Ever get the sense that your work is multiplying? Like every time you wash a dish, you turn around and there’s another one you didn’t see and oh, there’s the dog with something disgusting in his mouth? Or every time you try to find a reference for some basic statement about the history of cinema, a whole stack of scholarship you’ve never even seen just explodes in your face and your footnotes and everywhere? And you’re like, “Drop it, Romeo, no, outside, ick, why,” or “Goddamnit André Gaudreault, you and your culture broth,” or maybe “Help, chocolate,” or something like that? I think this is a pretty universal experience, no?

What if I told you it’s not your fault? What if there really were little gremlins or brownies or otherwise mischievous creatures, or André Gaudreault, for that matter, hiding out and just waiting for their chance to screw everything up yet again?

Well, then, that is the basic idea behind this story, up today in Apex Magazine: “Mag, the Habitat and We.”

ETA: There is also a podcast of this story! Check out Mahvesh Murad’s Apex podcast here.

Please enjoy, or at least find a moment’s respite.

Speaking of respites, here is a picture of me on a snowshoe hike near a lovely lonesome northern lake. I hope all of you had an equally pleasant beginning to 2017.

On Tord Lake, though it looks like any number of the zillion lakes up in northern Minnesota. Feeling weirdly light and free. Photo by Mr. Jeffrey Mitchell.

(apologies to André Gaudreault, whom I have never met, and who is a fine scholar and writer of important things.)