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

11    this love was going to short circuit my brain   i’d blow a fuse, trying, in vain, to inform myself of myself in such a way that i could achieve greater and greater echelons of happiness—not to mention explain myself in such a way that people could understand me—or at least praise me.      

     where are you headed now?  i’m going to my grave   “but there’s a lot of things that can happen in between that, right?”  And there were: for example: i could marry someone else.  I don’t know if i was trying to make Alexandria jealous or what, but I told her (just like I was

     maybe you want to be at the center of everything, and so you turn on your heels and say, “this is not the end of everything,” or something like that, when what you really mean is, “this is a little hard to believe,” and you’d be right, some things, such as life after death

     the American dream?  what quasi-socialist state was this?  the uneducated, or those that just didn’t know any better because they weren’t students of political science, might’ve associated socialism with communism.  I did, for years.  But a socialist government wouldn’t seize your property under the auspices of producing the country’s food, and then, in a

     i don’t know what was up with AOC and or Alex, but I hadn’t heard from them all day—or, if I had, i didn’t recognized that.  Maybe, at this time, there were no telepathic emails to look at; although, i don’t see how that could be, since something happens every day, and it gets

     Where—oh, where, do we go from here?  I had to bring myself back to reality; the stats (so far) were in, and Alexandria was trailing Superman (the governor of California) and Wonder woman (the former Vice President and presidential nominee) by a margin of approximately nine percent.  That was real downer for me, because

     the question presented itself:  “Do you want your whole career to be determined by The New Yorker?”  I don’t know why I didn’t understand that they were out of my league—that I was just a drop of water in the ocean to them, and, therefore, it would have been a very bad idea to

     You’ve shifted gears, now.  “yes, we’re moving a little faster now.”  The space between me and Alex had shifted—she didn’t seem to mind that she had a white collar job and i didn’t.  We were closer now than i’d conceded: if the conditions are right, then, yes, you follow your heart.  She was reticent.