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Inside his immaculate fortress high in the Alps, where nobody but the most reliable yes-men could molest him, Brad hunkered down as he did every afternoon with his fountain pen, a sheaf of staff paper (both of which he used out of a nostalgic notion that they were better than modern technology) and his encyclopedic collection of Bill Evans LPs to do his three hours of transcriptions. But for some reason today he couldn't concentrate. He needed a change; he needed a break. What would Kierkegaard do, he wondered. Maybe he should write some liner notes! What a treat! The prospect immediately delivered him to a time years earlier when he had been hanging out behind his high school, smoking cigarettes and discussing Nietze with his schoolmate, Chris Dunbar. The innocence of those days! The pale 80's sincerity! What little irony he had had! If only he could be there now instead of stuck in this cage with golden bars. Immediately he realized that he was experiencing nostalgia, which for no apparent reason he had long ago decided was life's greatest folly, its greatest sin. A wave of self-loathing overtook him and he knew what he had to do: write a short-short!

He lifted his fountain pen and considered his subject. "I should write about what bullshit nostalgia is," he thought. "Better make it Ewan who has the nostalgia, not me. Yeah, I'll make him a real lummox, it'll be easy. There we go... Eurotour... okay, now to add some tension....Feldspar... okay, let's see. Better put Jimson in there. No need for any detail, just a vague female presence/foil should do. Man, that Ewan sure is a nostalgic dolt!"

Note: For examples of Brad's oddly strong sense of nostalgia and his hatred thereof, see the shorts Ewan gazed, In college, Fred longed..., Bad Mozart, and Feldspar took the white blotter...

Date Written: November 26, 2003
Author: Ewan Snow
Average Vote: 4.6667

Comments:
11/26/2003 Dylan Danko (4): Pistols at dawn?
11/26/2003 qualcomm (5): this one's very funny. i take back calling that ewan "such a chump" in my comments for this one. it's brad who's the chump! brad!
11/26/2003 Jimson S. Sorghum (5): Nice work.
11/26/2003 Phony Millions: I feel exposed and naked, yet oddly giddy and excited! This will inspire me to greater heights (depths)of self-referential onanism and/or laughably transparent transference of my wilted desires that Ewan alludes to here onto such victims as himself, his poor Jimson and Feldspar in my future shorts! I will make no pretense at hiding my bruised subject-self from you poor hapless readers! You must endure my imperfect thwarted offerings, like so many clay-adobe tiny turds of a constipated opiate user! No, I shall not attempt anything resembling objectivity or even affect the air of interested inquiry into something outside my ivory tower outhouse, filled with recollections of 'pale 80's sincerity,' so aptly recalled in my character here by Ewan! (Nice touch with the Alps locale for the fortress - sort of Thomas Mann/Hermann Hesse Teutonic stuff, me wanting to be that...Great!)
11/29/2003 Phony Millions: also see comments here for more navel gazing.
11/30/2003 Ewan Snow: Well, I'm glad we hashed this out. It sort of reminds me of the good old days, like, before now, when everything was better. Too bad it isn't back then...
12/2/2003 Phony Millions: You're asking for more punishment, Ewan! Let's see, I'm getting a picture in my mind here...Ewan and Jimson...graduate school together...A really, really pretentious creative writing assignment...self-loathing, doubt, fear...awkward sex...collegiate wanderlust...Oh yes, yes baby!!!Ahrghhh!!!