she wants to win more than she wants to change the world   and i can’t say that i wasn’t a strategic thinker myself: indeed, things can get nasty when it comes to free health care and a living wage (thirty dollars an hour).  I was willing to do almost anything to get our Anna

     i’m not digging in yet   i’m on the verge of digging in   are you kidding me?   Is this for real?  but we knew that you had to run for president when the people wanted you to run for president—if you turned them down, then they’d be let down, and they might look elsewhere.  even

     Anna Karenina was pissed: she said something about me trying to critique her into place in order to insert my dominance over her.  I didn’t think that was the case, but she was in a bad mood, so, instead of getting argued out of my mind (which is something I used to do with

      i want to be the president: i don’t care about anything else   but that wasn’t true, or, if it was, she meant that everything she does is consistent with a presidential arc.  Anna Karenina was back to asking me all kinds of questions that were difficult to answer, and I answered them, and I

     don’t you love me anymore?  i just want you to look past what you perceive as hunger; immerse yourself in your work.  but, as is often the case, in order to do the really fun things that we want to do, we have to build up to it with a series of seemingly inconsequential

     you seem too happy to be devastated—that was my assessment of how Anna Karenina was handling the likelihood that she would be the next president.  that was all well and good, and it was great to see her feeling good.  Of course i still suspected that things could get a little better for her—she

     i was tuning into AOC and various things were passing through my head but i couldn’t make much sense of what was happening—something about wolf-son, healthcare—a lot about healthcare, actually, and then she said, “i don’t mean to ignore you; so i got to wondering: what if AOC was thinking about things that were

     AOC was asking about Finnegan’s Wake; did you really read it, and i said, yes, i did, and i actually recorded it—and then felt bad about it for various reasons (i had better things to do than make a recording of me reading Finnegan’s wake—I don’t even like James Joyce; I think he’s boring,

     AOC was saying something now, about a car—i know she’d gotten a car several years ago but i don’t know if she still had one.  She could’ve been getting rides everywhere, now—I don’t know.  But what did she want to say about a car?  That it’s working?  And what did you mean by that? 

     So the lines were blurring between my AOC and the AOC that went by the name of Alex—and, in the company of Bernie Sanders (an outspoken Senator), Alexandria.  I had pretty much defined my AOC—my orphan from the future—as both looking and sounding exactly like the real flesh and blood AOC that I called