consumer products business into India as part of a partnership with Jay Jay Iconic Brands, a leading fashion and lifestyle Company in India.” “The Indian market today is dominated by consumers under the age of 35, who represent more than 65 percent of the country’s total population and are driving India’s significant online shopping growth. The Playboy brand’s core values of playfulness and exploration resonate strongly with the expressed desires of today’s younger millennial consumers. For us, Playboy was the perfect fit.” “The Playboy international portfolio has been flourishing for more than 25 years in several South Asian markets such as China and Japan. In particular, it has strategically targeted the millennial and gen-Z audiences across categories such as apparel, footwear, home textiles, eyewear and watches.” https://www.licenseglobal.com/industry-news/playboy-expands-global-footprint-india It looks like they gave COVID the heisman in terms of net damage sustained: “Although Playboy has not suffered any material adverse consequences to date from the COVID-19 pandemic, the business has been impacted both negatively and positively. The remote working and stay-at-home orders resulted in the closure of the London Playboy Club and retail stores of Playboy’s licensees, decreasing licensing revenues in the second quarter, as well as causing supply chain disruption and less efficient product development thereby slowing the launch of new products. However, these negative impacts were offset by an increase in Yandy’s direct-to-consumer sales, which have benefited in part from overall increases in online retail sales so far during the pandemic.” Looks like the positives are long term (Yandy acquisition) and the negatives are temporary (stay-at-home orders).
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921006093/tm213766-1_defa14a.htm
This speaks to their ability to maintain a financially solvent company throughout the transition phase to the aforementioned areas. They’d say some fancy shit like “expanded business model to encompass four key revenue streams: Sexual Wellness, Style & Apparel, Gaming & Lifestyle, and Beauty & Grooming.” I hear “we’re just biding our time with these trinkets until those dollar dollar bill y’all markets are fully up and running.” But the truth is these existing revenue streams are profitable, scalable, and rapidly expanding Playboy’s e-commerce segment around the world.
"Even in the face of COVID this year, we've been able to grow EBITDA over 100 percent and revenue over 68 percent, and I expect that to accelerate going into 2021," he said. “Playboy is accelerating its growth in company-owned and branded consumer products in attractive and expanding markets in which it has a proven history of brand affinity and consumer spend.”
Also in the SEC filing, the Time Frame:
“As we detailed in the definitive proxy statement, the SPAC stockholder meeting to vote on the transaction has been set for February 9th, and, subject to stockholder approval and satisfaction of the other closing conditions, we expect to complete the merger and begin trading on NASDAQ under ticker PLBY shortly thereafter,” concluded Kohn.
The Players: Suhail “The Whale” Rizvi (HMFIC), Ben “The Bridge” Kohn (CEO), “lil” Suying Liu & “Big” Dong Liu (Young-gun China gang). I encourage you to look these folks up. The real OG here is Suhail Rizvi. He’s from India originally and Chairman of the Board for the new PLBY company. He was an early investor in Twitter, Square, Facebook and others. His firm, Rizvi Traverse, currently invests in Instacart, Pinterest, Snapchat, Playboy, and SpaceX. Maybe you’ve heard of them. “Rizvi, who owns a sprawling three-home compound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a 1.65-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida, near Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, moved to Iowa Falls when he was five. His father was a professor of psychology at Iowa. Along with his older brother Ashraf, a hedge fund manager, Rizvi graduated from Wharton business school.” “Suhail Rizvi: the 47-year-old 'unsocial' social media baron: When Twitter goes public in the coming weeks (2013), one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his photos from the internet. In IPO, Twitter seeks to be 'anti-FB'” “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia looks like a big Twitter winner. So do the moneyed clients of Jamie Dimon. But as you’ve-got-to-be-joking wealth washed over Twitter on Thursday — a company that didn’t exist eight years ago was worth $31.7 billion after its first day on the stock market — the non-boldface name of the moment is Suhail R. Rizvi. Mr. Rizvi, 47, runs a private investment company that is the largest outside investor in Twitter with a 15.6 percent stake worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday (November, 2013). Using a web of connections in the tech industry and in finance, as well as a hearty dose of good timing, he brought many prominent names in at the ground floor, including the Saudi prince and some of JPMorgan’s wealthiest clients.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/technology/at-twitter-working-behind-the-scenes-toward-a-billion-dollar-payday.html Y’all like that Arab money? How about a dude that can call up Saudi Princes and convince them to spend? Funniest shit about I read about him: “Rizvi was able to buy only $100 million in Facebook shortly before its IPO, thus limiting his returns, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” Poor guy :(
He should be fine with the 16 million PLBY shares he's going to have though :)
Shuhail also has experience in the entertainment industry. He’s invested in companies like SESAC, ICM, and Summit Entertainment. He’s got Hollywood connections to blast this stuff post-merger. And he’s at least partially responsible for that whole Twilight thing. I’m team Edward btw.
I really like what Suhail has done so far. He’s lurked in the shadows while Kohn is consolidating the company, trimming the fat, making Playboy profitable, and aiming the ship at modern growing markets.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-ipo-rizvi-insight/insight-little-known-hollywood-investor-poised-to-score-with-twitter-ipo-idUSBRE9920VW20131003
Ben “The Bridge” Kohn is an interesting guy. He’s the connection between Rizvi Traverse and Playboy. He’s both CEO of Playboy and was previously Managing Partner at Rizvi Traverse. Ben seems to be the voice of the Playboy-Rizvi partnership, which makes sense with Suhail’s privacy concerns. Kohn said this:
“Today is a very big day for all of us at Playboy and for all our partners globally. I stepped into the CEO role at Playboy in 2017 because I saw the biggest opportunity of my career. Playboy is a brand and platform that could not be replicated today. It has massive global reach, with more than $3B of global consumer spend and products sold in over 180 countries. Our mission – to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure – is rooted in our 67-year history and creates a clear focus for our business and role we play in people’s lives, providing them with the products, services and experiences that create a lifestyle of pleasure. We are taking this step into the public markets because the committed capital will enable us to accelerate our product development and go-to-market strategies and to more rapidly build our direct to consumer capabilities,” said Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy.
“Playboy today is a highly profitable commerce business with a total addressable market projected in the trillions of dollars,” Mr. Kohn continued, “We are actively selling into the Sexual Wellness consumer category, projected to be approximately $400 billion in size by 2024, where our recently launched intimacy products have rolled out to more than 10,000 stores at major US retailers in the United States. Combined with our owned & operated ecommerce Sexual Wellness initiatives, the category will contribute more than 40% of our revenue this year. In our Apparel and Beauty categories, our collaborations with high-end fashion brands including Missguided and PacSun are projected to achieve over $50M in retail sales across the US and UK this year, our leading men’s apparel lines in China expanded to nearly 2500 brick and mortar stores and almost 1000 digital stores, and our new men’s and women’s fragrance line recently launched in Europe. In Gaming, our casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth. Our product strategy is informed by years of consumer data as we actively expand from a purely licensing model into owning and operating key high-growth product lines focused on driving profitability and consumer lifetime value. We are thrilled about the future of Playboy. Our foundation has been set to drive further growth and margin, and with the committed capital from this transaction and our more than $180M in NOLs, we will take advantage of the opportunity in front of us, building to our goal of $100M of adjusted EBITDA in 2025.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
Also, according to their Form 4s, “Big” Dong Liu and “lil” Suying Liu just loaded up with shares last week. These guys are brothers and seem like the Chinese market connection. They are only 32 & 35 years old. I don’t even know what that means, but it's provocative.
https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1832415.htm
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-ii-002600994.html
Y’all like that China money?
“Mr. Liu has been the Chief Financial Officer of Dongguan Zhishang Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd., a regional designer, manufacturer and distributor of LED lights serving commercial customers throughout Southern China since November 2016, at which time he led a syndicate of investments into the firm. Mr. Liu has since overseen the financials of Dongguan Zhishang as well as provided strategic guidance to its board of directors, advising on operational efficiency and cash flow performance. From March 2010 to October 2016, Mr. Liu was the Head of Finance at Feidiao Electrical Group Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese manufacturer of electrical outlets headquartered in Shanghai and with businesses in the greater China region as well as Europe.”
Dr. Suying Liu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., commented, “Playboy is a unique and compelling investment opportunity, with one of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, its proven consumer affinity and spend, and its enormous future growth potential in its four product segments and new and existing geographic regions. I am thrilled to be partnering with Ben and his exceptional team to bring his vision to fruition.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
These guys are good. They have a proven track record of success across multiple industries. Connections and money run deep with all of these guys. I don’t think they’re in the game to lose.
I was going to write a couple more paragraphs about why you should have a look at this but really the best thing you can do is read this SEC filing from a couple days ago. It explains the situation in far better detail. Specifically, look to page 137 and read through their strategy. Also, look at their ownership percentages and compensation plans including the stock options and their prices. The financials look great, revenue is up 90% Q3, and it looks like a bright future.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
I’m hesitant to attach this because his position seems short term, but I’m going to with a warning because he does hit on some good points (two are below his link) and he’s got a sizable position in this thing (500k+ on margin, I think). I don’t know this guy but he did look at the same publicly available info and make roughly the same prediction, albeit without the in depth gambling or cannabis mention. You can also search reddit for ‘MCAC’ and very few relevant results come up and none of them even come close to really looking at this thing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gOvAd6lebs452hFlWWbxVjQ3VMsjGBkbJeXRwDwIJfM/edit?usp=sharing
“Also, before you people start making claims that Playboy is a “boomer” company, STOP RIGHT THERE. This is not a good argument. Simply put. The only thing that matters is Playboy’s name recognition, not their archaic business model which doesn’t even exist anymore as they have completely repurposed their business.”
“Imagine not buying $MCAC at a 400M valuation lol. Streetwear department is worth 1B alone imo.”
Considering the ridiculous Chinese growth as a lifestyle brand, he’s not wrong.
Current Cultural Significance and Meme Value: A year ago I wouldn’t have included this section but the events from the last several weeks (even going back to tsla) have proven that a company’s ability to meme and/or gain social network popularity can have an effect. Tik-tok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. They all have Playboy stuff on them. Kids in middle and highschool know what Playboy is but will likely never see or touch one of the magazines in person. They’ll have a Playboy hoodie though. Crazy huh? A lot like GME, PLBY would hugely benefit from meme-value stock interest to drive engagement towards their new business model while also building strategic coffers. This interest may not directly and/or significantly move the stock price but can generate significant interest from larger players who will.
Bull Case: The year is 2025. Playboy is now the world leader pleasure brand. They began by offering Playboy licensed gaming products, including gambling products, direct to consumers through existing names. By 2022, demand has skyrocketed and Playboy has designed and released their own gambling platforms. In 2025, they are also a leading cannabis brand in the United States and Canada with proprietary strains and products geared towards sexual wellness. Cannabis was legalized in the US in 2023 when President Biden got glaucoma but had success with cannabis treatment. He personally pushes for cannabis legalization as he steps out of office after his first term. Playboy has also grown their brand in China and India to multi-billion per year markets. The stock goes up from 11ish to 100ish and everyone makes big gains buying somewhere along the way.
Bear Case: The United States does a complete 180 on marijuana and gambling. President Biden overdoses on marijuana in the Lincoln bedroom when his FDs go tits up and he loses a ton of money in his sports book app after the Fighting Blue Hens narrowly lose the National Championship to Bama. Playboy is unable to expand their cannabis and gambling brands but still does well with their worldwide lifestyle brand. They gain and lose some interest in China and India but the markets are too large to ignore them completely. The stock goes up from 11ish to 13ish and everyone makes 15-20% gains.
TL;DR: Successful technology/e-commerce investment firm took over Playboy to turn it into a porn, online gambling/gaming, sports book, cannabis company, worldwide lifestyle brand that promotes sexual wellness, vetern access, women-ownership, minority-ownership, and “pleasure for all”. Does a successful online team reinventing an antiquated physical copy giant sound familiar? No options yet, shares only for now. $11.38 per share at time of writing. My guess? $20 by the end of February. $50 by EOY. This is not financial advice. I am not qualified to give financial advice. I’m just sayin’ I would personally use a Playboy sports book app while smoking a Playboy strain specific joint and it would be cool if they did that. Do your own research. You’d probably want to start here:
WARNING - POTENTIALLY NSFW - SEXY MODELS AHEAD - no actual nudity though
https://s26.q4cdn.com/895475556/files/doc_presentations/Playboy-Craig-Hallum-Conference-Investor-Presentation-11_17_20-compressed.pdf
Or here:
https://www.mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/default.aspx
Jimmy Chill: “Get into any SPAC at $10 or $11 and you are going to make money.”
STL;DR: Buy MCAC. MCAC > PLBY couple weeks. Rocketship. Moon.
Position: 5000 shares. I will buy short, medium, and long-dated calls once available.

My Assessment and Selection was an "Audition" of sorts. I ceased a phenomenal opportunity. I physically, and mentally "Auditioned" for an extremely selective position that required a healthy amount of combat deployments, suitable appetite for violence, and an unhealthy amount of alcohol consumption. It was, hands-down, the best "Audition" I have ever subjected myself to.
Dear Reader, I have failed. I was simply unaware. Maybe I forgot? Forgetfulness is plausible. My profession as a Corporate Headhunter has produced undesirable side effects, and forgetfulness is undoubtedly one of them. The Wife was the first person to notice my deteriorating mental acuity. The wife can be so negative at times though. Seriously! I remembered the car seat. I remember the stroller. I even remembered the diaper bag, and formula. Yet, all she can talk about is how, "You forgot the baby!"
Pause
Dear Reader, see? See that "Pause" over to the left? I briefly forgot what I was typing about. Perks of the job. Anyways, I either missed or completely forgot about the "Audition." I happened though. Evidently, there was a recent "Audition" for the esteemed role of "Cul-De-Sac Drama Queen." Being that I missed the audition, I am only left with my assumptions.
Drama Queen: A Karen who habitually responds to situations in a melodramatic way.
Dramatization
Ring. Ring. Ring.
Female Voice: Hello?
Karen: Hey Bitch. I am looking to apply for the Cul-De-Sac Drama Queen opening.
Female Voice: Did you just call me a bitch?
Karen: (Sweet Voice) No. You must be hearing things.
Female Voice: (Suspicious) Okay!?! What are your qualifications for this esteemed position?
Karen: I have been jobless since I married. I live at home with my morbidly obese husband, and my forty-nine year old son who is also jobless.
Female Voice: You're forty-nine year old son?
Karen: Yes. He had a rough divorce nine years ago and is still getting-on-his-feet.
Female Voice: Wow. Anything else?
Karen: My breath reeks of Friskies, and I love the cat I don't have more than I love my husband.
Female Voice: That's certainly a start...
Karen: Oh. My dildo has a prescription for Viagra.
Female Voice: Well then! That's a horse of another color! You sound like a real B-I-T-C-H!
Karen: (Proudly) I am!
Again, I was not privy to the interview transcripts, but I surmise I am approximately two-hundred percent accurate in my dramatization assessment. I know what you are thinking Dear Reader, "What did Karen do this time that has Sloppy so irritated?" Dear Reader, she clearly continues to underestimate my resolve, and undying commitment to the beloved art of "Fuck-Fuck."
Christmas was Christmas! However, the wife had a last-minute request on the 23rd of December.
Wife: Have you ever built a quarterpipe?
Sloppy: No. I don't skateboard.
Wife: Do you think you can build one?
Sloppy: Does a bear shit in the woods and wipe his ass with a fluffy white rabbit?
Wife: (Disgust) Does that mean you can build it?
Sloppy: Only if you volunteer to be the first to take Cake to Urgent Care or the Emergency Room (ER).
Wife: (Smile) Deal!
Sloppy: Yes. I will start right-away!
Wife: You can't! I don't want him to see it. You will have to build it Christmas Eve. After he goes to bed.
Sloppy: Like, after midnight?
Wife: (Wife Eyes) Yeah!?!
Sloppy: Fuck Sleep! Sleep is a crutch.
I found some respectable specs online, and did exactly as instructed. I destroyed my pristine shop, and built a superb quarterpipe for Cake. I was dead-tired when we opened gifts, but the glimmer of joy in Cake's eyes was payment enough. Cake absolutely "loved" his quarterpipe. When Cake ceremoniously took his maiden trip up his quarterpipe, Karen was devilishly preparing for Drama Queen-warfare. Karen donned her leopard-printed "Queen Bitch" shirt, Spanx Shapewear Waist Cincher, and tiger-print leggings in preparation to torment an eleven year old boy.
28 December 2020
9:07 AM EST
It's early morning and my back is questioning my decision to "slow-down" and take a desk job. I was quietly pondering my life decisions, and then there was a ruckus in the garage. The door that enters into the main household swung open with intense speed. My wife had just unceremoniously transformed into Karen.
Sloppy's Balls Retract Into Stomach.
Sloppy: (Big-Big-Big Fucking Eyes) Yeah!?!
Wife: There is a man, WITH A BADGE, outside our door!
Sloppy Brain: Did you murder anyone last night?
Thinking!
Sloppy Brain: I don't think so. BUT, we cannot rule it out. Maybe the Wife asked for the "Manager."
Sloppy: RELAX. I've got this.
Sloppy Brain: Do you?
Thinking
Sloppy Brain: Probably not!
Green Mile Walk To Front Door
Sloppy: Can I help you "Officer?"
Officer: Hello. I am Mr. Phillips, and I am a Codes Compliance Inspector for CITY NAME. Here is my Card, and here is my Badge.
Sloppy Brain: You can TOTALLY take this guy!
Sloppy: (Puzzled) Okay!?! What can I help you with?
Inspector: There has been a nuisance complaint about a skateboard ramp.
Sloppy: (Pissed) WHAT?
Inspector: Yes. I can show you the complaint if you'd like.
Sloppy: I would!
Shuffling Around; Present IPAD
Sloppy Reading: Skateboard ramps are not permitted with CITY NAME in any residential zoning district, unless located within community facility as a use accessory to the community facility. Words, Words, Words, are permitted in Park Zoning District. Words, Words, Words, ramps in other non-residential zoned properties shall require a conditional use permit approved by the city council.
Sloppy: So I can apply to have it approved.
Inspector: (Laughed) I have been doing this job for forty-four years, and they have never approved one. My son skateboards, and that's why we moved.
Sloppy: I built this on Christmas Eve. He has only used it twice, and I can ensure you the "noise" is far less than our basketball hoop, or shooting hockey pucks at a steel goal.
Wife: I want to know who complained!
Inspector: I can't tell you...
Sloppy: We know who complained. (Looks to Wife). I've got this.
Inspector: How big is the ramp Sir?
Sloppy: Want to see it?
Inspector: Sure. I built a twenty-eight foot half pipe for my son. Seeing it will really help me out.
Inspector Inspects Quarterpipe.
Inspector: (FUCKING PUZZLED)
Inspector Points
Inspector: This? I am out here for this?
Inspector Jumps On And Around Quarterpipe
Inspector: They said the "Sound is penetrating their house." They serious? This is the quietest thing I have ever seen.
Sloppy: Look, we have had problems with these neighbors. Thus the reason for the higher fence, hanging herb garden to block basketballs, and other renovations...
Inspector: Did they come over and talk about it with...
Sloppy: NO. They are not "adults." They are the most passive aggressive people I have ever met. I would have gladly accommodated them. I can insulate the inside, and put a backer-board on it. I can dictate skating times. However, they would prefer to complain than act like reasonable adults.
Inspector: (Laughing) Yes. They actually sent me the city ordinance code in the complaint. They know what they are doing.
Sloppy: What now?
Inspector: I am caught here. The city ordinance clearly states that skateboard ramps are in violation.
Sloppy: What's that mean. Do I get a ticket? Do I get a fine?
Inspector: Well, you would get a notice to move it in thirty-days and then a re-inspection.
Sloppy: So you're telling I have to get rid of the ramp?
Inspector: Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do.
Sloppy: (Pissed) We have tennis courts here...
Inspector: (Baffled) What?
Sloppy: Tennis courts. They're designed for tennis. However, there is roller-hockey played on the tennis courts on the weekends. Tennis is their designed purpose, but I assume there is no ordinance violation with roller-hockey being played on tennis courts. Is there?
Inspector: (Still Baffled) Suppose not. Nothing against that.
Sloppy: Great. I see the city ordinance specifically targets skateboard ramps. What about scooter or bike ramps?
Inspector: (Scrolling) Nope. Nothing about ramps for scooters or bikes.
Sloppy: Awesome. I worked in a job in which "words" have meaning. How do you like my "Bike Ramp." I designed for bikes, but I suppose there is no ordinance against that?
Inspector: (Laughing) No. There is nothing in the Codes about bike or scooter ramps.
Sloppy: It's not a skateboard ramp. What now?
Inspector: I will have to explain this to my boss, and the lawyer.
Sloppy: Good. I will also assume the city is not willing to lose in court over an ordinance either? I mean, I am willing to fight to keep my bike ramp, because there is no law that dictates the name of this wood contraption. It's a bike ramp, and I don't care if my son uses his skateboard on it. I can be a subjective prick too.
Inspector: (Laughing) No. You would certainly win in court.
Sloppy: Great. What now?
Inspector: I will be consulting with the powers that be, and I will give you a call back.
2:59 PM (Inspector Pulls Up)
Inspector: Good Afternoon!
Sloppy: Maybe!?!
Inspector: I spoke to my boss. There is no ordinance about bike ramps. This is tricky though, because we are figuring out how to word-smith this to them.
Sloppy: I mean, I can go knock on their door right now and tell them to, "Fuck Off."
Inspector: (Laughing) That is not the preferred way. Just thought I would stop over and let you know.
Sloppy: I appreciate it Mr. Phillips.
Inspector: (Laughing) Enjoy your "Bike Ramp."
Sloppy: Oh. I will!
29 December 2020 - Right Fucking Now (1:49 EST)
My neighbor semi-recently had a tree removed. The owner of the business is in their church group. Oddly enough, his lat name is Stump. Well, I befriended Mr. Stump during the course of three days while he was working in my neighbors yard. We have become buddies, and I utilized his service as a "scare-tactic" a couple months ago. It was a, "Fuck with me...I cut your tree" event. Mr. Stump pulled his heavy equipment into my yard, and gazed at Karen's beloved three. I grew "concerned" with the nearly fifty percent that grows over my property line. This devastated Karen. Dear Reader, I had thought she learned. I thought the war was over. I have very, very recently become concerned with the tree again.
1:53 EST - Mr. Stump Walking To My Garage
Stump: Sloppy. How the fuck have you been?
Sloppy: I thought good. I thought our tactic last time worked.
Stump: Really? She was crying like a baby.
Sloppy: This Karen is more powerful than I thought. Never again.
Stump: (Laughing) What do you need me to do?
Sloppy: Check it out, and then give me an actual estimate.
Stump: (Laughing Hysterically) I am not going to charge you. It will probably only take a couple hours, and I cannot wait to watch her cry. When do you want it done?
Sloppy: Maybe you can go knock on her door, and ask to troop her property line to get a better idea of the job? Step one starts now. I want them to know beforehand.
Stump: (Laughing) Well, we'd do that anyways, but I might as well do it while I am here.
Stump Departs; Sloppy Watches With Non-Lethal Airsoft Glock19XR
Dear Reader, unfortunately I cannot detail the entire conversation. I refuse to make up the first thirty-seconds. Fortunately, I can detail the rest of the conversation. Now, I am not entirely certain, but I honestly believe a colony of Fire Ants ascended her leg, and were the first brave Soldiers to tickle her "Fancy" since 1976. Mr. Stump had just awoken the Karen, and she wasn't Karen about anything he had so say.
Karen: You will not touch that tree. It was a gift from my daughter and it has been here for over thirty years.
Sloppy Brain: I feel sorry for you daughter. Only because you are here Karen mother.
Stump: Ma'am. The only thing I asked was to walk your property line to determine the work.
Stump Fucks Sloppy
Stump: (Pointing) It's the property owner that is concerned about the tree.
Karen Sees Sloppy;Balls Retract...Again!
Karen: You're going to cut my tree?
Sloppy: (Pointing) No. I am not going to cut your tree. I am going to hire him to do it.
Karen: I thought we talked about this?
Sloppy: Yes. I thought we spoke about being civil. Evidently not.
Karen: You can't cut my tree. I will call a lawyer.
Stump: Ma'am. That'd be a waste of money, but you can if you wish. The property owner is well within his rights to trim the tree.
Karen: How much are you doing to TRIM?
Sloppy: (Balls Drop) TRIM? Every fucking bit of it that goes into my property will be TRIMMED!
Karen: That will kill it.
Sloppy: That's why I have hired an arborist!
Stump: Yeah. Ma'am it wont die. It'll just look really fucking funny.
Ken And Kenny Jr Come Out
Kenny Jr: Mom!
Yes. The forty-nine year old man-child just yelled mom, like a toddler.
Karen: They're going to cut my tree.
Kenny Jr: They can't do that. Has ta be illegal!
Sloppy: Nope. Perfectly legal.
Kenny Jr. Growing Some; Steps Towards Sloppy
Sloppy: I'd watch it!
Kenny Jr: Or What?
Sloppy: Both our Rings are recording. You step on my property and I will perceive it to be an act of aggression. I will beat the shit out of you, and happily spend a night in the clink!
Ken: Wait. Wait. Wait. You can't cut down the tree!
Sloppy Retreats To Garage; Grabs Pruning Sheers
Sloppy Cuts Large Portion Of Juniper Tree Leaning On Sloppy's Fence
Sloppy: I can!
Stump: (Laughing) Yeah. You can't have your tree lean on or over his fence too. That's against ordinance.
Arguing With Fence In The Middle Now
Sloppy Brain: I left the gate open. PLEASE, PLEASE assume it's an invitation!
Ken: Wait. Can we not talk about this?
Sloppy: We are! Dear Ken, I've hired someone to cut half your tree! End of discussion.
Ken: Okay. Okay. I will withdraw the complaint about the skateboard ramp.
Sloppy Brain: Got-you Mother Trucker.
Sloppy: Skateboard ramp? What skateboard ramp?
Ken: That one. That there!
Sloppy: Ken. I don't see a "skateboard" ramp. I see a bike ramp. See there (Pointing), it says bike ramp. I cannot help it if kids ride their skateboards on it though. Bike ramps are not against ordinance. Please address my BIKE RAMP properly. I don't want kids to think they can skateboard on it.
Karen: (No. No. No Dance) IT'S NOT. THAT'S A SKATEBOARD RAMP...
Sloppy: Nope. Spoke to one of the city Inspectors, and got a phone call from the lawyer. They said, "You're dancing a fine line, but there is nothing we can do about you BIKE RAMP." Ain't that a bitch? Sorta...like you!
Karen: (Talking To Ken) HE CAN'T DO THAT KEN. CAN'T. CAN'T. CAN'T.
Ken: Sloppy...
Sloppy: Ken.
Ken: We need to talk about this! NOW!
Sloppy: What, exactly, do we need to talk about...
Ken: We...
Sloppy: Your passive aggressive complaint to the city? The fact that a seventy-two year old man cannot find the testicles to ask me about my not-skateboard ramp? Or do we want to talk about your sixty-nine year old wife acting like a spoiled princess as she throws a tantrum for Ring Cameras?
Ken: You're a real fucking asshole.
Sloppy: The only honest thing you have said thus far.
Ken: So Mr. Stump. You think you're going to come onto my property to assess...
Stump: No. No. No. Not anymore. I am going to go in the garage with Sloppy and drink beer now. Sir, I have never said this before, but I look forward to cutting your tree, in half. Good evening.
Inaudible Yelling
Stump: Ho-Lee FUCK. How do you deal with that?
Sloppy: I call an arborist friend I know!
Stump: That's hilarious.
Sloppy: Want to hear something funny?
Stump: You've got more?
Sloppy: I have been on the hunt for the last twenty-four hours. The wife said, "Do what you want."
Stump: My God! What do you have planned?
Sloppy: I just ordered a glitter-bomb for...
Stump: What?
Sloppy: Mail package...that explodes very, very fine glitter everywhere once opened. They will get it next month. I need to create a decent amount of space, but anonymity is guaranteed. I also used a rechargeable card, at Starbucks, and while using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
Stump: (Laughing) They are going to love that...
Sloppy: Oh. I also order a new desk light for Kelly. It's going to sit in his window, because it faces their master bedroom.
Stump: (Laughing) What kind of light?
Sloppy: This one (See Link Below)!
Stump: A skeleton middle finger! (Laughing)
Sloppy: Oh, and my parametric speaker will be here Friday!
Stump: A what!?!
Sloppy: Parametric Speaker! It's a directional speaker that focuses sounds. Think of a laser beam of sound that you can only hear if pointed towards you. Like, out Kelly's bedroom, and towards their master bedroom.
Stump: Won't that bother Kelly too though?
Sloppy: Watch this. (YouTube Video Link Below)
Stump Watching YouTube
Sloppy: See? It's directionally focused sound. Kelly won't hear it. Nor will the cops when they arrive.
Stump: (Hysterical Laughter) You Sir, are the biggest asshole I have ever met.
Sloppy: I have also ordered eclectic Garden Gnomes. One is a Zombie Gnome, and the other lovable Travelocity-looking fucker is giving the finger, and with some camera-magic, they have both been approved by the Home Owners Association (HOA).
Stump: Really? I thought the HOA took weeks to approve stuff.
Sloppy: They do. I submitted it in October!
Stump: (Scared) You are "that guy." The guy that should never be fucked with unless it's all-out war.
Sloppy: We are in the heat of battle friend. So how much to "trim" the tree?
Stump: (Sips Beer) Fucking Free. I cannot wait to see her face when it all comes down! Fuck that bitch!
Sloppy: Cheers!
Dear Reader, I am "All-In" now. I have done everything in my powers to be a rational, and reasonable neighbor. It seems the neighbors and I are polar opposites. I am out here hunting laughs, and they are digging for misery, pain, and regret. My Grandfather said, "You get everything you want in life. If you didn't get it, you didn't want it bad enough." Dear Reader, I think they "want" to be miserable, and I am certainly going to do my part to ensure they get it. Besides, who wouldn't want to hear "Bitches Ain't Shit" by Dr Dre being pumped out of a direction parametric speaker?
Future Prediction
Cop Lights
Karen: The music is non-stop and driving me crazy. My dildo turned into my son, and just stopped working too.
Cop: I don't hear the music.
Karen: It's in my room!
Cop: What?
Karen: You can only hear it in my room!
Cop Brain: Bat-Shit Cray-Cray!
Must Use Seriously Incapacitating Chords (MUSIC) Assault STOPS!!!
Cops Check Around;Assume Karen Is Crazy
Knock. Knock. Knock
Sloppy: (Groggy) Officer. Is there something I can do for you?
Cop: Your'e neighbor...
Sloppy: Karen?
Cop: YES. She is complaining of loud music. She said it plays all the time. However, we don't hear any music.
Sloppy: That's odd. Has there been complaints from other neighbors.
Cop: No. We've talked to them, and not a single one of them complained about music.
Sloppy: You know what? I am probably not supposed to say this, but Karen has been mentally declining since we moved in. She called my bike ramp a skateboard ramp, and constantly accuses me of petty things like allowing my children to play basketball in their own yard. Maybe she has lost touch with reality?
Cop: That's exactly what we were thinking. Have a good evening you handsome looking chap!
Door Shuts; Cops Leave
Sloppy: Alexa. Play "Bitches Ain't Shit" by Dr. Dre.
Alexa: Here's Beep Ain't Beep by Dr. Dre on Amazon Music.
Sloppy: Alexa! Volume Ten.
Sloppy Brain: I wonder if it's actually on, because I cannot hear a fucking word.
Sloppy: (Humming) Bitches ain't shit but...
Dear Reader, I do apologize for the length of this saga. You should seriously get a medal for reading this rant. I said I was busy. Believe me, I am busy. However, I could not wait to get this tale out. Ordering petty items to assist with revenge, and calling an arborist was not enough. I simply needed to detail this in written form. It really makes me feel better when I capture my stress when I let you know. I never imaged my neighborly revenge stories would transform from Limited Series. We are nearly across the line into 2021, and I already fucking know that Season Two is going to be better!

Cheers FUckers,
Sloppy

Kelly Desk Light: https://www.wish.com/product/5bdeeac459db9f7323644398?hide_login_modal=true&from_ad=goog_shopping&_display_country_code=US&_force_currency_code=USD&pid=googleadwords_int&c=%7BcampaignId%7D&ad_cid=5bdeeac459db9f7323644398&ad_cc=US&ad_lang=EN&ad_curr=USD&ad_price=22.00&campaign_id=7203534630&gclid=CjwKCAiAxKv_BRBdEiwAyd40N3iQLbETqlNzO-601PmjmM7sErTtvXPmtNOMNmQj_1qQ3pHBqIT0oBoChYYQAvD_BwE&share=web
Parametric Speaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hD5FPVSsV0&t=110s

The horn effect, closely related to the halo effect, is a form of cognitive bias that causes one's perception of another to be unduly influenced by a single negative trait. An example of the horn effect may be that an observer is more likely to assume a physically unattractive person is morally inferior to an attractive person, despite the lack of relationship between morality and physical appearance.

The team views Brown as lazy or not motivated. Whether that's because he actually is, or because he's taller and skates slowetakes fewer strides, I don't know. What I do know is that because they hold that negative view, it will make the team more likely to rate him negatively in other categories of evaluation thus making it harder for him to "earn" his spot.
You can think of this as making a good first impression. When people like you they will be more likely to think you are smarter, more competent, more trustworthy and so on, even though those traits are not linked.
Another compounding bias is Confirmation Bias.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.

Once that negative impression is formed, coaches or regular people like you or me will typically search for evidence that confirms our beliefs. Any error that Brown makes will confirm his lack of effort, meaning he likely has to play absolutely mistake free hockey to make the team.
A lot of people don't like me droning on about advanced stats but the above biases are major reasons why I like them. Especially because we have no idea when biases like the Horn Effect or Confirmation Bias are influencing our decisions. The more biased a person might be, the more useful the advanced stats will be, because they force you to look only at the on-ice results instead of focusing on a bad pass or one play where there wasn't enough hustle. Jason Spezza's drop passes are another great example. We remember the bad play and miss the fact that despite the odd turnover the team was way better with him on the ice.
xdiagnosis made a great post about some of L Browns stats and how good they look.
My conclusion is that the team is likely not being fair to Logan and should try to be more objective. He appears to be playing really well at the NHL level which IMO is more important than how hard he skates or if he hits.

What's up fellow degens.
I wrote and released a Python package that accesses Sportsbook Review's GraphQL endpoint (sportsbookreview.com). This means you can access any odds information found on SBR in the time it takes to load a webpage. Any betting market found on SBR is supported, e.g. half and quarter spread, ml and total, and futures odds. Any sportsbook found on SBR is supported. I have tested the program for basketball, football, UFC, tennis, soccer and hockey, but it should work for baseball, golf, horse racing, boxing and politics as well.

Examples

Odds on Wimbledon futures
March Madness odds
Odds on McGregor vs. Poirier
Bovada's complete line history for every game the Lakers played last year
Closing oveunder line on for every game the Leafs and Habs played against each other last year
Odds on today's game in Brazil Serie A between Coritiba FC PR vs CR Vasco da Gama RJ (tried to find the most random event)
Number of bets placed on Ravens vs. Bills amongst SBR users on each side of the spread.

Limitations

FanDuel and DraftKings are not available on SBR, but the odds source they use includes them. I used only sportsbooks that are available on the site's front end. It may be possible to add support for FanDuel and DraftKings
I have no idea what the rate limit is on requests to the GraphQL endpoint so if you use this library try and avoid hammering the server with multiple requests per second
The GraphQL endpoint is for SBR's internal use, and I have no control over it - use at your own risk.

Links

With that being said, feedback welcome! If any SBR employees are reading, please for the love of god don't shut it down, I worked way too hard on this
EDIT: I created a discord server if anyone has questions / problems getting it working / feedback!

Amidst our slower than anticipated start, I have seen countless comments on GTD's and other posts about how we have such a great team on paper, but TG's system is just not working. Despite the consistent shitting on TG's system, I have actually yet to see anyone on this sub point out any technical flaws, instead making comments like "we're always outshot", or "we always rely on goaltending", or my favourite "we have such a talented team, but the system is hurting our ability to win games". Since no one can actually explain why our system is causing our issues, I decided to take a look at last games goals against and try and identify any system flaws that may have lost us the game.

Goal #1 - EVEN: Josh Anderson (5) Wrist Shot, assists: Ben Chiarot (2), Nick Suzuki (7)
This goal is about 5% on Bo and 95% on Jalen Chatfield. Chariot takes the feed from the corner and throws a weak one on net, it tips off Bo's stick and changes direction right to Josh Anderson. You could possibly argue Bo needs to be more aware of his stick position, but since his stick was off the ice, I would argue it was more poor luck than carelessness. Chatfield actually does a good job tracking his man as you can see him look back and cover his assignment, unfortunately the change of direction of the puck threw him off guard and he didn't have enough strength on his man to take away the scoring chance. It is a good sign to see Chatfield track his man, but in the NHL where the game is so quick, he needs to be quicker and stronger on his man. Not a systems issue here, all players were positioned well, however there was simply some poor puck luck and Chatfield needing to be stronger on his man.

Goal #2 - EVEN: Josh Anderson (6) Tip-In, assists: Brett Kulak (3), Nick Suzuki (8)
This is the only goal from the game where I could accept a potential systems issue, however I would argue this one is more on Sutter simply not executing the breakout properly, and Montreal just making a great play to cause the turnover. Sutter has the puck along the boards, and is almost immediately pressured by Anderson giving him basically no time to make a play. Suzuki actually does an incredible job here noticing the pressure on Sutter and jumping into the breakout lane to cause the turnover, very impressive awareness by the young talent. For anyone who has ever played any level of hockey before, it is breakout 101 to have the Center curl up the middle of the ice to create the outlet pass from the winger. While this breakout pass works most of the time, Sutter does need to be aware of any disruption in the passing lane, and dump it softly up the boards/glass if the outlet pass isn't there since he wasn't able to skate it out due to the pressure by Anderson. In this case, he makes the wrong play to try and feed Beagle, the habs take possession and eventually get a goal off a nice tip from Anderson who had an amazing shift. Again, not a systems issue. This is breakout 101 and unfortunately Sutter made the wrong play, however this was great work by Anderson and Suzuki to force the pressure and the turnover.

Goal #3 - EVEN: Tyler Toffoli (8) Tip-In, assists: Joel Edmundson (2), Jeff Petry (8)
Off the face-off the habs gain possession. Petey does the right thing here by pressuring Edmundson and forcing a weak shot on goal, as it is the responsibility of the winger (in this case Petey didn't take the draw and therefore was the winger in this scenario) to cover the point. He did stumble off the draw which slowed him down, however he recovered quick and didn't entirely lose his position. Hughes, Toffoli's assignment, actually battles nicely against him, however Toffoli makes a really nice last second adjustment to come off Hughes' check and tip it by Demko. This goal was just nicely done by Toffoli, however Hughes does need to take some blame for letting Toffoli get into position to tip the weak shot, which he could have avoided IMO by battling a little bit harder to disrupt Toffoli's stick position. You could argue Petey falling off the draw gave time to Edmunson to coral the puck from his backhand and get off a shot, however I would say Hughes needs to be more aggressive on his assignment and take away Toffoli's position. Once again, this was not a system that was exploited, but rather a combination of Petey falling off the draw and Hughes needing to battle harder in front of the net.

Goal #4 - EVEN: Tyler Toffoli (9) Backhand, assists: Jesperi Kotkaniemi (6), Shea Weber (5)
On this goal, Hughes makes the pinch to keep the puck in the zone, and is successful. However, Bo does a good job covering the pinch which is the right play. From here, a few things happen - Bo abandons his position covering the point for Hughes to help Miller who has the puck, which is the right play. Hughes makes a mistake here by getting caught puck watching - the second he finishes executing the pinch he NEEDS to hustle back to his position at the point, you can actually seem him pause for a second or two watching the puck, and then immediately start booking it back down the ice because he realizes he lost his position. Miller does turnover the puck, however he was pressured hard by the habs players, and the ensuing Toffoli partial break would have been prevented if Hughes hustled back to his position instead of puck watching. Toffoli then turns poor Jordie Benn into a pylon and scores an absolute beauty. Jordie Benn also needs to do better here, although you can't deny the beautiful play by the former Canuck. Sure, you could argue the aggressive system of making the pinch play as often as possible could cause more odd man rushes, however in this instance Hughes has enough time to get back and prevent the Toffoli partial break but unfortunately he gets caught puck watching which allows Toffoli to break free. Jordie Benn also needs to play the 1 on 1 better.

Conclusion
I am no die hard TG supporter by any means, he's a relatively new head coach and certainly has room for improvement. However, it is important to understand that our losses are not entirely due to some system issue that causes us to break down more than other systems out there. Aside from the Sutter giveaway, all of the goals were due to defenseman losing 1 on 1 battles or losing their position. The reality is that some of our younger defenseman are prone to defensive breakdowns, which is PERFECTLY NORMAL for young defenseman. There is a reason that it is harder for defenseman to break into the NHL if they are not outstanding offensively, and that is because it is such a difficult position. In all of the goals I highlighted in this lengthy ass post, it was quite literally 1-2 seconds of mental or physical lapses that caused the breakdown, and that is the reality of the NHL. Losing Tanev REALLY hurt us. Like really really hurt us. He was a minute eater that made the right play 99% of the time. However, it is what it is and we need our players to step up and improve their game defensively. It will happen, which is why I am not all that worried, since our offense is potent, however I don't believe whatsoever that getting a new coach and changing our system is going to fix our issues overnight.

EDIT - I forgot to include the acknowledgement that YES this is just one game, very small sample size. However, I don't have the time to go through every goal against this season obviously, and since the GDT for this game was systems this, systems that, I decided to use this game as my sample. I am definitely open to look at other games where system issues may be more obvious, however for now I decided to focus on this game in particular.

Iris

The first person to ever tell me the theory was Iris. It was nighttime in 2015, and we were lying on an old mattress on the roof of a four-storey apartment building in a university town in southern Ontario. A party was going on downstairs to which we’d both been invited and from whose monotony we’d helped each other escape through an ordinary white door that said “No entrance”. It was summer. I remember the heat waves and the radiating warmth of the asphalt. Our semester was over and we had started existing until the next one started in the way all students exist when they don’t spend their months off at home or touring Europe. I could feel the bass thumping from below. I could see the infinite stars in the cloudless sky. The sound seemed so disconnected from the image. Iris and I weren’t dating, we were just friends, but she leaned toward me on the mattress that night until I could feel her breathing on my neck, and, with my eyes pointed spaceward, she began: “What if…”
Back then it was pure speculation, a wild fantasy inspired by the THC from the joint we were passing back and forth and uninhibited by the beer we’d already drunk. There was nothing scientific or even philosophical about Iris’ telling of it. The theory was a flight of imagination influenced by her name and personalized by the genetic defect of her eyes, which her doctors had said would render her blind by fifty. Even thirty-five seemed far away. It’s heartbreaking now to know that Iris never did live to experience her blindness—her own genetic fate interrupted by the genetic fate of the world—but that night, imagination, the quality Einstein called more important than knowledge, lit up both our brains in synapses of neon as we shared our joint, sucking it into glowing nothingness, Iris paranoid that she’d wake up one morning in eternal darkness despite the doctors’ assurances that her blindness would occur gradually, and me fearing that I would never find love, never share my life with anyone, but soothed at least by Iris’ words and her impossible ideas because Einstein was right, and imagination is magical enough to cure anything.

- - - - -

2025, Pre-

I graduated with a degree in one field, found a low paying job in another, got married, worked my way to slightly better pay, wanted to have a child, bought a Beagle named Pillow as a temporary substitute, lived in an apartment overlooking a green garbage bin that was always full of beer cans and pizza boxes, and held my wife, crying, when we found out that we couldn’t have children. Somewhere along the way my parents died and Kurt Schwaller, a physicist from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, proved a grand theory of everything that rather than being based on the vibrations of strings, was based on a property of particles called viscous time force. I never understood the details. To me they lacked imagination. The overriding point, the experts on television told us, was that given enough data and computing power we could now predict the outcome of anything. The effect was that no one wanted to study theoretical physics and everyone wanted to make breakthroughs in data collection systems and biological hardware. Hackers created a version of Linux that ran from DNA. Western Digital released the first working holographic storage drive. The NSA, FSB, BND and other agencies rushed to put their suddenly valuable mass of unprocessed raw spy data to prognostic use. A Chinese bookmaker known only by the nick ##!! wrote a piece of Python code that could predict the outcomes of hockey games. Within a month, the NHL and KHL were scrambling to come up with ways of saving their leagues by making them more unpredictable. They introduced elements of chance: power plays without penalties, a tilting ice surface, fluctuating rules that sometimes allowed for icings and offsides and sometimes not, and, finally, a pre-game lottery by which the names of the players on both teams were put into a pot and randomly drawn into two squads. Given enough variables, the strategy did thwart the code, but the inherent unfairness of the innovations alienated the players, the draft made owners question why they were paying the salaries of superstars who played against them half of the time, and the fans simply stopped paying attention to a league full of teams for which their already dwindling loyalty had bottomed out. Besides, the code was basic. ##!! had room to expand. The KHL folded first, followed by the NHL, and then the other sports leagues, preemptively. They didn’t bother to wait until their own codes were broken. I remember seeing an interview with ##!! while this was still front page news. The reporter, a perpetually smiling big-breasted blonde with blindingly white teeth, asked him if he thought that hockey could be rescued by the creation of roving blue lines that would continually alter the relative sizes of both offensive zones and the neutral zone. ##!! answered that he didn’t know what a blue line was because he’d never watched a hockey game in his life. His voice was cold, objective, and there was something terrifyingly inhuman about the idea that a person with no knowledge of a subject could nevertheless understand it so completely. Content had become a mere input of form.
By 2025, mainstream interest in the theory of everything faded, not because the theory was wrong but because it was too right and too abstract and now there weren’t any young theoretical physicists to help explain it using cute graphics on YouTube. We consumed what we understood and passively accepted the fallout while going on with our daily lives. The people who did understand made money, but for the rest of us the consequences were less than their potential, because even with enough time, memory and microprocessors the most we could know was the what and the when, not the why. For the governments and corporations pouring taxes and tax-free earnings into complex models of world domination, that didn’t matter. They weren’t interested in cause. They were in the business of exploiting certainty to gain power. As long as they could predict lightning, they were satisfied. If they could make it, all the better. Away from the cutting edge, however, like ants or ancients, what we craved to know was where the lightning came from, what it meant, and on that issue the theory was silent. As Kurt Schwaller put it in a speech to the United Nations, “All I’ve given you is a tool—a microscope to magnify the minutes, so to speak—with which to investigate in perfect detail the entirety of our interrelations. But the investigations still have to made, ladies and gentlemen. Have a hay stack, look for the needle. Know there might not be one.”
In January, my wife and I began a fertility treatment for which we’d been saving for years. It was undoubtedly the reason we became so emotionally involved in the media attention around Aiko, the lovely, black-haired and fashionable Crown Princess of Japan, who along with her husband was going through the same ordeal that we were. For a few months, it seemed as if the whole world sat on the edges of its seat, wishing for this beautiful royal couple to conceive. And we sat on two, our own and one somewhere in an exotic Japan updated by the royal Twitter feed. It strikes me now that royalty has always fascinated the proles, a feeling that historically went in tandem with hatred, respect or awe, but it was the Japanese who held our attentions the longest and the most genuinely in the twenty-first century, when equality had more or less rendered a hereditary ruling class obsolete. The British declared themselves post-Christian in 2014 and post-Royal in 2021, the European Court of Justice ruled all other European royals invalid in 2022, and the Muslim monarchs pompously degraded themselves one-by-one into their own exiles and executions. Only the Japanese line survived, adapting to the times by refusing to take itself seriously on anything but the most superficial level. They dressed nicely, acted politely and observed a social protocol that we admired without wanting to follow it ourselves. Before he died, my father had often marvelled that the Second World War began with Japan being led by an emperor god, and ended with the American occupation forcing him to renounce his divinity. The Japanese god had died because MacArthur willed it and Hirohito spoke it. Godhood was like plaque. If your mother told you to brush your teeth, off it went, provided you used the right flavour of Colgate. Kings had once ruled by divine right. By 2025, the Crown Princess of Japan ruled our hearts merely by popular approval. She was our special friend, with whom we were all on intimate and imaginary terms. Indeed, on the day she died—on the day they all died—Princess Aiko’s was the most friended account on Facebook.
That’s why March 27, 2025, was such a joyous occasion for us. In hindsight, it’s utterly sick to associate the date with happiness of any kind, but history must always be understood in context, and the context of the announcement was a wirelessly connected world whose collective hopes came suddenly true to the jingle of a breaking news story on the BBC. I was in the kitchen sauteing onions when I heard it. Cutting them had made me cry and my eyes were still red. Then the announcer’s voice broke as he was setting up his intro, and in a video clip that was subsequently rebroadcast, downloaded and parodied close to a billion times in the one hundred thirty-two days that followed, he said: “The Crown Princess of Japan is pregnant!”
I ran to the living room and hugged my wife, who’d fallen to her knees in front of the wall-mounted monitor. Pillow was doing laps on and off the sofa. The BBC cut away from the announcer’s joyful face to a live feed from Japan. As I held my wife, her body felt warm and full of life. The top of her jeans cut into her waist. Her tears wetted the top of my shirt sleeve. Both of our phones started to buzz—emails and Twitter notifications streaming in. On the monitor, Aiko and her husband, both of their angular faces larger than life in 110” 1080p, waved to the crowd in Tokyo and the billions watching around the world. They spoke in Japanese and a woman on the BBC translated, but we hardly needed to know her exact words to understand the emotions. If them, why not also us? I knew my wife was having the same thought. We, too, could have a family. Then I smelled burning oil and the pungency of onions and I remembered my sauteing. I gently removed my arms from around my wife’s shoulders and ran back to the kitchen, still listening to Aiko’s voice and its polite English echo, and my hands must have been shaking, or else my whole body was shaking, because after I had turned down the heat I reached for the handle of the frying pan, knocked the pan off the stove top instead, and burned myself while stupidly trying to catch it before it fell, clattering, to the floor. The burned onions splattered. I’d cracked one of the kitchen tiles. My hand turned pale and I felt a numbness before my skin started to overflow with the warmth of pain. Without turning off the broadcast, my wife shooed me downstairs to the garage where we kept our car and drove me to the hospital.
The Toronto streets were raucous. Horns honked. J-pop blared. In the commotion we nearly hit a pedestrian, a middle-aged white woman pushing a baby carriage, who’d cut across Lake Shore without looking both ways. She had appeared suddenly from behind a parked transport—and my wife instinctively jerked the car from the left lane to the right, scraping our side mirror against the truck but saving two lives. The woman barely noticed. She disappeared into a crowd of Asian kids on the other side of street who were dancing to electronica and waving half a dozen Japanese flags, one of which was the Rising Sun Flag, the military flag of Imperial Japan. Clutching my wrist in the hope it would dull the pain in my hand, I wondered how many of them knew about the suffering Japanese soldiers had inflicted on countless Chinese in the name of that flag. To the right, Lake Ontario shone and sparkled in the late afternoon light. A passenger jet took off from Toronto Island Airport and climbed into the sky.
In the hospital waiting room, I sat next to a woman who was reading a movie magazine with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s face on the cover. The Cannes film festival was coming up. My wife checked me in at the reception desk. The woman beside me put down her magazine and told me that she was there with her son, as if needing to justify her presence. I affirmed by nodding. He’d hurt his leg playing soccer for a local Armenian junior boys team, she went on. I said I’d hurt myself frying onions and that I was here with my wife. She said my wife was pretty and asked if I liked movies. Without meaning to do it, I tried to guess her age—unsuccessfully—and proceeded to imagine having doggy style sex with her. She had dark eyes that barely blinked and plump thighs. When I started to feel guilty, I answered her question: sometimes I watched movies at home, but I hadn’t been to a theatre in a decade. When my wife sat down, I let the two of them talk about the woman’s son. I was having trouble concentrating. I took my phone out of my pocket and read all the new emails about the royal conception, then stared at the seconds hand going slowly around its digital clock face on my home screen, wondering why we so often emulated the limitations of analogue machines on devices that were no longer bound by them. I switched my clock type to a digital readout. Now the seconds no longer rotated but flickered away. They called my name over the crackling intercom and a nurse led me to one of the empty rooms. “How about that baby,” he said while we walked. I didn’t see his face, only the shaved back of his head. “The things they can do these days, even for infertile couples.”
I waited for over thirty minutes for a doctor. When one came in, she inspected my hand for less than ten seconds before telling me that I was fine and hinting that I shouldn’t have wasted her time by coming to the emergency room. She had high cheek bones, thin lips and bony wrists. Her tablet had a faux clipboard wallpaper. Maybe I had only misinterpreted her tone. “How about that baby,” I said.
“It’s not a baby yet,” she answered.
This time her tone was impossible to misinterpret. I was only repeating what the nurse had said, I told myself. But I didn’t say that to her. Instead, I imagined her coming home at night to an empty apartment, furnished possibly in a minimalistic Japanese or Swedish style, brewing a cup of black coffee and settling into an armchair to re-read a Simone de Beauvoir novel. I was about to imagine having sex with her when I caught hold of myself and wondered what was up with me today.
When I got back to the waiting room, my wife was no longer there—but the Armenian woman was. She pointed down the hall and told me a room number. She said that sometime after I left, my wife had gotten a cramp and started to vomit all over the floor. Someone was still mopping up. The other people in the waiting room, which was filling up, gave me tactfully dirty looks, either because I was with the vomiter or because I’d shirked my responsible by being away during the vomiting. Irrationally, I wiped my own mouth and fled down the hall.
Inside the numbered room, my wife was sitting hunched over on an observation bed, slowly kicking her feet back and forth. “Are you OK?” I asked.
“Come here,” she said.
I did, and sat beside her on the bed. I repeated my question. She still smelled a little of vomit, but she looked up at me like the world’s luckiest puppy, her eyes big and glassy, and said, “Norman, I’m pregnant.”
That’s all she could say—
That’s all either of us could say for a while.
We just sat there on the examination bed like a pair of best friends on a swing set after dark, dangling our feet and taking turns pulling each other closer. “Are you sure?” I finally asked. My voice was hoarse. I sounded like a frog.
“Yes.” She kicked the heel of my shoe with the rubber toe of hers. “We’re going to have a baby.”
It was beautiful. The most wonderful moment of my life. I remembered the day we met and our little marriage ceremony. I thought about being a father, and felt positively terrified, and about being a better husband, and felt absolutely determined, and as I kissed my wife there in the little hospital room with its sterile green walls, I imagined making love to her. I kept imagining it as we drove back to the apartment through partying Toronto streets. “Not since the Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup!” the radio announcer proclaimed—before I turned him off. I also turned off my phone and my wife’s phone. No more buzzing. In the underground parking lot, I leaned over and licked her soft neck. I pushed her through the open apartment door and straight into the living room, onto the sofa, and wished I could be the cushions beneath her thighs and the air invading her lungs. Pillow barked a greeting and wagged her tail. The monitor on the wall showed talking heads and fertility experts. I unbuttoned my wife’s blouse. She unbuckled my belt. The picture on the monitor dissolved to a close-up of Aiko’s smiling face. My wife and I took turns sliding off each other’s jeans. I kissed her bare stomach. She ran her hands through my hair. I dimmed the lights. We made love.
When we were done it was starry nighttime. My wife bandaged my hand. We turned off the television. The silence was refreshing because people on television too often talk like they’re trying to push you off a ledge. My wife excused me from the duty of making supper because of my ineptness with the frying pan, and handed me a leash instead. I hooked it up to Pillow’s collar and took her outside. While she peed, I gazed up at the sky and identified the Big Dipper. It and the Little Dipper were the only constellations I could identify without using a smartphone app. After Pillow finished, we ducked into a nook and I peed, too. The March sky was amazingly clear of smog. My urine splashed on the concrete and I felt embarrassingly primal. I breathed in, shook out the last drops and zipped up.
In the apartment, we ate grilled portabella mushrooms topped with parmesan and parsley and drank brown rice tea. My wife had changed into fresh clothes. I had changed into fresh skin. Every time she said “mom” and “dad”, the words discharged trickles of electricity up and down my peripheral nervous system. We were happy; we were going to have a baby. The whole world was happy; the Crown Princess of Japan of was going to have a baby. The sounds of drunken urban celebrations drifted in through our bedroom window all night like fog, and we barely slept.

2025, Post-

Gold is precious because it’s rare. Now close your eyes and imagine that the next time you open them, everything in your world will be golden: your kitchen table, the bananas you bought on the way home from work yesterday, your bottle of shampoo, even your teeth. Now blink. You’re not alone. The market’s flooded. Gold isn’t rare anymore. It’s everywhere. Which means that it’s worth about as much as its weight in mud, because there’s nothing intrinsically good about gold. Can you write on your gold table? It scratches. Surely you can’t eat your golden fruit. Your shampoo’s not a liquid anymore, so your hair’s already starting to get greasy. And if you do find something to eat that’s not made of metal, how long will those gold teeth last before you grind them into finely polished nubs?
For two days the Earth glittered.
For two days we lived in a daze of perfection.
And then, on March 29, a researcher working with lab mice at Stanford University noticed something odd. All of his female mice were pregnant. He contacted several of his colleagues who were also working with mice, rats, and monkeys. All their female animals were pregnant, too. Some of the colleagues had wives and girlfriends. They took innocent-seeming trips to their local pharmacies and bought up all the available pregnancy tests. At home, women took test after test and all of them showed positive. By midnight, the researchers had drafted a joint letter and sent copies of it to the major newspapers in their countries. On the morning of March 30, the news hit.
When I checked my Twitter feed after breakfast, #impregtoo was already trending. Throughout the day, Reddit lit up with increasingly bizarre accounts of pregnancies that physically couldn’t be but, apparently, were. Post-menopausal women, celibate women, prepubescent girls, women who’d had their uteruses removed only to discover that their reproductive systems had spontaneously regenerated like the severed tales of lizards. Existing early stage pregnancies aborted themselves and re-fertilized, like a system rebooting. Later term pregnancies developed Matryoshka-like pregnancies nested within pregnancies. After a while, I stopped reading, choosing to spend time with my wife instead. As night fell, we reclined on the sofa, her head on my chest, Pillow curled up in our tangle of feet, the television off, and the streets of Toronto eerily quiet save for the intermittent blaring of far off sirens, as any lingering doubts about the reality of the situation melted away like the brief, late season snow that floated gently down from the sky, blackening the streets.
On March 30, the World Health Organization issued a communique confirming that based on the available data it was reasonable to assume that all female mammals were pregnant. No cause was identified. It urged any woman who was not pregnant to step forward immediately. Otherwise, the communique offered no guidance. It indicated merely that the organization was already working with governments around the world to prepare for a massive influx of human population in approximately nine months’ time. Most places, including Toronto, reacted with stunned panic. Non-essential workplaces and schools were decried closed. People were urged to stay indoors. Hospitals prepared for possible complications. A few supermarkets ran out of canned food and there were several bank runs, but nothing happened that the existing systems couldn’t handle. Populations kept their nerve. Highway and air traffic increased slightly as people rushed to be with their friends, families and gynaecologists. We spent the entire day in our apartment and let Pillow pee in the tub. Except for the conspiracy theorists, who believed that the Earth was being cosmically pollinated by aliens, most of us weren’t scared to go outside, but we were scared of the unknown, and we preferred to process that fear in the comfort of our own dens.
The New York Times ran a front page editorial arguing for an evaluation of the situation using Kurt Schwaller’s theory of everything. In conjunction with The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Wikipedia Foundation, a website was set up asking users for technical help, monetary donations and the sharing of any surplus computing power.
The project quickly ran into problems. To accurately predict anything, the theory of everything needed sufficient data, and, on April 2, cryptome.org published a series of leaked emails between the French Minister of Health and a high-ranking member of World Health Organization that proved the latter’s communique had been disingenuous at best. Externally, the World Health Organization had concluded that all female mammals were pregnant. That remained true. However, it had failed to admit an even more baffling development: the wombs of all female mammals had inexplicably become impenetrable to all rays and materials that had so far been tried against them. For all intents and purposes, there was no way to see inside the womb, or to destroy it. The only way to revert the body to its natural form, to terminate the pregnancy, was to kill the woman—an experiment that, according to the high-ranking member of the World Health Organization, the French government had helped conduct on unwilling women in Mali. Both parties issued repeated denials until a video surfaced showing the murders. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. They spun their denials into arguments about the necessity of sacrificing lives for the greater good.
Reminded once again of the deception inherent in politics, many turned to religion, but the mainstream religions were hesitant to react. They offered few opinions and no answers. The fringe religions split into two camps. Some leaders welcomed this development, the greatest of all known miracles, while others denounced the same as a universal and unnatural punishment for our collective sins of hedonism, egoism and pride. The most successful of all was the Tribe of Akna, a vaguely mystical Maya revival cult that sprang up seemingly overnight and was led by a Guatemalan freelance programmer named Salvador Abaroa. Although it originated in Mexico City, the Tribe spread as quickly across the world as the computer viruses that Abaroa was notorious for creating. On the Tribe’s homepage, Abaroa could be seen striking an antique brass gong and saying in Spanish-tinged English, “Like energy, life is never destroyed. Every one of us plays an integral part of the cosmic ecosystem. Every man, woman and virus.” Elsewhere on the website, you could buy self-published theological textbooks, listen to scratchy recordings of speeches by Alan Watts and read about the hypothesis that Maya thought was deeply connected to Buddhism because the Mayans had crossed the Pacific Ocean and colonized Asia.
But despite the apparent international cooperation happening at the highest levels, the first week of April was an atomizing period for the so-called people on the ground. We hunkered down. Most personal communication was digital. My wife and I exchanged emails with her parents and sister, but we met no one face-to-face, not even on Skype. We neither invited our neighbours to dinner nor were invited by them, despite how easy it was to walk down the hall and knock. I read far more than I wrote, and even when I did write, responding to a blog post or news story, I found it easier to relate to strangers than to the people I knew. My wife said I had a high tolerance for solitude. “Who do you know in the city?” she asked. Although we’d been living here together for three years, she still considered Toronto mine. She was the stranger, I was the native. I said that I knew a few people from work. She told me to call one of them I’d never called before. I did, and the next day’s sky was cloudless and sunny and there were five of us in the apartment: my wife and I, my friend Bakshi and his wife Jacinda, and their daughter, Greta. Greta drank apple juice while the rest of us drank wine, and all five of us gorged ourselves on freshly baked peach cobbler, laughing at silly faces and cracking immature jokes. It hardly registered for me that the majority of the room was unstoppably pregnant, but wasn’t that the point: to forget—if only for a few hours? Instead of watching the BBC, we streamed BDRips of Hayao Miyazaki movies from The Pirate Bay. Porco Rosso ruled the skies, castles flew, a Catbus arrived at its magical stop. Then Bakshi’s phone rang, and he excused himself from the table to take the call. When he returned, his face was grey. “What’s the matter?” Jacinda asked him. He was still holding the phone to his ear. “It’s Kurt Schwaller,” he said. “They just found his body. They think he killed himself.”

Iris

The first person to ever tell me the theory was Iris. It was nighttime in 2015, and we were lying on an old mattress on the roof of a four-storey apartment building in a university town in southern Ontario. A party was going on downstairs to which we’d both been invited and from whose monotony we’d helped each other escape through an ordinary white door that said “No entrance”. It was summer. I remember the heat waves and the radiating warmth of the asphalt. Our semester was over and we had started existing until the next one started in the way all students exist when they don’t spend their months off at home or touring Europe. I could feel the bass thumping from below. I could see the infinite stars in the cloudless sky. The sound seemed so disconnected from the image. Iris and I weren’t dating, we were just friends, but she leaned toward me on the mattress that night until I could feel her breathing on my neck, and, with my eyes pointed spaceward, she began: “What if…”
Back then it was pure speculation, a wild fantasy inspired by the THC from the joint we were passing back and forth and uninhibited by the beer we’d already drunk. There was nothing scientific or even philosophical about Iris’ telling of it. The theory was a flight of imagination influenced by her name and personalized by the genetic defect of her eyes, which her doctors had said would render her blind by fifty. Even thirty-five seemed far away. It’s heartbreaking now to know that Iris never did live to experience her blindness—her own genetic fate interrupted by the genetic fate of the world—but that night, imagination, the quality Einstein called more important than knowledge, lit up both our brains in synapses of neon as we shared our joint, sucking it into glowing nothingness, Iris paranoid that she’d wake up one morning in eternal darkness despite the doctors’ assurances that her blindness would occur gradually, and me fearing that I would never find love, never share my life with anyone, but soothed at least by Iris’ words and her impossible ideas because Einstein was right, and imagination is magical enough to cure anything.

- - - - -

2025, Pre-

I graduated with a degree in one field, found a low paying job in another, got married, worked my way to slightly better pay, wanted to have a child, bought a Beagle named Pillow as a temporary substitute, lived in an apartment overlooking a green garbage bin that was always full of beer cans and pizza boxes, and held my wife, crying, when we found out that we couldn’t have children. Somewhere along the way my parents died and Kurt Schwaller, a physicist from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, proved a grand theory of everything that rather than being based on the vibrations of strings, was based on a property of particles called viscous time force. I never understood the details. To me they lacked imagination. The overriding point, the experts on television told us, was that given enough data and computing power we could now predict the outcome of anything. The effect was that no one wanted to study theoretical physics and everyone wanted to make breakthroughs in data collection systems and biological hardware. Hackers created a version of Linux that ran from DNA. Western Digital released the first working holographic storage drive. The NSA, FSB, BND and other agencies rushed to put their suddenly valuable mass of unprocessed raw spy data to prognostic use. A Chinese bookmaker known only by the nick ##!! wrote a piece of Python code that could predict the outcomes of hockey games. Within a month, the NHL and KHL were scrambling to come up with ways of saving their leagues by making them more unpredictable. They introduced elements of chance: power plays without penalties, a tilting ice surface, fluctuating rules that sometimes allowed for icings and offsides and sometimes not, and, finally, a pre-game lottery by which the names of the players on both teams were put into a pot and randomly drawn into two squads. Given enough variables, the strategy did thwart the code, but the inherent unfairness of the innovations alienated the players, the draft made owners question why they were paying the salaries of superstars who played against them half of the time, and the fans simply stopped paying attention to a league full of teams for which their already dwindling loyalty had bottomed out. Besides, the code was basic. ##!! had room to expand. The KHL folded first, followed by the NHL, and then the other sports leagues, preemptively. They didn’t bother to wait until their own codes were broken. I remember seeing an interview with ##!! while this was still front page news. The reporter, a perpetually smiling big-breasted blonde with blindingly white teeth, asked him if he thought that hockey could be rescued by the creation of roving blue lines that would continually alter the relative sizes of both offensive zones and the neutral zone. ##!! answered that he didn’t know what a blue line was because he’d never watched a hockey game in his life. His voice was cold, objective, and there was something terrifyingly inhuman about the idea that a person with no knowledge of a subject could nevertheless understand it so completely. Content had become a mere input of form.
By 2025, mainstream interest in the theory of everything faded, not because the theory was wrong but because it was too right and too abstract and now there weren’t any young theoretical physicists to help explain it using cute graphics on YouTube. We consumed what we understood and passively accepted the fallout while going on with our daily lives. The people who did understand made money, but for the rest of us the consequences were less than their potential, because even with enough time, memory and microprocessors the most we could know was the what and the when, not the why. For the governments and corporations pouring taxes and tax-free earnings into complex models of world domination, that didn’t matter. They weren’t interested in cause. They were in the business of exploiting certainty to gain power. As long as they could predict lightning, they were satisfied. If they could make it, all the better. Away from the cutting edge, however, like ants or ancients, what we craved to know was where the lightning came from, what it meant, and on that issue the theory was silent. As Kurt Schwaller put it in a speech to the United Nations, “All I’ve given you is a tool—a microscope to magnify the minutes, so to speak—with which to investigate in perfect detail the entirety of our interrelations. But the investigations still have to made, ladies and gentlemen. Have a hay stack, look for the needle. Know there might not be one.”
In January, my wife and I began a fertility treatment for which we’d been saving for years. It was undoubtedly the reason we became so emotionally involved in the media attention around Aiko, the lovely, black-haired and fashionable Crown Princess of Japan, who along with her husband was going through the same ordeal that we were. For a few months, it seemed as if the whole world sat on the edges of its seat, wishing for this beautiful royal couple to conceive. And we sat on two, our own and one somewhere in an exotic Japan updated by the royal Twitter feed. It strikes me now that royalty has always fascinated the proles, a feeling that historically went in tandem with hatred, respect or awe, but it was the Japanese who held our attentions the longest and the most genuinely in the twenty-first century, when equality had more or less rendered a hereditary ruling class obsolete. The British declared themselves post-Christian in 2014 and post-Royal in 2021, the European Court of Justice ruled all other European royals invalid in 2022, and the Muslim monarchs pompously degraded themselves one-by-one into their own exiles and executions. Only the Japanese line survived, adapting to the times by refusing to take itself seriously on anything but the most superficial level. They dressed nicely, acted politely and observed a social protocol that we admired without wanting to follow it ourselves. Before he died, my father had often marvelled that the Second World War began with Japan being led by an emperor god, and ended with the American occupation forcing him to renounce his divinity. The Japanese god had died because MacArthur willed it and Hirohito spoke it. Godhood was like plaque. If your mother told you to brush your teeth, off it went, provided you used the right flavour of Colgate. Kings had once ruled by divine right. By 2025, the Crown Princess of Japan ruled our hearts merely by popular approval. She was our special friend, with whom we were all on intimate and imaginary terms. Indeed, on the day she died—on the day they all died—Princess Aiko’s was the most friended account on Facebook.
That’s why March 27, 2025, was such a joyous occasion for us. In hindsight, it’s utterly sick to associate the date with happiness of any kind, but history must always be understood in context, and the context of the announcement was a wirelessly connected world whose collective hopes came suddenly true to the jingle of a breaking news story on the BBC. I was in the kitchen sauteing onions when I heard it. Cutting them had made me cry and my eyes were still red. Then the announcer’s voice broke as he was setting up his intro, and in a video clip that was subsequently rebroadcast, downloaded and parodied close to a billion times in the one hundred thirty-two days that followed, he said: “The Crown Princess of Japan is pregnant!”
I ran to the living room and hugged my wife, who’d fallen to her knees in front of the wall-mounted monitor. Pillow was doing laps on and off the sofa. The BBC cut away from the announcer’s joyful face to a live feed from Japan. As I held my wife, her body felt warm and full of life. The top of her jeans cut into her waist. Her tears wetted the top of my shirt sleeve. Both of our phones started to buzz—emails and Twitter notifications streaming in. On the monitor, Aiko and her husband, both of their angular faces larger than life in 110” 1080p, waved to the crowd in Tokyo and the billions watching around the world. They spoke in Japanese and a woman on the BBC translated, but we hardly needed to know her exact words to understand the emotions. If them, why not also us? I knew my wife was having the same thought. We, too, could have a family. Then I smelled burning oil and the pungency of onions and I remembered my sauteing. I gently removed my arms from around my wife’s shoulders and ran back to the kitchen, still listening to Aiko’s voice and its polite English echo, and my hands must have been shaking, or else my whole body was shaking, because after I had turned down the heat I reached for the handle of the frying pan, knocked the pan off the stove top instead, and burned myself while stupidly trying to catch it before it fell, clattering, to the floor. The burned onions splattered. I’d cracked one of the kitchen tiles. My hand turned pale and I felt a numbness before my skin started to overflow with the warmth of pain. Without turning off the broadcast, my wife shooed me downstairs to the garage where we kept our car and drove me to the hospital.
The Toronto streets were raucous. Horns honked. J-pop blared. In the commotion we nearly hit a pedestrian, a middle-aged white woman pushing a baby carriage, who’d cut across Lake Shore without looking both ways. She had appeared suddenly from behind a parked transport—and my wife instinctively jerked the car from the left lane to the right, scraping our side mirror against the truck but saving two lives. The woman barely noticed. She disappeared into a crowd of Asian kids on the other side of street who were dancing to electronica and waving half a dozen Japanese flags, one of which was the Rising Sun Flag, the military flag of Imperial Japan. Clutching my wrist in the hope it would dull the pain in my hand, I wondered how many of them knew about the suffering Japanese soldiers had inflicted on countless Chinese in the name of that flag. To the right, Lake Ontario shone and sparkled in the late afternoon light. A passenger jet took off from Toronto Island Airport and climbed into the sky.
In the hospital waiting room, I sat next to a woman who was reading a movie magazine with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s face on the cover. The Cannes film festival was coming up. My wife checked me in at the reception desk. The woman beside me put down her magazine and told me that she was there with her son, as if needing to justify her presence. I affirmed by nodding. He’d hurt his leg playing soccer for a local Armenian junior boys team, she went on. I said I’d hurt myself frying onions and that I was here with my wife. She said my wife was pretty and asked if I liked movies. Without meaning to do it, I tried to guess her age—unsuccessfully—and proceeded to imagine having doggy style sex with her. She had dark eyes that barely blinked and plump thighs. When I started to feel guilty, I answered her question: sometimes I watched movies at home, but I hadn’t been to a theatre in a decade. When my wife sat down, I let the two of them talk about the woman’s son. I was having trouble concentrating. I took my phone out of my pocket and read all the new emails about the royal conception, then stared at the seconds hand going slowly around its digital clock face on my home screen, wondering why we so often emulated the limitations of analogue machines on devices that were no longer bound by them. I switched my clock type to a digital readout. Now the seconds no longer rotated but flickered away. They called my name over the crackling intercom and a nurse led me to one of the empty rooms. “How about that baby,” he said while we walked. I didn’t see his face, only the shaved back of his head. “The things they can do these days, even for infertile couples.”
I waited for over thirty minutes for a doctor. When one came in, she inspected my hand for less than ten seconds before telling me that I was fine and hinting that I shouldn’t have wasted her time by coming to the emergency room. She had high cheek bones, thin lips and bony wrists. Her tablet had a faux clipboard wallpaper. Maybe I had only misinterpreted her tone. “How about that baby,” I said.
“It’s not a baby yet,” she answered.
This time her tone was impossible to misinterpret. I was only repeating what the nurse had said, I told myself. But I didn’t say that to her. Instead, I imagined her coming home at night to an empty apartment, furnished possibly in a minimalistic Japanese or Swedish style, brewing a cup of black coffee and settling into an armchair to re-read a Simone de Beauvoir novel. I was about to imagine having sex with her when I caught hold of myself and wondered what was up with me today.
When I got back to the waiting room, my wife was no longer there—but the Armenian woman was. She pointed down the hall and told me a room number. She said that sometime after I left, my wife had gotten a cramp and started to vomit all over the floor. Someone was still mopping up. The other people in the waiting room, which was filling up, gave me tactfully dirty looks, either because I was with the vomiter or because I’d shirked my responsible by being away during the vomiting. Irrationally, I wiped my own mouth and fled down the hall.
Inside the numbered room, my wife was sitting hunched over on an observation bed, slowly kicking her feet back and forth. “Are you OK?” I asked.
“Come here,” she said.
I did, and sat beside her on the bed. I repeated my question. She still smelled a little of vomit, but she looked up at me like the world’s luckiest puppy, her eyes big and glassy, and said, “Norman, I’m pregnant.”
That’s all she could say—
That’s all either of us could say for a while.
We just sat there on the examination bed like a pair of best friends on a swing set after dark, dangling our feet and taking turns pulling each other closer. “Are you sure?” I finally asked. My voice was hoarse. I sounded like a frog.
“Yes.” She kicked the heel of my shoe with the rubber toe of hers. “We’re going to have a baby.”
It was beautiful. The most wonderful moment of my life. I remembered the day we met and our little marriage ceremony. I thought about being a father, and felt positively terrified, and about being a better husband, and felt absolutely determined, and as I kissed my wife there in the little hospital room with its sterile green walls, I imagined making love to her. I kept imagining it as we drove back to the apartment through partying Toronto streets. “Not since the Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup!” the radio announcer proclaimed—before I turned him off. I also turned off my phone and my wife’s phone. No more buzzing. In the underground parking lot, I leaned over and licked her soft neck. I pushed her through the open apartment door and straight into the living room, onto the sofa, and wished I could be the cushions beneath her thighs and the air invading her lungs. Pillow barked a greeting and wagged her tail. The monitor on the wall showed talking heads and fertility experts. I unbuttoned my wife’s blouse. She unbuckled my belt. The picture on the monitor dissolved to a close-up of Aiko’s smiling face. My wife and I took turns sliding off each other’s jeans. I kissed her bare stomach. She ran her hands through my hair. I dimmed the lights. We made love.
When we were done it was starry nighttime. My wife bandaged my hand. We turned off the television. The silence was refreshing because people on television too often talk like they’re trying to push you off a ledge. My wife excused me from the duty of making supper because of my ineptness with the frying pan, and handed me a leash instead. I hooked it up to Pillow’s collar and took her outside. While she peed, I gazed up at the sky and identified the Big Dipper. It and the Little Dipper were the only constellations I could identify without using a smartphone app. After Pillow finished, we ducked into a nook and I peed, too. The March sky was amazingly clear of smog. My urine splashed on the concrete and I felt embarrassingly primal. I breathed in, shook out the last drops and zipped up.
In the apartment, we ate grilled portabella mushrooms topped with parmesan and parsley and drank brown rice tea. My wife had changed into fresh clothes. I had changed into fresh skin. Every time she said “mom” and “dad”, the words discharged trickles of electricity up and down my peripheral nervous system. We were happy; we were going to have a baby. The whole world was happy; the Crown Princess of Japan of was going to have a baby. The sounds of drunken urban celebrations drifted in through our bedroom window all night like fog, and we barely slept.

2025, Post-

Gold is precious because it’s rare. Now close your eyes and imagine that the next time you open them, everything in your world will be golden: your kitchen table, the bananas you bought on the way home from work yesterday, your bottle of shampoo, even your teeth. Now blink. You’re not alone. The market’s flooded. Gold isn’t rare anymore. It’s everywhere. Which means that it’s worth about as much as its weight in mud, because there’s nothing intrinsically good about gold. Can you write on your gold table? It scratches. Surely you can’t eat your golden fruit. Your shampoo’s not a liquid anymore, so your hair’s already starting to get greasy. And if you do find something to eat that’s not made of metal, how long will those gold teeth last before you grind them into finely polished nubs?
For two days the Earth glittered.
For two days we lived in a daze of perfection.
And then, on March 29, a researcher working with lab mice at Stanford University noticed something odd. All of his female mice were pregnant. He contacted several of his colleagues who were also working with mice, rats, and monkeys. All their female animals were pregnant, too. Some of the colleagues had wives and girlfriends. They took innocent-seeming trips to their local pharmacies and bought up all the available pregnancy tests. At home, women took test after test and all of them showed positive. By midnight, the researchers had drafted a joint letter and sent copies of it to the major newspapers in their countries. On the morning of March 30, the news hit.
When I checked my Twitter feed after breakfast, #impregtoo was already trending. Throughout the day, Reddit lit up with increasingly bizarre accounts of pregnancies that physically couldn’t be but, apparently, were. Post-menopausal women, celibate women, prepubescent girls, women who’d had their uteruses removed only to discover that their reproductive systems had spontaneously regenerated like the severed tales of lizards. Existing early stage pregnancies aborted themselves and re-fertilized, like a system rebooting. Later term pregnancies developed Matryoshka-like pregnancies nested within pregnancies. After a while, I stopped reading, choosing to spend time with my wife instead. As night fell, we reclined on the sofa, her head on my chest, Pillow curled up in our tangle of feet, the television off, and the streets of Toronto eerily quiet save for the intermittent blaring of far off sirens, as any lingering doubts about the reality of the situation melted away like the brief, late season snow that floated gently down from the sky, blackening the streets.
On March 30, the World Health Organization issued a communique confirming that based on the available data it was reasonable to assume that all female mammals were pregnant. No cause was identified. It urged any woman who was not pregnant to step forward immediately. Otherwise, the communique offered no guidance. It indicated merely that the organization was already working with governments around the world to prepare for a massive influx of human population in approximately nine months’ time. Most places, including Toronto, reacted with stunned panic. Non-essential workplaces and schools were decried closed. People were urged to stay indoors. Hospitals prepared for possible complications. A few supermarkets ran out of canned food and there were several bank runs, but nothing happened that the existing systems couldn’t handle. Populations kept their nerve. Highway and air traffic increased slightly as people rushed to be with their friends, families and gynaecologists. We spent the entire day in our apartment and let Pillow pee in the tub. Except for the conspiracy theorists, who believed that the Earth was being cosmically pollinated by aliens, most of us weren’t scared to go outside, but we were scared of the unknown, and we preferred to process that fear in the comfort of our own dens.
The New York Times ran a front page editorial arguing for an evaluation of the situation using Kurt Schwaller’s theory of everything. In conjunction with The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Wikipedia Foundation, a website was set up asking users for technical help, monetary donations and the sharing of any surplus computing power.
The project quickly ran into problems. To accurately predict anything, the theory of everything needed sufficient data, and, on April 2, cryptome.org published a series of leaked emails between the French Minister of Health and a high-ranking member of World Health Organization that proved the latter’s communique had been disingenuous at best. Externally, the World Health Organization had concluded that all female mammals were pregnant. That remained true. However, it had failed to admit an even more baffling development: the wombs of all female mammals had inexplicably become impenetrable to all rays and materials that had so far been tried against them. For all intents and purposes, there was no way to see inside the womb, or to destroy it. The only way to revert the body to its natural form, to terminate the pregnancy, was to kill the woman—an experiment that, according to the high-ranking member of the World Health Organization, the French government had helped conduct on unwilling women in Mali. Both parties issued repeated denials until a video surfaced showing the murders. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. They spun their denials into arguments about the necessity of sacrificing lives for the greater good.
Reminded once again of the deception inherent in politics, many turned to religion, but the mainstream religions were hesitant to react. They offered few opinions and no answers. The fringe religions split into two camps. Some leaders welcomed this development, the greatest of all known miracles, while others denounced the same as a universal and unnatural punishment for our collective sins of hedonism, egoism and pride. The most successful of all was the Tribe of Akna, a vaguely mystical Maya revival cult that sprang up seemingly overnight and was led by a Guatemalan freelance programmer named Salvador Abaroa. Although it originated in Mexico City, the Tribe spread as quickly across the world as the computer viruses that Abaroa was notorious for creating. On the Tribe’s homepage, Abaroa could be seen striking an antique brass gong and saying in Spanish-tinged English, “Like energy, life is never destroyed. Every one of us plays an integral part of the cosmic ecosystem. Every man, woman and virus.” Elsewhere on the website, you could buy self-published theological textbooks, listen to scratchy recordings of speeches by Alan Watts and read about the hypothesis that Maya thought was deeply connected to Buddhism because the Mayans had crossed the Pacific Ocean and colonized Asia.
But despite the apparent international cooperation happening at the highest levels, the first week of April was an atomizing period for the so-called people on the ground. We hunkered down. Most personal communication was digital. My wife and I exchanged emails with her parents and sister, but we met no one face-to-face, not even on Skype. We neither invited our neighbours to dinner nor were invited by them, despite how easy it was to walk down the hall and knock. I read far more than I wrote, and even when I did write, responding to a blog post or news story, I found it easier to relate to strangers than to the people I knew. My wife said I had a high tolerance for solitude. “Who do you know in the city?” she asked. Although we’d been living here together for three years, she still considered Toronto mine. She was the stranger, I was the native. I said that I knew a few people from work. She told me to call one of them I’d never called before. I did, and the next day’s sky was cloudless and sunny and there were five of us in the apartment: my wife and I, my friend Bakshi and his wife Jacinda, and their daughter, Greta. Greta drank apple juice while the rest of us drank wine, and all five of us gorged ourselves on freshly baked peach cobbler, laughing at silly faces and cracking immature jokes. It hardly registered for me that the majority of the room was unstoppably pregnant, but wasn’t that the point: to forget—if only for a few hours? Instead of watching the BBC, we streamed BDRips of Hayao Miyazaki movies from The Pirate Bay. Porco Rosso ruled the skies, castles flew, a Catbus arrived at its magical stop. Then Bakshi’s phone rang, and he excused himself from the table to take the call. When he returned, his face was grey. “What’s the matter?” Jacinda asked him. He was still holding the phone to his ear. “It’s Kurt Schwaller,” he said. “They just found his body. They think he killed himself.”

TW: No Goal
TLDR; I accidentally cursed the Flames because Pavel Bure made me sad when I was a kid.
I’m pretty sure I traded the ability to watch the Flames win for the 2004 cup run, resulting in my viewing presence operating as a curse on the team. Whenever I watch the Flames, they lose. I know, I know, everyone thinks they have this curse. Until recently, I was suspicious but ultimately thought it was a figment of my imagination – maybe some sort of weird pessimistic confirmation bias at work. And I suppose that’s still possible, but the growing mountain of evidence in the other direction is now too large to ignore.
As I flipped the Flames/Jets game on and off last night, I finally put the pieces together. The Flames ended up winning 4-3 in a shootout. I watched the first period – two extremely questionable tripping calls lead to two extremely identical Kyle Connor goals. I turned the game off at intermission – I had to go upstairs and feed the baby anyway, and at this point getting spit up on me seemed preferable to watching the Flames muster 3 fucking low quality shots in a period. I’ll check in later.
So I did, at the end of the second. The Flames managed to pot one, I watched the highlights to see elite sniper Chris Tanev trickle a wrist shot past a Vezina-caliber goalie from 140 feet away. Odd how that lucky bounce happens a few seconds of game time after I turn it off. Maybe I’ll turn on third period, I think, right as my two-month-old aggressively shits his pants. I took this as a sign and did not turn the game back on for the start of the third.
I check my phone a while later – Flames in the lead 3 to 2. Great! There’s six minutes left, I’ll turn it on and hopefully watch them close it out. At that point, the swivel on the arena cameras broke and the teams agreed to play the rest of the game in the Flames zone. Predictably, the Jets tied it. I turned it off and assumed if I didn’t watch OT or the shootout, they’d probably win. And mercifully, they did.
Let’s stop there and rewind a bit, all the way back to sometime in the early 1990s. A cursed little shit in upstate New York has been gifted his first NHL video game for the Sega Genesis. Not knowing a damn thing about the NHL, he picks the team with the best colors and the player with the coolest name, the Flames and Theo Fleury. The game was NHLPA ’93 and Fleury dominates. The Flames have just got a new young fan for life. Sounds great!
Spoiler: it wasn’t great.
A few years later, wearing my very own Theo Fleury jersey, I was allowed to stay up late and watch playoff hockey for the first time ever. It’s the 1994 playoffs, and it’s Game 7 between Vancouver and Calgary. The Flames are heavily favored, but the Canucks are giving them all they can handle. The game goes to OT, and all you old fuckers here remember what happens next.
Ten-year-old me is traumatized. How is it possible? Why would my parents subject me to this kind of pain? Wasn’t he offside? What the hell is a Jyrki Lumme? But as little kids go, I got over it pretty quick. After all, they’ll be back next year, right? As it turned out, no one would be back next year. But I didn’t think I was cursed – they just happened to lose, right?
Then followed 10 years of nonsense. Marginal regular season success. No playoff wins. Franchise players slowly leaving town and winning cups for other teams. Not a whole lot to get excited about. But things were just about to heat up.
It’s fall 2003 and our cursed little shit is now a pimply awkward young adult. Now fully entrenched as a Flames fan and used to constant disappointment, I had very low expectations going into the season. The Flames ended up having a surprisingly strong regular season and earning the 6th seed in the West and a match-up with Vancouver. I had a sneaking suspicion the Flames were a dark horse this year and could, at the very least, slip past the Canucks before getting annihilated by the Red Wings. I wanted payback for the pain inflicted on my ten-year-old self.
Let’s pick up the action at Game 7. I had to work late and turned on the game in the middle of the third period. As I drove home from work, I begged the hockey gods to let the Flames win. I was too young to remember the 1989 cup and didn’t follow hockey then anyway – I had never in my 20 years seen the Flames win a playoff series. Please hockey gods, I will do anything. I pulled into my buddy’s driveway where we planned to watch the rest of the game and whispered the words to myself that I would do anything to take back – “if they never win again just let them win tonight.”
I don’t know why it came out like that. I should have offered up a finger or a puck with Raffi Torres’ blood or anything else. I wanted nothing more than revenge on the Canucks in this moment. I didn’t understand how steep the price would be.
The clock ticked down around 10 seconds and Jarome Iginla missed an empty net by inches, then blew a tire skating backwards as the Canucks brought their final push. A feeling of extreme dread came over me, and future sleezeball Matt Cooke tied the game with seconds left. We were going to overtime in Game 7 against Vancouver again. I prayed to hockey Gods, again.
“Don’t do this to me. Just this one win. One time.”
Minutes later, the hockey gods delivered. Stephane Yelle pushed the puck towards the net, and it bounced to Iginla. He got a shot off that Auld kicked directly to Martin Gelinas who smashed it home and consequently short-circuited my still adolescent brain. I remember running down the street screaming and loudly high fiving mailboxes. It was a chilly April night but I was somehow covered in sweat despite the fact that I had taken off my shirt at some point. My friend reassured concerned neighbors that I was not on any psychotropic drugs. When I became lucid again, I was laying on the floor in my friend’s living room still sweating and already on my third slice of pizza. The Flames actually won a playoff series and I got to watch it. In my euphoria, I forgot about what I’d give up for this.
The rest of the playoffs were a ride I never wanted to end. You probably have your own memories of the next two series. It was the best month to be a Flames fan. I woke up my Red Wings fan dad by running into his room and screaming “ROBYN REGEHR!!” when they won Game 1 in OT. When Gelinas won Game 6, I did the same thing but this time just made goal horn noises for what was probably 20 straight minutes. I specifically remember Steve Montador scoring a goal against the Sharks.
After the Flames improbably beat the Red Wings, I thought maybe I’d escaped the hockey gods collecting on our deal. After all, I said they never had to win again and here they were winning. I never thanked them out of fear of reminding them that there was a cost. I was convinced the Flames were going to win the Stanley Cup after they beat Detroit. I’d spent the last 10 years of my life mainlining as much playoff hockey as I could and I could feel it. This team had the look. You know what I mean – you can tell when a team is dialed in in the playoffs. Passes connect more often. The blue line gets held more. The goalie makes big saves at the right times. Bounces seem to go your way. This is the only time I have ever seen the Flames with that look.
As we all know, the joyride was about to end in car-wreck fashion.
I remember that I tried to watch Game 5 of the Finals, but was sick because I had participated in an unsanctioned Oreo eating contest earlier in the day. I caught bits and pieces of it between cold sweats and crawling to the bathroom. In a cream-filling induced haze, I had passed out on the floor of my bedroom when I awoke to the post game show. What the hell? I slept through the end – I didn’t even realize it went into OT. This was before online highlights were thing, so I waited for goddamn SportsCenter to see Oleg Freakin’ Saprykin win it for the Flames. I was pissed that I missed such an awesome moment, but confident that the Flames would lift the cup after Game 6 in Calgary. That game, I thought to myself, I will not miss.
I’ll spare you the retelling. I watched all of Game 6. You know what happened. No goal. Marty St. Louis. Misery.
Remember that dark, ominous feeling from late in the third period of Game 7 against Vancouver? I felt it creeping in again before Game 7 against the Lightning. I tried to ignore it, but I knew It was over. The Lightning scored the first goal and I could have turned it off then and maybe things would’ve been different. But I didn’t. How could I have? I watched the entire game in a state of despair, willing the clock to go faster and end my suffering. I knew that it would end with the Lightning on the ice and the Flames in the locker room. I felt it in my bones, the same way I felt it earlier when they were dialed in. It was time to pay the hockey gods.
Those are the origins of the curse. Let’s rapid fire through some more recent evidence, culminating with last night’s viewing experience against Winnipeg.
As an out of market fan on the east coast, I rarely get to watch the Flames unless I both pay for the NHL TV package and stay up until the games start at 10pm or (pre-Covid) find a bar with the NHL package.
I usually find a way to watch the season openers because sometimes they’re free on NHL TV. I think the opening night jinx is just a sub-category of my curse. My memory is fuzzy, but I’ve watched at least the last 5 season openers.
I didn’t watch a minute of the playoff series against the Canucks in 2015 because I was starting to suspect the curse. I couldn’t resist watching the Anaheim series even though I knew they’d lose (they probably would’ve lost that one even if I didn’t watch).
I have watched two games in their entirety this year – the opener and that game against Toronto where three goals went in off Flames’ skates.
This is only tangentially related, but when Iggy was chasing 500 goals I was watching all the games to make sure I caught it. I can’t specifically remember how many I watched where he didn’t score (3 or 4 maybe), but he ended up scoring it on a lucky bounce against Minnesota, the first game I didn’t watch.
A year ago, when those two games relit the Battle of Alberta, I couldn’t watch the first game but was so hype after the Rittich stick flip that I went to a local bar with the NHL package to watch the second one. They lost 8-3.
This will surprise exactly no one at this point, but I stupidly turned on Game 6 vs Dallas just as they scored to go up 3-0.
I have attended exactly four Flames games in person. They won the first one, which was in Buffalo in 1993 before the curse. The other three came after 2004, and they have lost all three. Small sample size, but consistent with the curse nonetheless. I have never set foot in the Saddledome and I’m afraid that if I do I will somehow escalate the curse. Luckily I live ~3,900 km away.
I mentioned earlier that I have a two-month-old son. I don’t want to pass this curse onto him. Sometimes I look into his eyes and I swear he can see the dark clouds over my head. My wife asks me what I’m looking at and I just say “nothing.” She wouldn’t understand; how could she? She just sees her beautiful baby boy and her husband watching Kyle Fucking Connor repeatedly snipe like he’s possessed by the ghost of Teemu Selanne. She can’t tell that I know he’s looking straight at me, not the camera, but me, right through the TV. It’s not actually Connor looking at me – it’s just the hockey gods reminding me that they are watching. Reminding me that I asked for this.
I turn off the TV. It’s time to feed the baby anyway. My wife gets the bottle ready and asks me how much milk to put in it.
“He seems to sleep better if he eats more so I’ll shoot for 150mL tonight.”
“You don’t have to force it,” she reassures me. “There’s no goal."

I - II - III - IV - V - VI - VII - VIII - IX - X - XI - XII - XIII - XIV
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He will begin in the furthest corner of your basement.
—
Paul was right about one thing: Psych wards aren't like the movies, at least this one wasn't. If anything, it felt more like a nursing home. Boring. Assisted living with cameras and security guards. No electroshock therapy. No drawn-out talks with stoic shrinks. No evil head nurse.
The movies got one thing right though: isolation. Especially for the first few days. I was in hysterics, strapped to a bed, screaming about the man in the basement. Screaming about how sleeping away from home would only make him stronger. Give him more influence. Of course, I knew this behavior didn't exactly help my case for appearing sane. But when you're staring down the barrel of a gun, none of that really matters.
Regardless, I calmed myself down after a few days. A steady cocktail of Seroquel and benzos might've helped too. Now, I had only one goal: Appear sane enough to get discharged. Get back home and hopefully salvage this disastrous transgression. Maybe the intruder would give me some leeway since my being here was involuntary. Wishful thinking.
I guess there's one other thing the movies get right. The more you try to appear sane, the more insane you appear. It's not easy to pretend things are normal when you believe an ever-more powerful hivemind/ tulpa/ whatever the fuck is trying to absorb you into itself. But… I put up a decent show.
To be honest, getting stuck in a psych ward is the last place I expected to be. Before this, it seemed like everything was leading up to some vast and terrible revelation, like I'd finally get the answers to all my questions. A final, horrific revelation connecting all the pieces together. But now... I was stuck in a borderline nursing home, putting together cat puzzles and playing Uno with strangers. Not exactly the finale I had in mind. The anti-climax of it all was suspect, to say the least. I was still waiting for the hammer to drop. To wake up in my room and see a coat-rack in the corner.
—
Getting forced into a psych ward changed my view on a lot of things. There was one guy in there; he had OCD so bad he needed seven cups of water on his bedside table at all times. Each cup needed to be slightly fuller than the last, but he also needed to drink from the third, fourth, and seventh cups every fourteen minutes. Then, pace around the psych ward three times. If he broke the ritual, he was convinced a man made out of paper would climb in through the vents and cut him in half. Shit like that might've seemed funny to me before, in a morbid kind of way, but after seeing it first hand, after living through it myself. Let's just say I don't look at homeless people rambling to themselves on the street the same way I did before. It's easy to make fun of things that make you uncomfortable. It's not so easy when you're the one going through hell.
Paul came to visit too. Or at least, he tried; I didn't sign off the first few times. As far as I was concerned: Paul wasn't Paul. The real Paul was trapped back in his house, barely alive, strapped to a hospital bed, and burnt up almost beyond recognition. A prisoner in his own home.
Mitch even showed up once too, but I refused him as well. Mitch wasn't Mitch either. Mitch was dead. A mangled heap of skin on his kitchen floor. Worst of all, I don't think either of them was even aware of it. But I believed that they believed they were actually themselves. Unwitting duplicates.
Paul kept trying, showing up every other day. He even covered all my hospital bills out of his own pocket. (I was borderline broke, so that was appreciated.) Out of curiosity more than anything else, I finally gave in. I finally signed off on Paul's visit.
We sat down in the common area. Imagine a low-income high-school lunchroom. Round tables covered in half-finished puzzles. Cold vinyl floors with flecks of milky gray. An older woman stood by the window; Rosa was her name. Every ten minutes or so, Rosa would call out for the nurse. When the nurse showed up, she'd ask them for the time. They'd tell her the time, and she'd thank them. Rinse and repeat that for the last three hours straight. After a while, you start to tune out stuff like that. Everything becomes background noise eventually.
Finally, the doors pushed open, and in walked Paul. Our eyes met. He smiled sadly. Strode across the room, pulled out a rickety chair, and sat down across from me, "How've you been?"
I shrugged.
He nodded, and pulled a brown envelope out from his jacket. He placed it flat down on the table and slid it towards me, "That's not gonna answer everything, but it might help some."
Skeptical, I reached into the envelope and pulled out a stack of documents — papers, photos, ID cards.
Paul cleared his throat, "That's everything I could find on my friend in the guest room. Full warning, some of it's a little graphic."
I scanned the first paper: Hospital records, detailing a man named Lawrence Weiser. A photo: A man laying on a gurney in the Vietnam jungle covered in full-body chemical burns. I flipped to the next page: Military legal papers, giving Paul the right to shelter and look after Lawrence Weiser. Clearance to 'monitor and treat complications sustained due to long-term effects of a wartime injury.' I flipped to the next page. A photo of Paul, much younger, was paper-clipped to the corner, his arm wrapped over another man's shoulder, about the same age. Both of them looked so much alike; they could've been brothers. I kept flipping, more documents, more photos, ID's, birth certificates. If they were fake, Paul would've spent a lot of time and money making them. Maybe the intruder created them out of thin air... I turned the page. More photos of Paul; He was setting up a hospital bed in his house's spare bedroom, military personnel helping out. I put the papers down and looked at him, "and...?"
Paul scratched his neck, "I know it barely answers anything. But at least it clears up one thing."
I set the documents on top of the envelope and slid it back across to Paul. "…I drove to Mitch's apartment, forty minutes out of town, saw a fucking fetus monster climb out his mouth, then I ran down the hallway and ended up in your basement… Hell, I'm pretty sure my car's still parked out at Mitch's. And you're saying it's in my head?"
Paul nodded understandingly, looked back over his shoulder, making sure nobody was in earshot, "It's not in your head," he said, turning back to face me, "It's only partially in your head. This thing's got a foot in the door between reality and nothing, and if you let it, it'll push that door all the way open and never go back."
I scoffed, "Why all the runarounds? Why the stupid fucking rules?"
Paul leaned back into his chair, "Mitch and I have different ideas on how to fix it. I figured accepting it's there and living life regardless is the best route. Mitch thinks that's what it wants you to do... Truth is probably somewhere in the middle."
"Why'd you say I could pass it off then?"
Paul looked at me, genuinely confused.
"In the park," I continued, "you said I could build a bunker door, pass it off to somebody else."
"In the park...?"
I looked at him in disbelief. Did he forget?
"I- I honestly don't know what you're talking about," said Paul.
He seemed sincere. But I'd been fooled more than enough by now.
"In the park, you told me this long, drawn-out fucking story about how you fell in between these boulders, saw a man down between the rocks. Told me the intruder dug a tunnel between the houses."
"A tunnel?"
"You're serious?"
"Look, Brandon… I don't know who you talked to, but it wasn't me... But that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is you focus on moving past all this. Focus on getting better. The stronger you are, the healthier your mind is, the less power this has over you. Like I said before, once I stopped drinking, started caring for people close to me, all the crazy shit started going away. Things still happen, don't get me wrong, but I can deal with it now. You learn to cope."
"How do I know you're even you?"
"You don't. Shit… I don't. But that doesn't matter either. I'm here, I exist. You exist. Work with what you know."
I didn't respond.
"How long've you been away from home now?"
"Two… three weeks..."
"Has anything happened? Has the intruder shown up here? Have you died?"
I didn't answer, but I caught the point.
"This doesn't make any sense," I said, leaning forward, resting my arms on the table.
"That's the point. This thing preys off confusion, addiction, fear, repression… trauma. The more fucked up you are, the better a time it has."
I mulled it over, still not convinced.
"Has the doctor helped?" Paul continued, "The meds...?"
I gave a reluctant nod. As much as I hated to admit it, things didn't feel as crazy as they used to. I felt calmer. More stable. But like I said before, this was all too easy: uncomfortably anti-climactic. "…The night before I went to your house, I swerved, almost hit a bear. I smashed into a roadside post and cracked my head on the driver's side window… I saw things, experienced things. I saw you, driving, looking out through your eyes."
Paul nodded, as if expecting the point to be raised, "I'm not gonna say it wasn't real. But it's only little snippets of moments, crumbs of conspiracy. Just enough to create a narrative in your head that may or may not be real. Enough to keep obsessed. Enough to-"
"-I saw you. Driving drunk. You swerved into somebody on a green-bike. Hit and run. It... seemed like you tried to cover it up..."
Paul looked at me with deadly serious eyes, "I'd kill myself before trying to cover up something like that," he said, with brutal conviction, "Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. But it didn't happen in this world, and it didn't happen to me. Whatever that's worth."
"…Sure…" I said, still not fully satisfied.
"Nurse?!" Rosa by the window, called out again. The staff was ignoring her now. "NURSE!?"
Paul looked around, expecting someone to help.
"She just keeps asking the time," I said.
Paul pulled up his sleeve and checked the time on his watch, "Five-fifty-eight in the afternoon," he said, smiling warmly towards her.
Rosa looked at Paul like he was an angel sent from above, "…Thank you."
Paul nodded and turned back to me. More silence.
I cleared my throat, "You and Mitch talkin' again?".
Paul shook his head, no. "He was just worried about you, is all."
"Still thinks you're possessed?"
"Something like that," Paul rubbed his jaw, "…I mean, it's not just that, though. I was a shit father too..."
I nodded, "You remind me of my old man sometimes."
"Shit father too, huh?"
I almost laughed, "Nah, he was alright."
"…Where's he now?"
"Dead."
"Ah. Sorry."
"It's okay."
"What got him?"
"Lung cancer."
"Same thing that got my dad, in the liver though."
A strange calm came over me, something I hadn't felt since before this nightmare began. A feeling that maybe, despite all its misery, life was worth sticking around for. At least a little while longer. If for nothing else, just to see what happens.
We talked about Howie too. Paul said Howie always struck him as weird, even before the intruder. Maybe he was a servant of the intruder. Maybe he was an unwitting vessel, controlled by the intruder to spy on new 'recruits.' Maybe he was just a weird guy who really liked the color green and crossword puzzles. Maybe some things were better left alone.
A bell RANG out through the PA system, "Dinner will now be served in the cafeteria. Please line up on the marks, maintaining a six-foot distance from one another."
Paul hit the table gently with his fist, "Well. I'll stop buggin' you now."
I forced a smile.
Paul stood up, "I'm not asking you to trust me blindly here, but if you got the patience. I'd love to swing by and visit every so often. Don't got much else going on anyways."
"…Sure." I said, still skeptical. Even though I didn't trust Paul, or anyone else for that matter, I had to admit, his presence made me feel a little less crazy. A little less alone. Besides, any visitor, even a potential vessel of the intruder, was preferable to no visitors at all.
"Take it easy kid," he smiled again, then strode back for the exit and pushed through the doors.
—
Paul stopped by every single day for the next two weeks. We played cards, talked about hockey, politics. Sometimes we'd talk about the intruder too, but less and less every day. Paul eventually brought me somewhat around, convinced me to work with the doctors, "What've you got to lose anyways?"
A fair point.
Paul told me to tell the doctors what they needed to hear. Tell them I acknowledge it was all in my head, even if we both knew that wasn't entirely true. Say what I needed to say to get out, but don't rush things. Only leave when I felt ready to.
—
Reality is a spectrum.
Things in the realm of thought and emotion don't exist or not exist in a binary state. Belief leads to real actions, terrible and beautiful. Just look at religion. I'm not a believer myself, but it's pretty staggering the simultaneous beauty and horror created by mythic ideologies. True or not, sometimes it feels like belief itself has more effect on the real world than anything else. I don't know. Maybe the intruder worked in a similar way. Molding itself out of belief, obsession, trauma, forcing itself out of the abstract into the concrete, like a virus of the mind. Who knows.
—
Paul was there the day before my discharge. The doctors had determined I was stable enough to return to public life. I still felt like shit, but now in a normal constant haze of vague depression and anxiety kind of way as opposed to a supernatural entity is trying to kill me kind of way. Paul and I played crib in the common area. Best out of three. He won, as usual. Stretching out his arms, Paul checked the time, "Well, I should head out," he said, partially yawning. "I'll swing by tomorrow, give you a ride home."
"Sure… Thanks Paul."
"No worries kid.
—
Paul drove me home the next day. We pulled into my driveway, and sure enough, there sat my car. Inexplicably back in its spot, no longer in front of Mitch's apartment. I opened my mouth to ask about it, but stopped myself short. Better leave well enough alone.
"So what's next for Brandon?" he adjusted the rearview mirror as he spoke.
I shrugged, "Probably gonna move upstate to be honest."
"Yeah? I don't blame you."
"I haven't checked my email in a while, but… pretty sure I'm jobless by now. That kind of just fell off the map."
Paul chuckled, "Fair enough. Is that a bad thing though?"
"I mean… not really. Wasn't really my favorite job anyway."
"What're you gonna do now?"
"I don't know. Maybe I'll go back to school. Maybe I'll start writing again."
"You write?"
"I used to."
"And you enjoyed that?"
"Yeah."
"Why'd you stop?"
"No money."
"Well, if you move, sell the place, that might give you a bit of a cushion, huh?"
"Sure."
"I'm not saying what you should do Brandon, but if you like writing, then at least try for it. If you like something else, shoot for that. It's better than not trying. Trust me. I learned that the hard way,"
"Yeah, maybe," I said, mulling it over. Looking back, this conversation, like many others, was a little strange, but I didn't think much of it at the time.
"Anyways, I'll get out of your hair now," said Paul.
Silence. I reached for the door and stopped. "…Thanks Paul," I said, looking back at him. It's hard to know what to say to someone who might've saved your life.
"You owe me one," he said, cracking a smile.
I smiled back, turned away, and unlatched the door. I stepped out, went to close it and-
"-Oh, one other thing,"
I froze, pulled the door back open, hunched down to meet his eyes.
"I know you're planning to move anyways, but…" Paul shifted in his seat slightly, "It's probably better we keep minimal contact from here on out. Same goes for Mitch. I'm not sure why, but this thing seems to feed off us being around each other."
I nodded, stepped away, pushed the door shut, and turned back for my house. Paul pulled into reverse, backed across the street, and pulled into his garage.
To this day, I don't know if that was even Paul, the intruder, or something in between. All I know is he helped me get back on my feet. So I'm grateful for that.
I rifled for my keys and... something caught the corner of my eye. Down the street, parked about seven houses away: A white hatchback with tinted windows. The same car I'd seen all those weeks ago. I don't know why it grabbed my attention, but it did. It felt out of place, sinister almost....
...I shrugged it off, turned away, and opened the door. The smell of cooking hit me. Chicken soup, gravy, and mashed potatoes. Howie humming to himself. I pulled the door shut behind me, and was greeted with a bright green, brand new: basement door.
"You like it?" Howie's voice shot down the hallway. I turned. His bald head peeked out from the kitchen.
"Yeah, Howie it's… it's great." I lied.
Howie smiled brightly and stepped out into the hallway, "Works picking up again, so it's from my own pocket. The least I could do for you letting me stay here."
"Thanks Howie."
"… How've you been? Mitch's dad sort of filled me in a little. And he's apparently not dead? His kid told me otherwise... Some people are so weird, huh?"
"...Crazy's catching," I said.
"Huh?"
"Nothing."
"-Oh, I got something." Howie slipped back into the kitchen and reappeared on the other side, this time with a crossword book in hand. "Nine words, third letter T, last letter M… A naturally occurring yellow blackish liquid found in geological formations below the earth's surface."
I furrowed my brow. The word was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't quite place it. Howie looked at me, eyes filling with anticipation. I shrugged again, "Beats me."
His eyes filled with disappointment.
"I'll let you know if it comes to me."
"Sure… sure… no problem," Howie slumped back into the kitchen and placed down the booklet. He looked like I just told him his dog died or something.
—
I moved out the next week. Howie offered to stay, pay rent with his newfound income. I agreed. I never did find out exactly what made him leave his old place, but he never brought it up, so I didn't ask.
—
I moved upstate, rented a small studio apartment in a mountain town. Still can't sleep in places with basements, but you can't really blame me on that one. Got back into writing hard too. Started taking online courses, watching youtube tutorials, stuff like that. Got my craft to a place where I'm not entirely embarrassed to share it. Weirdly, all these events actually inspired me to start writing again.
Of course, all the loose ends, all the unanswered questions still bothered me. Something just felt too convenient about the last few weeks. Like I'd gotten out of the woods too easy. Like the hand of an invisible, and benevolent god stepped in and waved away all my problems. Deus ex machina.

But sometimes, I wondered if the intruder was still using me. Working towards some unknown and terrifying endgame; An endgame that would reveal itself at any moment. Vague anxiety once again lingered beneath everything. Like a constant, rising, shepard tone. Sometimes barely audible, sometimes unbearably loud. I did what I could to put it out of my mind, to focus on other things. Not pushing it away, just being aware that it's there, and gently choosing to focus elsewhere. I'm learning to live with it. Learning to accept the unknowable.
I'll admit one thing though: coat-racks still freak me the fuck out.
Despite all my progress, there was something else I couldn't shake. One question that kept me up nights. What happened to Zack? Was it really what the police said? Just some long-haul semi-truck driver in the night. A terrible accident? But what about the visions of Paul, drunk driving, hitting somebody on a green bike? What about the intruder's mimicry murder of Zack? Pleading and apologizing. What about the-
-I stopped myself from spiraling. These questions stuck in the back of my head like splinters of wood stuck between fingers. But even here, I'm learning to live with it.
—
About six weeks ago, I decided to look up Zack's mother. Just to call her and see how she was doing; See if she was even still alive. It took a bit of work, but I found her. She lived in a care-home down in Georgia.
I called her on a Wednesday night.
"Hello?" she said, her voice sounding almost how I remembered, despite all the years between.
"Mrs. Serrano?"
"Speaking."
"Hi… uhm… I'm not sure if you'll remember me or not, but this is …Brandon Miller-"
"Brandon?" her voice filled with recognition.
"Yeah, that's me."
"Oh, it's so nice to hear from you! How have you been? It's been so long..."
"...I'm doing alright."
We made small talk for a while, talked about the town I grew up in. Talked about the pandemic. The craziness of the upcoming election. Then, the conversation took an unexpected turn:
"How's your father doing?" she asked.
"Oh, he passed away quite a few years back now."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"It's okay, I've accepted it now."
"Yeah…. I've mostly done the same with Zack. But it still hurts. That never goes away. But you learn to live with it."
I didn't say anything; I was lost for words. Silence hung in the air until-
"-You know Zack always had trouble making friends before you."
"…I didn't know that." Zack always struck me as effortlessly charismatic.
"He was a bit of an odd duck, but in a good way. Before we moved, none of the other kids ever really clicked with him. But with you? Inseparable."
"Huh. Yeah, I was the same way."
"How's that?"
"Not good at making friends."
"Mmm."
More silence.
"I remember his passing hit you really hard," she said, "You didn't speak for months. Your father was terribly worried about you."
"Yeah… I'm doing better now thankfully."
"That's good to hear. I'm sure the closure helped too. It helped me."
"…closure?"
"What?"
"What closure?"
"...You didn't hear?"
"Hear what?"
"…A driver. Long-haul teamster, came forward a couple years back. All those years back... he was sleep-deprived, running a cross-state shipment when…" she trailed off, the tragedy spoke from the silence. She took a breath and continued, "This driver, he grew overwhelmed with guilt, came forward two years back to confess. I met with him too. A kind soul, really. A sensitive soul. Wrong person. Wrong place. A terrible mistake."
"…Where's he now?"
"…He… took his own life a few months back. Poor soul. Neighbors found him in a basement corner."
The words 'basement corner' hit me like a concrete wall. Was this connected to the intruder? Was this connected to Paul? Nightmarish thoughts and incomprehensible images raced through my mind. The image of a naked body, pale and decomposing, slumped into a basement corner, a plastic bag wrapped over it's head-
"-You there?" said Mrs. Serrano.
I stopped myself, took a deep breath. Set it aside. Don't worry about it. It's a coincidence.
"I hope his family is okay," I said.
"Me as well."
Threads of conspiracy dangled in front of me like fishing lures. This had to be connected to the intruder somehow, it had to be connected to the rules-
"-What's his name?" I asked, almost involuntarily.
"Hmm?
"The driver."
"Oh... Uh, Mason... Mason Parker I believe."
"...Huh." I didn't recognize it.
Awkward silence.
"…Well, it's been lovely hearing from you Brandon, but games night is about to start and I can't be late."
"Of course. You as well Mrs. Serrano."
"Take care of yourself, call anytime. Okay?"
"Okay."
She ended the call.
I sat at my work desk. The glow of car lights beamed in through the window and swiped across the darkened walls. Raindrop shadows stretched across the room and returned into darkness. I took another deep breath. Exhaled. Doing my best to stay grounded. Using a trick I learned from Paul:
Three by four.
Name three things you can see: Bookshelf. White wall. Brown desk. Name three things you can hear: Rain against the window, tires against the road outside, neighbors footsteps up above. Name three things you can feel: The back of my legs against the seat, the warmth of the heater against my shins, the brush of my shirt as I breathe in and out. Name three things you can smell: coffee, gasoline, burnt hair-
- overwhelming terror pushed up from the floor, into my toes, through my legs, my spine, into my head. A sickening upward swell of chemical dread. A feeling that something truly heinous... something truly evil, yet emotionless beyond human-understanding was standing behind me. I imagined arms: impossibly long, stretching from the shadows across the room, unnaturally large hands, fingers with extra joints, reaching for the scruff of my neck. Eager to pull me down through the floor, down through the ground, down through the dirt, beneath the surface of reality itself. Trapping me below an invisible barrier, suffocating me under water with impenetrable surface tension. Forcing me to watch, gasping for air as the world above moved on without me. The world above acted as if I never even existed to begin with. Eternal suffering.
I spun around, expecting to see something incomprehensible. But there was nothing. No Intruder. No coat-rack. No man held together with nails and wire. Just an empty studio apartment. The orange glow of more headlights wiped across: Slow and yawing light crawling over the kitchen, over the front door, over me. Like the beams of a deep-water submarine scanning the ocean floor. Everything returned to moonlit darkness. Against the window drapes - a faint, greenish and flickering glow from a neon bar-sign across the street.
I sniffed the air.
The smell of gasoline and burnt hair was gone. Maybe it was never there to begin with. I took another deep breath and exhaled. It's all in my head. Or, at the very least: it's mostly in my head. But still, the words only rang partially true. If I'd learned anything over the past few months, it was this: nothing good comes easy. At least, not this easy. As much as I tried to repress it, as much I tried to ignore it. I knew something was missing. There was some piece of the puzzle that may, or may not, ever be found. I knew this wasn't finished. I took a deep breath. Exhaled.
I turned back to my desk, popped open my laptop-
-and started writing.
—
—
—
Polterkites
Part XIV
.-. . -- . -- -... . .-. . -.. .-.-.-

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