Sled

HE STUDIES HIS LESSONS BECAUSE HE IS TOLD HE MUST, AND PLAYS HARD BECAUSE HE ENJOYS IT.

HE FEELS NO SPECIAL ATTRACTION TOWARD ANY OF HIS SCHOOLMATES UNTIL ONE WINTER DAY THIS SAME BLUE-EYED GIRL ASKS HIM FOR A PLACE ON HIS SLED.

he shares it with her as a well-behaved boy should and so begins the first faint bond of feeling that like a tiny rill on the hillside slowly gathers power until at last a mighty river it sweeps all other feelings before it how slowly that rippling rill of feeling grew during the next few years need not be specified like other boys of his age he feels at times ashamed of caring whether she notices him or not and again the incipient pangs of jealousy because she notices other boys in a year he begins to bring her flag-root in summer or big apples in winter and although her way home is different from his he occasionally feels called upon to accompany her heedless of the fact that it costs him an extra half mile and fault-finding at being late home he passes unharmed through the terrors of speaking pieces on examination day and when st valentine's day comes he conquers the momentous task of indicting a verse where bliss rhymes with kiss upon one of those missives which he has purchased for five cents at the village store and timidly leaves it where this same girl will find it in her desk at school on two occasions during the last summer at the district school he quite a big boy now joins the older boys and girls under a large apple tree that grows near the schoolhouse and plays a silly game the principal feature of which consists in his having to choose some girl to kiss as he knows very well whom he prefers and has the courage to kiss her when his turn comes

Oh, I have had no luck lately.

WITH THE CROWNING GLORY OF HER SUNNY HAIR, A SWEET AND SYMPATHETIC MOUTH, MODEST AND UNASSUMING WAYS, TENDER HEART AND AFFECTIONATE MANNER, SHE WAS AN UNUSUALLY ATTRACTIVE GIRL.

of her feelings toward the boy little need be said and since he has now reached eighteen and a moustache he deserves and shall have an introduction by his name of mr charles manson he was tall had honest brown eyes an earnest manner was unsophisticated and believed all the world like himself good and true HE WAS OF CHEERFUL TEMPER AND GENEROUS DISPOSITION, HATED SHAMS AND SMALL CONCEITS, AND, NEXT TO LIDDY, LOVED THE FIELDS, THE WOODS, AND THE BROOKS THAT HAD BEEN HIS COMPANION SINCE BOYHOOD.

SHE HAD KNOWN HIM WHEN, AT THE DISTRICT SCHOOL, HE IGNORED GIRLS, AND LATER, AS HE BEGAN TO BRING HER FLAG ROOT IN SUMMER, OR DRAW HER ON HIS SLED IN WINTER, SHE HAD TAKEN MORE NOTICE OF HIM, WHEN HE LEFT THE LITTLE BROWN SCHOOLHOUSE FOR GOOD SHE HAD GIVEN HIM A LOCK OF HAIR, THOUGH FOR WHAT REASON SHE COULD HARDLY TELL.

AND WHEN HE WALKED HOME WITH HER FROM HIS FIRST PARTY SHE FELT STARTLED A LITTLE AT HIS BOLDNESS IN KISSING HER.

And the sleds have really been annoying me recently.

So I think I would go with, oh God, I'm just going to say sled pull.

pull? Here's me saying I don't like

sleds.

So I think it's more positional than the actual erg itself.

But we see some interesting stuff around Sled to sled to burpees will tell you roughly where people are

at.

Okay.

was too much.

And I will say Sleigh

Queen.

That one felt like, but the ones like bracelets, I'm like, okay, if I do this one enough, I'm eventually going to get it.

The latter, strangely enough, being men whose own exploits had not been the most successful in polar exploration.

The hero of the Alert Sledge journey admitted the feasibility of the drift theory, but shook his head at the idea of any ship withstanding the winter pressure of the great ice packs in the far north.

A ship once caught and frozen in became part of the ice itself, and when the pressure crushed masses a hundred feet thick into minute fragments and powder, what chance would a vessel held in such a mass have of escaping? But Nansen was not to be discouraged.

He had the true insight of genius, that insight which gave him the confidence in his own idea and which needed something more than verbal reasons to overthrow it.

So now we come to the conversation that, in a way, changed the direction of this entire project.

The Thursday night at Sled Island, I went to the Ship and Anchor to see K-Riz and the family.

Opening the show was an artist from Edmonton named Arlo Maverick.

I'd never heard of him before.

And that's one of the great things about Sled Island.

You can walk into a venue because you want to see one particular artist and walk out having discovered someone completely new.

That's exactly what happened with Arlo.

And that's where the Sonic Collective, the AB Scene, comes in.

What would you say to those people?

Well, if somebody wants to squint and make a distinction between person and being, the easy thing is to subject them to the SLED test first, and first ask the four degrees of difference between the unborn person, unborn human, and the person who is born, a size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency.

And you just walk through each of those one at a time and say, did my dignity and worth change because of how big or tall I am you know Gary Coleman was much smaller than Shaq or level of development they are smaller for sure but so is my my six-year-old he's not nearly developed he's prepubescent and he's going to continue to develop you know even young men here in their 20s they're what is it the the uh the the frontal cerebral cortex, whatever, is underdeveloped.

They say this is why so many Medal of Honor winners are young men, because they don't have that fear of death that older men do.

Her degree of dependency is also elevated and she's much older.

Right.

So we need to be able to affirm and subject them to the SLED test.

And it's a simple thing that we can equip the people, the person, the pew with.

Citizen Kane fucking holds up.

And I think sometimes the problem... is that because it's such an old and such an iconic film, Citizen Kane just sometimes gets boiled down to, oh, Rosebuds the Sled.

Kind of like Soylent Green on Planet of the Apes, where, like, the big kind of final thing is like almost a punchline.

Like, forget the fact that the rest of Planet of the Apes is a fantastic film in its own right.