The first rule of professional wrestling is that if you see something, you are supposed to see it—there are plenty of secrets and slip-ups; a body falling to the floor a step early, a mistimed musical cue—yet the camera will always seem to cut away at the precise moment (cameras are everywhere these days) & it will never be spoken of again.

It’s with a heavy heart that I join the din of people announcing that American Decency has died. Like Mark Twain, reports of Decency’s death have often been exaggerated, but this time, Decency is good and truly dead.

As its longtime friend and occasional lover, it's with great sadness that I report the violent murder and dismemberment of Optimism during the early morning hours of last November the 9th.

I think (I hope?) maybe everyone had a place like Spyro Gyros in their 20s. Small and sticky-boothed, it was the only place in walking distance of the bars in downtown Lancaster that was open after last call.

True greatness is terrifying. You were terrifying.

The squared-shoulder, fist-pumping, finger-pointing, suffer-no-nonsense approach to the world.

While irony was first conceived by Socrates around 410 BCE, it sprang fully formed from the skull of Cleanth Brooks and the New Critics in 1949. Rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated after the release of “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette in 1995, but it appears to have been struck a mortal blow in 2016.

It is with a heavy head and a heavy heart that I bring My Patience with White People to its final resting place. It has been a long relationship. My Patience with White People has been one of my best friends seeing me through hard times teaching me how to turn the other cheek. And the other cheek and the other cheek and the other….

“Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing. Through the graves, the wind is blowing. Freedom soon will come.” – The Partisan

Subdiaphragmatic pressure, he called it. The Heimlich maneuver, though, was how it came to be known—given his name because in the two months after a description was published, dozens of lives were saved. This was in 1974.

When the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series, they ended the franchise’s 108-year streak of cruel futility. This year, the label of “lovable losers” died.

Fact was downed in battle, but the details stutter in, contradictory and strange. With no body, they tell me, closure is a challenge.