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Eight Million Stories

The following is a list of seemingly unrelated things that have happened to me in the last week or so

1.For about the one-hundred twentieth time in the past twenty years I’ve become inexplicably addicted to A Tribe Called Quest. This time it is their fourth album, Beats, Rhymes and Life, particularly Phife’s verse on The Pressure which I have run back incessantly for days, thinking about every word, every turn of phrase, listening to how his voice is engineered, the feeling of luminescent sandpaper in his breath, the snapped-to cadence of his verses, the fact that he somehow treats talking shit as a metaphysical activity. Thus spawned the title of this piece.

2. I was naked in the rain among the trees, hot water from a natural spring pouring over me, watching as a falcon mounted on an electrical wire no more than fifteen feet from me took a ginormous shit into the leaves.

3. I bought mistletoe for my apartment and my seventeen year old son kept asking, who is that for who is that for? you live alone? who did you buy that for? And I tried to remember a time when the concept of loving yourself because there are moments where you need love so badly and there is no one else to do it was so foreign to me that I couldn’t even imagine the existence of it.

4. Me and my kids and our family friend went to buy a Christmas Tree in a year where there is apparently a Christmas Tree shortage and the…