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I had a dream about an orange felt puppet with big reading glasses and a stupid-looking patchy mustache. He was called Chaco, and he was the star of a Youtube series about forgotten pop culture. He exhumed everything from ‘80s blockbusters that never spawned a franchise to ‘00s rap singles that never got a follow-up, subjecting them all to his nihilistic sense of humor. Imagine The Nostalgia Critic crossed with Oscar the Grouch.

The throughline of it all was that Chaco was also a failure, taking out his frustration that everyone had forgotten the short-lived TV show he once starred in. As his own story progressed, he began to realize that being mired in the past was ruining his present. He faced his demons, purged his resentment, and finally ended the series so he could do something different with his life.

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The second-worst thing any of my English teachers ever did was in 7th grade. For context, this teacher expected us to use quotes, with cited page numbers, on closed-book tests. This isn’t the second-worst thing yet! She expected us to memorize passages from the books we read, along with the page numbers for each passage, and copy them onto the test to support our arguments. And we had only a general idea of what the questions might be, so if the quotes you memorized weren’t relevant to the questions, too bad.

On the test for The Call of the Wild, she asked “Who is ultimately responsible for Spitz’s death?” I cited a quote to argue that the concept of one dog being “responsible” for another dog’s death doesn’t make sense within the moral framework of The Call of the Wild. She marked that wrong. The correct answer was that Buck killed Spitz, so Buck was ultimately responsible for Spitz’s death.

(I guess we were supposed to have Spitz’s death scene memorized and quote that? The more I think about this as an adult, the less sense any of it makes.)

Well, I finally wrote something furry

It’s called The All-Spirit, and it’s a transformation fable. Don’t worry; it’s SFW. I’m quite proud of what I did with it.