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Make a Game of Life

In North Loup, Nebraska, where I spent my boyhood summers with my grandfather, the television pulled one signal out of the sky, channel 10/11, and when the picture dissolved into snow the day still had eight hours left in it. A boy in a town like that learns the oldest technology on earth. Boredom is a raw material. A long afternoon wants shape, and shape comes from rules: the stick is a bat because we agree it is, the crack in the walk is a foul line because we say so, the score matters because we decide it matters. Nobody sold us that afternoon. We manufactured it ourselves, on the spot, out of dust and agreement, and the dust became the best part of the summer.

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Leave Behind Amber, Not Accolades

As we age into society, there are certain human truths we not only begin to learn, but then start to live — and it is in moments like those, like the one we’re sharing now in the rare “long form” live read on the internet — that I want to urge you to abandon the trophies and the tricks and the cunning surrounding our lives and to instead leave behind something that matters, footfalls suspended in amber, creating your own fossil record.

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Bingo!

by Tammy Tillotson

In 1930, Professor Carl Leffler developed a system of 6,000 bingo cards with non-repeating number groups. He later went insane. There are 1,474,200 unique Bingo cards possible, and only a handful of unique things to do for fun in a small town.

Bingo Hall of Fame
Since the last time someone’s unique idea resulted in an array of blue flashing lights, I recently decided that Bingo presented an argument of at least 1,474,197 different possibilities that might prove just as interesting as slow dancing in the median of Hwy 58 at midnight.

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