Announcement: Menick quits debate

There comes a time in your life when you know you have reached a turning point. I now know that I have reached such a point.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday discussing the Big Bronx tournament with Jon Cruz. Yes, it’s July, and the tournament is October, but he’s running a little late with his worrying this year—what can I say? Anyhow, we worked out this and that through a combination of email and tweet and IM and smoke signal, and, I thought, that was the end of it.

How wrong I was!

I am not making up any of the following. I’ll swear it on my copy of any Dead White Philosopher you want to name.

Last night I dreamed that, for reasons that are unclear, the Big Bronx tournament had to be relocated from the high school to my house. People began arriving with all their luggage days in advance, all of them teenagers. They would come up to me as they were moving in and say, “Remember me?” and I’d say yes, but it wasn’t true. Their faces, sort of, but that was the extent of it, except for a couple of known felons who everybody knew inside and outside of the activity. Being teenagers, they were an incredibly hungry group, and we ran out of food long before round one even started. There were no bathrooms in the house, or maybe the bathrooms were just steadily occupied by someone who wouldn’t come out, but there was no question that there were plumbing issues that everyone was complaining about. One cheeky young man who insisted I knew who he was (I think I dropped him at TOC a couple of times) suggested that he should be allowed free access to the liquor cabinet, in that he was quite the connoisseur of wines. Meanwhile, I was trying to get round one started, but I didn’t have the data, and, of course, O’C, who did have it, was nowhere to be found. I also couldn’t find my printer, but since I didn’t have any data to print, this didn’t seem too much of a problem.

I woke up. The alarm had not gone off yet, and it was pouring rain outside, and I drifted back to sleep, the way one will. O’C turned up and I was trying to convince him that next year the tournament should be in D.C. or Maine or Wyoming but he kept insisting that having it at my house was the best Big Bronx ever.

I woke up again, and wrote this entry on my blog. If this isn’t a subconscious warning that it is time for me to find a new pastime, I don’t know what is.