THE WINE DARK SEA!!

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

What if Shane gets outed super early in his career. Like rookie season or second season. Maybe he misses some important event because he's with Ilya and oversleeps and when he's confronted it all comes out. Something like that. Importantly, Ilya isn't outed but he's involved enough that he is or could feel at least a little bit responsible.

So Shane is outed and forced off his team and out of hockey in general. He's young and stupid and angry with himself and with Ilya so he ends things with Ilya completely. He's kinda mean about it, does it over the phone and furious.

Shane tries to move on with his life. He gets a normal job, meets normal people, dates normal men. But it's always weird and uncomfortable. If Shane washed out of hockey for any of the normal reasons almost no one would remember years later but people remember the first out gay hockey player and what happened after he was outed. I don't really have a strong idea of what Shane does for this period. Maybe he does real estate full time. Maybe he becomes a personal trainer. Maybe the flips houses. What matters is that after enough time, this feels like his real life, and hockey feels like something he thought he was gonna do as a kid.

He would say he doesn't think about Ilya anymore, because why would he think about the guy he exchanged blowjobs with one time at 18, but of course he thinks about Ilya. He doesn't watch hockey, but it's in the air enough that he sees Ilya on TV. And even if he didn't he googles Ilya sometimes at night and binge watches all his interviews and clips since the last time he googled him. Shane tried really hard to hate Ilya after everything and he got pretty close for a few years. He would imagine going back to when he was outed and dragging Ilya with him, or his secret comfort, the fantasy of Ilya coming out in solidarity, the two of them together against the world, in love.

How does this play out? When do they see each other again? Maybe Shane makes a public statement on the ten year anniversary of his outing that triggers Ilya to reach out. Maybe he writes his memoirs. Maybe he wins some award and Ilya is at the ceremony for whatever reason.

I like the idea though that an out gay kid is drafted into the mlh and suddenly Shane is relevant again in a way he hasn't been for years. Maybe he's drafted very high by Boston, where Ilya is still captain.

(Ilya has of course spent the last decade constructing a mental party palace out of his guilt and denial and regrets and hedonism and forgetting and remembering. He thinks about Shane every day. He never thinks about Shane. Was Shane even real or just some strange dream he had? He only thinks about Shane when he's jerking off. He only thinks about Shane when he fucks something else up.

And now he has this kid he's responsible for. He's nothing like Shane. He's swedish or something and so blond he doesn't have eyebrows and he's a strange combination of so straightforward he's almost rude and incredibly cocky. Ilya likes him and Ilya can't stand to be around him. And then they're comparing him to Shane and all these articles are coming out about how hockey failed Shane Hollander and all Ilya can see is that Ilya failed shane Hollander. So he's way too supportive of his new rookie. Borderline inappropriately friendly. It's okay because it's hockey, but Ilya does invite the rookie to all the team veterans get togethers and gives him a really intense whispered pep talk about how Ilya will murder anyone who gives him trouble. Opponent teammate staff person on the street it doesn't matter just let him know who.

It builds up in Ilya and he feels like he's going crazy and at the year end party he ends up drunkenly telling the rookie everything that happened with Shane. The rookie is drunk too and doesn't really speak enough English for this conversation but he gets the main idea. Enough to realize that his captain is coming out to him and has some kind of fucked up lost love situation going on. He flags down Marly for back up but by this point Ilya is incoherent.)

Shane ends up agreeing to one single interview with a gay culture and current events news source. It's the first time he's ever spoken publicly about what happened and his first interview since he was a professional hockey player. He spends a lot of time thinking about what he wants to say, but eventually he thinks, fuck it all, and gives a really biting breakdown of homophobia in hockey and pro sports. He names names. He comes with citations for specific things that were said about him. He comes with his bitchiest face on like armor, but the interviewer is a middle aged gay man with blue sparkly nail polish and Shane has grown up and learned to trust this type of gay to have his back and at the end the guy asks if he can hug him and Shane surprises himself with how much he wants that and how much better he feels after.

The guy asked if Shane knew any other professional athletes who were closeted and Shane took a single shaky breath before answering, just one, and he's still in it. The interview is on video and that question and answer goes viral because of how Shane looks. He cuts his eyes to the side, shuts them, inhales, and flutters his eyes open. Just one. Everyone is asking who was Shane's just one until Shane has to make a statement that people shouldn't take his interview about how awful it was to be outed as a pro hockey player as an invitation to out another pro hockey player.

now I know that there's no way for me to respond to this without a bunch of fans of the modern adaptations ruining my inbox for the next week, but there's no evidence of Waluigi - or indeed Luigi - in any of the contemporary versions of the Mario-Wario sagas. The name "Wario" itself is a later invention, held to be a pun on warui that likely emerged after the adoption of Japanese scripts in the Koopa States.

The conflict between Mario and his "boyhood rival" was one over political influence on his home island and Mario's long absences - in particular his trip to Sarasaland. While later Sarasan sources would heavily reference Mario's brother, he is absent from both the preceding narrative and the unrest in Mario's homeland. The historical consensus is that the Sarasaland journey was one of Mario's earliest wanderings, with his brother attempting to manage affairs in his absence and proving unfit. The invention of a separate "Wario" character and its development into an explicit coup d'etat were later poetic creations, as is distancing of the "Wario" figure from the later depictions of Mario's brother as the more cowardly and reserved "Luigi".

(As an aside: "Mario Land" is a mistranslation. The original Mushroomer and Sarasan chronicles are better translated as "the land of Mario", without connotations of ownership. The modern scholastic consensus is that it refers to Yoshi's Island, where Mario and his brother spent their youth and later established a small manor, not, as commonly depicted, a "Mario Castle". The emphasis on Mario as king of "Mario Land" was a mostly successful political maneuver by the Yoshis to retain coequal status with the Mushroom Kingdom heartlands in the face of 18th-century expansionist pan-Mushroomism.)

the lighting??? the fog?? the atmosphere???