New England

At the height of my new century depression, I got involved in an online game called Dylan Pool, where you’d bet what songs Bob Dylan was going to sing on tour. All the players had handles like “The_Mystery_Tramp” and “Napoleon_in_rags66.” I did badly because I’d always bet on outliers: “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread,” “Death is Not the End.” But besides work and drinking and Dylan Pool, there wasn’t much else to do. I was sharing a house in the middle of nowhere with a woman more depressed than me. By winter, she was just done with going into town and would send me out in the snow to buy red wine at the general store where they posted the names of customers who’d bounced checks behind the counter and the clerk had this weird growth on his arm. We’d sit in the dark to save money, drinking wine from jelly jars, stuffing newspapers and sticks in the pot belly stove to keep warm. We were good at watching the fire, watching the snow pile up, wondering what it’d been like if Mark David Chapman had shot Paul instead. How the world might look different. She wished it was ten years ago when she could still control men. I tried to tell her about Christ, Who I had some dim understanding of at the time. But my words died amid the sparks of our pathetic fire and I didn’t really believe anyone was coming to set us free from the cold and dark anyway. Not yet.