Ahead on Differential

Here are ten things.

1. Happy 35th birthday to me! Pisces power, baby!
2. It was the Academy Awards on Sunday! Everything Everywhere All at Once went 7 for 11! Michelle Yeoh has a fucking Oscar, dude! And the guy from the “Turn Down for What” video has three! That's cool as hell! That's my take: it's nice that the winners got an Oscar.
3. Maybe it's because I didn't watch the show, and maybe it's because I'm fucking sports-pilled beyond salvation, but I really liked what Daniel Joyaux wrote at the Ringer on how to fix the Oscars telecast once and for all. Basically make it two shows split by a Super Bowl Halftime Show-esque musical interlude.
4. Man, all this movie talk crowding up the list, huh? Too bad, here's more: every year, I give myself until the Oscars to officialize my list of the previous year's movies. To that end: here are my top 10 movies of 2022.
5. A brief history of the Peeing Calvin decal.
6. You know what's a fun game? Retro Bowl. Shout out to Retro Bowl. I'll take it over Madden any day of the week.
7. It's such a rare treat to discover a new favourite podcast. Thanks to a guest appearance by the Shutdown Fullcast's Ryan Nanni (who is on a yearlong quest to guest on as many podcasts as possible), I have been mainlining episodes of Remember that Guy?, a podcast about remembering athletes who are not legends or Hall of Famers, but who are fascinating and intriguing for other reasons. These guys are my people.
8. In conjunction with the release of his book Shift Happens, Marcin Wichary (or someone on their team, I can't tell) put together this nifty in-browser typewriter simulator.
9. For the last couple of months, I've been getting into lifting weights, spurred by a couple of chance encounters with the work of Casey Johnston. She writes about fitness in an approachable, lucid, down-to-earth way that I can appreciate as a complete and total novice. It's a real antidote to a lot of discourse that's in the ether about fitness and health in terms of tone and POV. If you're curious about strength training, her book Liftoff gets my official okey-dokey.
10. “The Kingfisher” by Mary Oliver:
    

    The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
    like a blue flower, in his beak
    he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
    the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
    a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
    that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
    There are more fish than there are leaves
    on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
    wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
    When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
    remains water—hunger is the only story
    he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
    I don’t say he’s right. Neither
    do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
    with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
    I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
    if my life depended on it, he swings back
    over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
    (as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

Only this time, the ten things are all movies I consider Short Good Secret All-Stars.

1. Ape (2012, comedy, colour, 86 minutes). Writer/director Joel Potrykus is gifted at weaving a very specific flavour of flyover-state ennui into acidic slacker doofus comedy gold. And here, his muse, Buster Keaton lookalike par excellence Joshua Burge, farts around, does shitty stand-up comedy, sets things on fire, listens to old-school rap/metal, wonders why everything sucks, and decides to make it everyone else's problem. Available on Mubi (and Kanopy in the US).
2. Avengement (2019, action, colour, 88 minutes). The crown jewel in the collaboration between English direct-to-video action lifer Jesse V. Johnson and the great Scott Adkins, possibly the most exciting fighter in the movies. Sits proudly atop the throne Guy Ritchie abdicated ages ago. Available on Netflix.
3. Dementia (1955, horror, b&w, 56 minutes). The other 1955 one-and-done, courtesy of aspiring producer and theatre-chain scion John Parker, is the epitome of “jazz horror.” A splintered avant-garde blast of urban decay and psychosexual paranoia. You will never look at a cello the same way again. Available on Tubi.
4. Fast Company (1979, action, colour, 91 minutes). A strange slice of auteur juvenalia: an early for-hire gig by body-horror master David Cronenberg that's... basically a Burt Reynolds movie? It's literally about a drag racer played by William Smith taking on his crooked sponsors, which may be the least Cronenbergian logline imaginable. But it does have former Playmate of the Month Claudia Jennings in a lead role, sick-nasty footage of cars going fast, a cute diet-Springsteen theme song, and a delightfully slimy supporting turn by CanCon All-Star Nicholas Campbell. Also John Saxon is here! Available on Tubi (and Kanopy in the US).
5. Furious (1984, action, colour, 71 minutes). A fractured, hallucinogenic no-budget fantasy martial arts jam shot in six days and starring legendary stuntman Simon Rhee. There's some surprisingly sturdy combat on display (Rhee and his brother Phillip are talented; the students from their dojo are less so), but the plot, tone, score, and pacing make absolutely no sense, and that anything-can-happen reach-exceeding-grasp energy is part of the reason I find this movie fascinating. Available on Tubi and YouTube.
6. Last and First Men (2020, sci-fi, b&w, 72 minutes). The sole directorial effort from the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson is a post-rock elegy for the living, and Tilda Swinton is the one delivering the eulogy. It's based on a heady British “future history” novel from the early 1930s and the whole thing is rendered in power shots of various World War II memorials in the former Yugoslavia. Majestic stuff. Available on Mubi.
7. Night Tide (1961, horror, b&w, 84 minutes). Curtis Harrington, a mentee of Maya Deren and acolyte of Kenneth Anger, had been making avant-garde shorts for nearly 20 years by the time Night Tide was released, and it shows: there's a choppy, narcotic quality to this movie, which feels like the sun-kissed Cali version of Carnival of Souls. Only here it's mermaids, not zombies, and oh yeah, Dennis Hopper is the lead. Available on Prime, Mubi, Plex, and Tubi.
8. Secret Honor (1984, drama, colour, 90 minutes). Philip Baker Hall as an armed-and-drunk Richard Nixon loudly monologuing in the Oval Office while his own tape machines record his breakdown. Robert Altman's peak between 3 Women and The Player. Available on the Criterion Channel.
9. Son of the White Mare (1981, animation, colour, 86 minutes). Director Marcell Jankovics's best-known work in North America is likely 1974's Sisyphus, mostly because it was used in a GMC ad aired during Super Bowl XLII (aka the Eli Manning Combo Breaker). But Son of the White Mare, a full-blown psychedelic interpretation of a Hungarian creation myth, deserves some shine. Available on Kanopy in the US.
10. Tread (2019, documentary, colour, 88 minutes). There is nothing more dangerous on the face of the earth than a man with a Certain Set of Skills who feels he has been wronged somehow, because that man could be Marvin Heemeyer, who built a goddamn tank in his garage and turned it loose onto his “enemies.” The only thing more astonishing than the footage of the mayhem is the Hall of Fame-level staying mad on display. Available on Netflix.

#tenthings #shortgoodsecret

📷: damndaze_

Here are ten things.

1. Part of the reason this edition of Ten Things is late is that I spent five hours yesterday laying on my stomach getting a brand new tattoo, pictured above. Shout out to Val from Grey Market for her astounding work.
2. Val and her studiomate were bumping some pretty sick jams while I was getting repeatedly stabbed with an ink-tipped needle: Still Woozy, Palace, Tame Impala, Tim Atlas, Ellington/Coltrane, Dayglow, New Abnormal-era Strokes.
3. After long threatening it, I'm finally making good on my promise of becoming a correspondence guy. Thank-you notes, postcards, letters, the works. If I have your address, I will send you something.
4. I've been thinking about personal rating systems a lot these days. Future blog post?
5. The most recent episode of Do by Friday is an all-timer. Stay for the interesting takes on ChatGPT, stay for the crushing existential despair of being locked inside your own head.
6. Via Kottke: the greatest unexpected performances in NBA history, or a crash course in statistical analysis.
7. What's that? Basketball not your thing? More of a baseball person? Don't worry, I've got you: the now-fully-back-from-being-hacked Foolish Baseball teaches you how to lie with baseball statistics.
8. JPEG is a newsletter of a different stripe. From their own copy: “The images are links. The subject matter varies. No text. Just images.” Right on.
9. Y'all know I play Magic: The Gathering, right? And how I like to play with just the dregs of the game? Well, let me introduce you to some like-minded people, the pride and joy of Roseville, Minnesota, Quest for the Janklord, i.e. four guys who play Commander exclusively with cards worth $0.79 or less. So keep that god damn Sol Ring in your binder there, brother. Jank forever.
10. A poem, from poem.exe:
    

    bright moon
    when did you get here?
    toward my door

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. It's Pisces Season, y'all. Time to feel those big feelings. Also, it means my birthday is coming up very soon. Do with this information what you will.
2. Happy belated Valentine's Day, love is not mind-reading. (via Austin Kleon)
3. I stumbled upon an April 2020 article in Nieman Storyboard about Derrick Goold, a baseball beat writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who writes one postcard a day, every day, to family and friends. What a wonderful idea this is.
4. The great Adam Neely on the so-called Nintendo-fication of jazz, the future of the jazz canon, and the video game music scene.
5. You know who's a great fucking rock band? Pup. I caught up with The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND, and guess what, it totally rips. Totally would have made my top albums of 2022 list had I heard it in time for list season.
6. Bailey Freeman, whose nom de plume is Foolish Baseball, got his main YouTube account hacked by Tesla dweebs. He has gotten it back, but has taken a hit in terms of subscriber count. If you're even in the ballpark of being as baseball fan (yes, I wrote that on purpose), I can't recommend this channel enough.
7. Secret Base's Kofie Yeboah on the sorry state of Mario sports games.
8. Some solid life advice from Pajiba's Kayleigh Donaldson: “Stop Romanticizing the Hays Code, You Ahistorical Dorks!”
9. My friend Andy has taken the Ten Things ball and run with it: here's the first edition of the So-So Ocho.
10. Yesterday, Montreal lit mag Yolk held one of their “pop-up poetry” events (you give me a prompt and ~15 minutes, I give you a custom poem), and I was lucky enough to be behind one of the typewriters, hammering out verse for passersby. Here's a small sample:
    

    I hope to hear your smile like sun rise on your face
    My heart's inside your pocket— in its resting place
    Felt from a distance conversation can erase

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. Happy Super Bowl Sunday to those who celebrate. Every championship season, I'm reminded of the modding communities that keep old sports games alive, updating the rosters and jerseys season after season. So shout out to the modding teams responsible for Tecmo Bowl 2023 and NFL Blitz 2023.
2. I am totally in the tank for whatever the Shutdown Fullcast crew does, and this includes Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson's newsletter, Channel 6. This week's free missive included a link to the 2008 Roofball World Championships. What is roofball? Why are all the participants in this supposed world championship seemingly all from Oregon? Fair questions both, but I invite you to just wade in the waters of adults putting a lot of time and effort into a backyard game (complete with score bugs and multiple camera angles, shades of classic Major League Wiffleball), all the while decked out in the finest fashions of the day. Says Hall in this very newsletter: “This is what the sports internet should have been, what it is at its best, and what it still could be.”
3. A new one for your rotation of morning puzzles: Cine2Nerdle, one part tile puzzle, one part Wordle.
4. My friend John Hex finally released his long-threatened defence of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie.
5. I didn't catch up on 2022 movies much this week, but I did finally watch a movie with one of the greatest tiles of all time: 1967's Nikkatsu noir A Colt Is My Passport. And it rips!
6. What is the smokiest movie? (via Todd Vaziri)
7. Catching up on some tunes: New York City, the new album by the Men, is a continuation of their Neil Young-via-Replacements-via-Sonics brand of guitar fury. It is also a colossal SEO nightmare.
8. RIP Burt Bacharach. Hiring he and Elvis Costello to play “I'll Never Fall in Love Again” in the second Austin Powers movie is one of the top 5 things Mike Myers has ever done.
9. Here's a weird one: I sunk over 1,000 words into Obsidian building a wiki for a grip of fictional characters that have been living in my head for years. I have no plans to make this into anything else, but it is nice to have this information somewhere that isn't my brain. I really like the idea of a wiki being not just a way of building a fictional universe, but telling a story by itself, as a kind of hypertext fiction.
10. Here's a peek at my current poetry project, a sci-fi/romance novella in verse:

    Nor physicist nor engineer nor botanist nor cook;
    I was just born here and got as comfortable as I could,
    
    a ghost in the fuselage, a small spectral heart
    in the outland folds of an infinite atlas,
    
    longing for the margins, the coffee table,
    the choppy waters at the edges of the page.
    
    The whir of the engines gets the best of me,
    and the brass tumblers in my brain slide into place
    
    and I sink into the plush sleep of those on solid ground

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. February came in like a lion, specifically a frost lion of myth that can freeze anything it lays its paws on. It got so cold that it didn't matter if the temperature I was reading was measured in Celsius or Fahrenheit. I wore thermals under denim like a sicko.
2. Writer Adam Sternbergh on reading recklessly. I'm trying to apply some of these rules to my own reading habits, with fitful success. (via Austin Kleon)
3. It's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction season! The longlist of nominees has dropped, and while I have some questions (chief among them: why is Joy Division and New Order considered one thing but Wham! isn't included with George Michael?), I am psyched about seeing Warren Zevon, Missy Elliot, and Willie Nelson under consideration. Is this the year that Kate Bush and Iron Maiden get in? And god dammit, I am too young for the White Stripes to be here!
4. This week's Movie Bowl was a gimmick bracket called Denz-Hell in a Denz-Cell, which focused on the career of Denzel Washington. Malcolm X defeated Training Day in the finals, and in many ways it is the correct final, but I spent the whole week thinking about the work Denzel had done with the late Tony Scott. In 2016, Jesse Hassenger of the AV Club wrote about those movies and how they fit in the context of both artists' respective oeuvres.
5. In the spirit of this Movie Bowl, I finally caught up with Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress, based on the Walter Mosely novel of the same name. I'm a sucker for anything hard-boiled, and Denzel, as you can imagine, is hyper-charismatic as Easy Rawlins, so I had a fantastic time with this one.
6. The great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Pahani was released from jail after a hunger strike. Never forger that, to date, this man has made four films “illegally,” one of which was smuggled out of Iran in a thumb drive hidden in a birthday cake so it could play the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
7. Patrick Willems released an 85-minute master class on film analysis that probably would have saved me a few thousand dollars in tuition fees.
8. More Criterion Closet fun, this time featuring triple Academy Award nominees Daniels.
9. This week's Shutdown Fullcast was a mailbag episode, and it was a total banger.
10. A poem: “Catch” by Langston Hughes:
    

    Big Boy came
    Carrying a mermaid
    On his shoulders
    And the mermaid
    Had her tail
    Curved
    Beneath his arm.
    
    Being a fisher boy,
    He’d found a fish
    To carry—
    Half fish,
    Half girl
    To marry.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. A weird one to start off: rediscovering the joy of eating eggs for breakfast. Shout out to eggs.
2. The nominations for the 95th Academy Awards dropped this week. Now, the Oscars may or may not matter, but the event itself is WrestleMania for cinephiles. How will the storylines resolve? Will the heel win over the beloved babyface? What swerves could there possibly be? My only real note here is that Cate Blanchett, as awesome as she was in Tár, already has two statuettes, so I'm all in on Michelle Yeoh and Team Everything Everywhere All at Once having a big night.
3. Sometimes you shitpost yourself into a hypothetical. Here's my all-time NHL All-Germany team: Draisaitl (will go down in history as the greatest German hockey player of all time, full stop; they're going to put his face on stamps one day), Sturm (Marco, to be clear; no shade to Nico, he can cry into his Stanley Cup ring about it if he likes), Hecht, Ehrhoff (just two solid dudes), Krupp (Avs legend, real heads know), Kölzig (now, this is a guy, Oli the Goalie, come on!).
4. Earworm of the week goes to this 11-year-old cover of “Nyan Cat” done in the style of prog-rock enfants terribles Emerson, Lake & Palmer, concocted by one Kobi LaCroix. It's shockingly good.
5. Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs runs down his pedal board. This is my version of ASMR.
6. Every now and again, the back catalogue of an artist I like will just appear unannounced on Spotify. This time around, the work of Tokyo math-funk weirdos Zazen Boys has arrived on the platform. Zazen Boys 4 is my suggested entry point (it features “Weekend,” whose immortal music video is how I found out about this band circa my time on Tumblr), but “Riff Man” from Zazen Boys III might be my favourite of their songs.
7. New music alert: the new White Reaper album Asking for a Ride kicks ass, all punk fury, glammy power pop, and Destroyer worship.
8. An intersection of relevant interests: John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats in the Criterion Closet.
9. 2022 catch-up: Charlotte Wells's moving, achingly 90s drama Aftersun and Todd Field's mesmerizing, patient character study Tár.
10. “There are no boring people in this world” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk (via Eileen Chengyin Chow):
    

    There are no boring people in this world.
    Each fate is like the history of a planet.
    And no two planets are alike at all.
    Each is distinct – you simply can’t compare it.
    
    If someone lived without attracting notice
    and made a friend of their obscurity –
    then their uniqueness was precisely this.
    Their very plainness made them interesting.
    
    Each person has a world that’s all their own.
    Each of those worlds must have its finest moment
    and each must have its hour of bitter torment –
    and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown.
    
    When people die, they do not die alone.
    They die along with their first kiss, first combat.
    They take away their first day in the snow …
    All gone, all gone – there’s just no way to stop it.
    
    There may be much that’s fated to remain,
    but something – something leaves us all the same.
    The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish –
    it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. Yesterday was me and Steph's 14th anniversary! I don't think she reads the blog, but in case she sees this particular post: I love you so much.
2. So the 14th anniversary is the ivory anniversary, and what contains ivory? That's right: teeth. And what has teeth? Why, rats, of course! To celebrate our anniversary, Steph and I welcomed two tiny dudes into our home: Trumpet and Trombone.
3. It was a Movie Bowl week! In the 1974 edition of the contest, Young Frankenstein beat out The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the championship belt and a spot in the Tournament of Champions. Over in the Sickos Bracket, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla reigned supreme.
4. Thanks to a combination of mild temperatures, wet snow, and active wind, I got yetified.
5. Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence threw four touchdowns and four interceptions in his team's miraculous 31-30 comeback win over the Los Angeles Chargers in the Wild Card Round of the NFL playoff. No QB in history has thrown that many picks while throwing that many touchdowns and won. It's an absurd stat line we will never see the likes of again. It makes me so happy.
6. I was so happy with this two-pack of USB squid cables that I bought two more.
7. The new Blank Check miniseries on the films of Danny Boyle started off with a corker of an episode on Shallow Grave.
8. Bailey Freeman, aka Foolish Baseball, asks the hardest-hitting question in sports media: does Pittsburgh Pirates legend Andrew McCutchen play better in the proximity of furries?
9. The great Louie Zong stays winning, extending his K.K. Slider-fied cover banger streak to four: here's his Animal Crossing-style covers of “Ain't No Sunshine” by Bill Withers and “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown.
10. An excerpt of Steph's favourite poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot:
    

    Let us go then, you and I,
    When the evening is spread out against the sky
    Like a patient etherized upon a table;
    Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
    The muttering retreats
    Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
    And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
    Streets that follow like a tedious argument
    Of insidious intent
    To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
    Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
    Let us go and make our visit.
    
    In the room the women come and go
    Talking of Michelangelo.
    
    The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
    The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
    Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
    Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
    Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
    Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
    And seeing that it was a soft October night,
    Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. We had a big snow this week from the West. I went for a walk one night during the worst of it. There's romance to snowfall illuminated by the floodlights of a baseball diamond.
2. I finished a notebook, this pocket-sized purple deal I had for a while, home to grocery lists, lines for repotting in poems, and other assorted scribblings. So to the stationary drawer I went, where notebooks old and new are patiently waiting their turn to be filled out. I took out a Field Notes Dime Novel notebook I had started in 2018 and, for some reason, abandoned. Turns out, reading notebooks and journals is the cheapest form of time travel.
3. I think I'm going to try and become a cursive sicko. One evening last week, I did the teenage-girl thing of trying out new signatures, looping my D differently, completely changing the shape of the G. We'll see if this sticks.
4. The great Louie Zong released a two-fer of Animal Crossing-fied covers, one of “Rich Girl” by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and one of “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest.
5. Steph got the Tachsen Astrology book from their Library of Esoterica (we also own Tarot), and now I'm just out here coveting Taschen books about graphic design and movies. Hell, I'll even take a look at those books about copy writing and restaurant menu design.
6. I'm trying to engage in what Austin Kleon calls promiscuous reading. I told a friend recently that I wanted to get back into capital-F fiction but have failed spectacularly in that respect. On my bedside table, so to speak, are Bluets by Maggie Nelson (prose poetry), Equipment for Living by Michael Robbins (essays; file under “Klostermania”), and How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark (I will ready any “how to” book on writing).
7. The 2022 catch-up train keeps rolling on: Henry Selick's Wendell & Wild (good but fractured) and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (dazzling and devastating).
8. This week on PlutoTV: 48 Hrs., a true-blue cable classic.
9. RIP Charles Simic. “A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.”
10. A poem, via poem.exe:
    

    we humans
    night after night
    blinking back tears

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. Today is my cat Ruby's fifth adoptaversary! Over the 2017–18 winter holidays, we were half-looking at Kijiji for people looking to re-home their pets, and we stumbled upon someone nearby giving away their adorable brown long-haired tabby cat. So on a cold January day, I went for a walk with a pet carrier and brought my little girl home.
2. I'm not a big resolution guy (see the last edition of Ten Things), but I do want to get better at writing capsule reviews on my Letterboxd.
3. One of my favourite Nintendo 3DS games is Pocket Card Jockey, a pyramid solitaire/horse racing game from the studio behind the Pokémon games. After literal years of crowing for a port or a remaster, Tim Apple has granted my wish: Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! drops January 20th, and might just be the killer app that gets me to subscribe to Apple Arcade.
4. What do the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera, synthetic tracheae, and the AT-727 Sound Burger all have in common? They are all featured in the Museum of Failure. (via Recomendo)
5. Two new additions to my bookshelf: The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols and the collected sonnets of William Shakespeare.
6. Every now and again I'll fall into the wonderful, questionably-accurate, likely-maintained-by-people-half-my-age Aesthetics Wiki and try to figure out what my bag is. Long story short, I may have been stealing some Dark Academia valour with my whole “goth professor” shtick.
7. NHL logos, Poké-fied.
8. I made some fried rice last week and I swear I saw the face of God.
9. 2022 cinematic catch-up, continued: the eye-popping, heart-wrenching visual feast that is Three Thousand Years of Longing, the Fincher-fied cape shit of The Batman, and what is likely to be 2022's Short Good Secret all-star, Leonor Will Never Die.
10. “After the Fire” by Ada Limón (via Carith)

    You ever think you could cry so hard
    that there’d be nothing left in you, like
    how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
    until every part of it is run through with
    wind? I live in the low parts now, most
    days a little hazy with fever and waiting
    for the water to stop shivering out of the
    body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
    is so bright and determined like a flame,
    like something almost worth living for.

#tenthings