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.

“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.

Then a small, vegan star

Arrived, lived

i remember. not wearing sexy panties. then wearing sexy panties. cuz i was grown. and my thighs. and between. glorious purple lace. i saw. possessed

I’m 14, in the back of my parents’ Toyota Camry. My mom is driving me and a friend home from a rehearsal of Hansel and Gretel.

Dig, if you will, this picture: me, as a teenage boy standing in front of my suburban classmates, who wear glazed-over expressions of bewilderment and don’t know whether to laugh with me or at me.

I won’t wear purple as an old man.

Instead, I say purple is for growing,

Because the world is cold-calling you now,

and somewhere the potential of a groove

We rode in his little red Corvette,

while seeing the most beautiful girl in the world.

2016

On the night that the episode of New Girl that Prince is in re-airs days after his death—the one where Nick and Jess tell each other they love one another for the first time—my wife Shannon and I frantically hustle to put on an immersive and interactive show at a stranger’s house in the middle of DC.