https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FLGiIqJVKWYr0nhu_IEwd4X3hFtGC-DOU4VmtTmfNWU/edit?usp=sharing.
https://imgur.com/a/U8mRk6R
In this table there are win total predictions for each NBA team from 7 different sources that were available in the preseason. The column for predicted wins is an average of rankings from ESPN, Bleacher Report Experts, Bleacher Report Odds, Basketball Reference, OddShark, 538 and Kevin Pelton’s RPM Predictions. The win total column is adjusted for teams WL record over an 82 game pace with the same data available for win percentage.
Teams that exceeded expectations the most.

• Toronto Raptors, were expected to play at a 45 win pace but played at a 60 win pace. +15.
  
• OKC Thunder, were expected to play at a 37 win pace but played at a 50 win pace. +13.
  
• Memphis Grizzlies were expected to play at a 28 win pace but played at a 38 win pace. +10.
  

Teams that failed to meet exceeded expectations the most.

• Golden State Warriors, were expected to play at a 49 win pace but played at a 19 win pace. -30.
  
• Minnesota Timberwolves, were expected to play at a 38 win pace but played at a 24 win pace. -14.
  
• Detroit Pistons, were expected to play at a 38 win pace but played at a 25 win pace. -13.
  

One-armed men have been the demise of many figures throughout history— Dr. Richard Kimble, anyone who faced Angels Pitcher, Jim Abbott in the 90’s, and unfortunately, yours truly.
This story takes place about 7 years ago inside a Gold’s Gym. I was planning on working out my arms, but decided to stop inside the basketball court first to shoot around. Nothing too intense, just a little warm-up to get the blood flowing.
Upon entering the gym, I noticed one other baller on the court— an overweight Cuban fella, who looked sort of like Fat Joe. I never caught his name and he wasn’t quite as big as Fat Joe, so we’ll just refer to him as Stocky Joe. Stocky Joe was hoisting up 3’s on the far basket. I took the near basket and began working on my mid-range game.
A few minutes later, the door flung open and in walked the man who would soon end my recreational basketball career, and convert me into a guy who uses ellipticals. He was a tall skinny guy with a medium build, bald head, one arm, and handlebar mustache. His name was Daryl. What Daryl lacked in appendages, he made up for in swag. This guy must have been sponsored by Under Armour. He had all the gear. I’m talking, shoes, tank top, headband, leg sleeves, wristbands, etc. He even wore a wristband on his chicken wing arm, which I thought was strange. But I just figured they came in two packs, and he didn’t want to waste one.
Daryl dropped his Under Armour duffel bag on the ground, and shouted in a loud booming voice, “Ya’ll wanna play bucket?”
Bucket, AKA, 21 is a classic playground basketball game. It’s perfect for when you have an odd number of players, as it’s essentially, one on one on one, etc. The objective of the game is to be the first to score 21 points. It’s also known as “Tips” to some people. Although in “Tips” you can tip in a missed shot and subsequently take the shooter’s points back to zero, while gaining two points yourself. But all that does is encourage cherry-picking. Also, only scrubs play Tips. We all agreed to play a man’s game. First to 21 wins, no tips, and you’ve got to take the ball back on every possession.
“I’ll break,” shouted Daryl, before stepping back and effortlessly sinking a thirty-foot 3-pointer.
By the way, this was the very first shot he took. He didn’t warm up at all. He literally entered the gym and immediately challenged every person on the court. Stocky Joe and I exchanged nervous glances. Neither one of us seemed prepared for this level of competition. Who was this guy? Why’s he so confident? What happened to his other arm?
That last question may seem inappropriate, but don’t act like you’ve never wondered the same thing when interacting with a person with a physical deformity Were they born that way? Did they get attacked by a shark? Was it some kind of a freak vending machine accident, and he stuck his arm up there because it wouldn’t dispense his Twix? All those questions would soon take a backseat to the more important question? Who taught this man how to play?
Daryl started the game from the top of the key, and checked me the ball. I checked it back and got in the defensive stance. He then jab-stepped to the left and dribbled once to the right, and then just disappeared. I literally heard the ball swish through the net while still facing the opposite direction. “What the fuck!” I muttered under my breath. “Is this guy The Flash? How’s he so fast?”
On his second possession. He did the same thing. I stayed with him for about half a second before watching him blow by me for an uncontested shot, which he decided would be a completely unnecessary 360 reverse layup.
After that, he hit me with a stutter step which almost caused me to fall down. He then streaked across the paint and hit a floater
Next, almost out of boredom, he heaved up a thirty-foot fade-away which bounced off the back of the rim. I snagged the rebound and took it to the top of the key. I could tell Daryl was toying with us. He thought we were both bums, and while I couldn’t speak for Stocky Joe, I was determined to prove him wrong. Now’s my time to shine, I thought to myself, eager to display my athleticism.
For my first possession, I dribbled down to the right block, stopped on a dime, and pivoted hard to the left. Then I quickly pivoted back to the right and faked a hook shot.
Now, this usually gets the defender to go airborne. Not always, but usually.
Once this happens, I tuck the ball back towards my body, wait for the defender to soar past me, and shoot the easy, uncontested layup. This was a move I had been using since junior high. I have perfected it over the years and it worked like a charm almost every time. It wasn’t something I could do every play, but once or twice a game, I could usually pull it off with a high success rate. Once again, I say usually. Unfortunately for me, this wasn’t one of those times. Daryl must have had the scouting report on me because he didn’t jump on the pump fake. He didn’t even flinch.
This put me in a precarious position. I now had my back turned to the basket and had already picked up my dribble. In a game situation, I’d simply pass the ball back out to the wing, but this was different. I had to try to hoist up a shot somehow. I had no other option. So, that’s what I did. I jumped backwards while simultaneously turning to shoot. Much to my dismay, once I turned I was making direct eye contact with Daryl’s crotch. He had also jumped, and he jumped much higher than me.
Now I’ve had my shot blocked before but this was different. This wasn’t so much a block as it was a spike. Daryl slammed the ball into the floor so ferociously, I thought the hardwood was going to open up and create a black hole. My thought process was them temporarily delayed while I crashed to the ground. I’m pretty sure my head slammed on the floor, but the only pain I could feel was to my pride. It had been broken. What I experienced that day was likely the most embarrassing scenario in all of sports. This was like getting tackled by the punter, or giving up a home run to the opposing teams batboy.
I contemplated faking an injury so I could get the hell out of there, but Daryl was quick to lend me a hand and help me up. Of course he exhibits good sportsmanship, I thought to myself. Is this guy determined to be better than me at everything!
As I sprung back up to my feet, my eyes caught Stocky Joe smirking at me with condescension. It was as if he was trying to say “Really, Bruh” with his eyes.
I shrugged and shook it off. It was tough though. Because fuck that guy! It wasn’t like he provided me with any help defense earlier.
The rest of the game went as you’ve likely already predicted. With Daryl dominating every step of the way. He scored on me at will. The final score was 21 to 3 to 0. I put up the goose egg. Again, I scored no points at all. Zero. Even that lazy asshole, Stocky Joe managed to sink a lucky shot at one point.
“Ya’ll wanna run again!” Daryl shouted out.
Stocky Joe passed on the opportunity to continue standing there, not playing defense, and I politely declined. I decided at that moment that I was done with basketball, not only for the day, but for the rest of my life. Unless I wind up with Alzheimer’s later on and forget about that humiliating beat down I had just endured.
On the drive home that day, I considered several new hobbies to replace basketball. Hobbies that don’t require athleticism, as it was clear my best days were behind me. Bowling, darts, scrap-booking... maybe I could get into bird-watching, I thought to myself.
Sometimes, when I look back on the events that transpired that day, I kick myself for not accepting Daryl’s offer for a rematch. Did I give up too easily? Was there a chance I could’ve redeemed myself? Why didn’t I try to force him to his weak side? He had no left hand.
Ultimately, I feel like I made the correct call. I was clearly outmatched, and leaving when I did certainly spared me additional embarrassment. Maybe one day in the future, I’ll get my confidence back and enter a pickup game, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just saw a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird out my window, and I need to log it in my journal.

Logline: A doctor's office assistant overhears the diagnosis of an all-star basketball player, leading to a big bet on an important basketball game.
___________
Sabrina Daniels serves as an office assistant for Dr. Gordon. Dr. Gordon is a world-renowned heart surgeon who is the "go-to" cardiologist for all the celebrities in the Los Angeles area. A tall man arrives at the office, he looks familiar, but Sabrina doesn't know where from.
"Can I help you, sir?" Sabrina asked.
"Hey, Xavier Hibbert, to see Dr. Gordon," said the man. Sabrina looks at her chart, "Xavier Hibbert, 4:30 p.m."
"You're all set, sir, please have a seat, and they'll call you when they're ready," Sabrina says. The large man has a seat in the waiting room chairs that are too small for him, Sabrina tries her best not to laugh. Then, Sabrina remembers where she knows him from; he happens to be the starting power forward for the UCLA men's basketball team. He's the star of the team, the top scorer, the leading rebounder, and an All American. The reason she knows, is that he's on every billboard in town, and her boyfriend happens to be a big UCLA Bruins fan, he points out the billboards every time they drive by one.
All she wanted to do was go home and sleep that night. But when she got home, her boyfriend, Bob, had a surprise party waiting for her. Saturday was her birthday, so he knew that if he did it on Saturday, she'd be suspicious, so he decided to surprise her three days before her birthday, and it worked.
Bob was the best relationship Sabrina had ever had in her life; he was caring, honest, and an attentive boyfriend. They didn't have a lot of money; in fact, they were in serious debt because of college loans, mortgages, and living beyond their means; but Sabrina and Bob were happy, and that made up for being poor.
The surprise party lasted late into the night. By midnight, there were just four people left, Sabrina, Bob, his friend Brian, and the girl Brian had been dating for two weeks, Rose. Sabrina's a little tipsy, trying to keep the conversation light, she describes the mystery patient that came into the office.
"This guy walks in, he had to be like seven feet tall, he didn't even fit in the waiting room chairs. Well anyway, it turns out it's the guy on the billboards, the guy from the UCLA basketball team, what was his name, Xavier..." Sabrina continues until she's interrupted by Brian.
"Hibbert, Xavier Hibbert, you had Xavier Hibbert in your office this afternoon?" Brian interjects.
"Yeah, that was his name Xavier Hibbert," Sabrina says. Brian looks at Bob, they're thinking the same thing. The season just started; what's this guy doing in a cardiologist's office?
"Do you know what his condition is?" Brian asks.
"Haven't you ever heard of patient confidentiality," Rose says.
"Nah, that's for doctors only," Brian says.
"Actually, I did overhear the doctors say something; they said that it was a shame that his condition would prevent him from playing this season," Sabrina said.
"Oh my God, do you guys realize what you have on your hands here, UCLA is the number one team in the country right now, and Xavier Hibbert is the number one player on that team, he might be the number one draft pick next year," Brian says as he looks at his phone.
"What are you thinking, go down to the casino and place a bet on UCLA to lose?" Bob asks. Brian points to his phone,
"I knew it, they're playing the number three team in the country, Duke, this weekend," Brian says.
"What if she misheard?" Bob says.
"I heard, what I heard, Xavier Hibbert is not going to play basketball this season," Sabrina reiterates.
"Just the fact that he was in a cardiologist's office tells me something's wrong," Brian says.
"I'm in, how much we talkin here?" Sabrina says.
"Even if we bet everything we have, that's like seven grand," Bob says.
"It's too bad we couldn't get more money, make it count," Sabrina says.
"Since we have this inside information, why don't we go for broke, I know a guy who can get us $100,000 each, by tomorrow," Brian says.
"$100,000, what if they still win?" Rose asks.
"Believe me, I know my basketball, and if Xavier Hibbert doesn't play, UCLA doesn't stand a chance, you have to understand, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, no one knows that Hibbert is not going to play yet, they haven't changed the lines yet," Brian says.
"What's a line?" Sabrina asks.
"Right now, UCLA is the favorite; they're favored by eight points, so, to win the bet, UCLA has to win by eight points. If Duke wins or losses by less than eight points, we would win," Bob explains.
"If Duke wins right now, we will win $120 for every $100 that we bet," Brian adds.
"That's it," Rose says
"If we win that $400,000 bet, once we pay back the $400,000 we borrowed, we would have $480,000 to split between the four of us, $120,000 each, that's a lot of cheddar," Brian says. Greed starts to blur everyone's thinking. The impulsiveness of potential winnings has everyone seeing green. In the end, each person agrees to get a $100,000 loan from Brian's loan shark, determined to bet on the UCLA versus Duke basketball game.
The next day, the four of them head down to the casino, they meet Brian's suspicious loan shark in the parking lot, Bob is still a little gun-shy.
"Maybe we should only bet $50,000 each, that way, if we lose, it won't be insurmountable to pay him back," Bob says.
"Look, let's stick to the plan, we agreed last night to do $100,000, let's do it, I'm sick of always struggling, I'm tired of being poor," Sabrina says. Bob keeps to the plan mostly for Sabrina as opposed to for his financial gain.
After they get the line of credit from the loan shark, Brian goes to the Sportsbook to place the actual bet. It's done, $400,000 on Duke, with a point spread of plus 8. Just as Sabrina predicted, the news came out later that afternoon that Xavier Hibbert was out for the season. The Duke versus UCLA game was taken off the board at the Sportsbook; it didn't matter; they already had their ticket.
Gameday is here, and Bob gets tickets to the game, not only will they have potentially $480,000 after this, but they will be able to see the game live. They're all nervous, living and dying with every play of the game; Duke is up by five points at halftime, things are going exactly as planned. In the second half, UCLA makes a comeback and takes a three-point lead with two minutes left in the game. UCLA hit a three-pointer, they're up by five, with a one minute and a half left in the game. UCLA hit another three-pointer, up by eight, with one minute left in the game. Everyone is starting to get nervous, with ten seconds left in the game, UCLA is up by ten, Duke takes the ball down the court, there are two quick passes, and a Duke player hits a three as time runs out. UCLA won by seven points; they won the bet!
They all head back to the casino to cash in their ticket and pay back the loan shark who charged interest of $20,000. When it was all said and done, they got to split $344,800 after taxes, Which came out to $86,200 each.
Initially, Sabrina enjoyed the money, purchasing cars, paying off college loans, and giving money to family and friends. Having money took a toll on their relationship, though, Bob and Sabrina started to argue about money more and more. I guess when you don't have money, there's nothing to argue about. They went through the money quicker than they had thought. In the end, they couldn't survive being rich.
Money does odd things to people; many feel that if they had money, they would be happy. Typically, if you're not happy before you have the money, you won't be happy after. Years after the bet, neither Bob nor Sabrina has a dime of the winnings left. Still, they don't have each other anymore, either. Constant squabbling about overspending and prioritizing what to buy led to their break-up. Someone once asked the Sabrina if you could go back and have Bob or the money, which one would you take? She responded,
"What I had with Bob was special, I've never had a relationship like that before, and probably never will again, we were in love. I don't even remember what I spent the money on, to be honest."

First - Previous
5. Ghosts of the Past
Winfield kept himself hidden just in case anyone—or anything—had the same interest in the wrecked airplane as he did. He watched from behind a faded, rusted firetruck that had somehow been tipped on its side. His first hope was that the water tanks would still be full, or at least have enough in them for him to get his first taste of water in almost three days. After spending ten minutes crawling all over the wreck and into the cab, he wanted to scream in frustration. Curiously, the cab and surrounding area was devoid of bones or any signs of human remains.
When his stomach warned him once again that it needed more than a few tasteless hunks of crab meat to survive, he decided to investigate the wreckage. Winfield glanced toward the airport once again, unable to shake the sensation that something sinister resided within its darkened interior. He had no idea exactly what it might be, only that after his previous encounters, his brain wouldn’t stop spinning furiously as it created newer, more horrifying nightmares to frighten him with. He glanced one last time toward the nearest plane a few hundred yards away, already making plans to investigate it next.
Winfield wasn’t sure whether to walk nonchalantly toward the doomed jetliner or run as fast as his weakened legs and dress shoes would carry him. The approach led down a slight incline, the airport’s outer security fence missing a section more than a hundred feet wide. A massive furrow in the earth began soon after, quickly becoming a few feet deep. At the end sat the charred, twisted skeleton of what he guessed was a 737.
He stared at the wreckage and the trail of destruction it left, trying to piece what happened together in his mind. The only plausible theory he could imagine that didn’t have clawed, finned, fanged monsters somehow bringing it down involved the pilot trying to land it after a nuke—or a dozen of them—had detonated, likely wiping out the electronics. Winfield decided to mentally portray the pilot and his crew as valiant men and women, the cabin full of terse commands and acknowledgments as the captain fought the controls without hydraulic assistance while the flight attendants used their calm, soothing voices to instruct passengers on what to expect from the upcoming hard landing. He knew from his own experiences the attendants would never suggest the plane was definitely going to crash. A “hard landing” would give the panicked passengers enough hope to follow instructions like docile sheep.
He turned and walked toward the jet he’d focused on earlier, deciding that stirring up old ghosts wasn’t something he wanted to add to his already troubled mental state. His stomach and brain both agreed that whatever impact and fire hadn’t destroyed, the elements had. Winfield tried to stop his constant, almost involuntary glances at the airport itself. He couldn’t shake the queerly instinctual knowledge that something was definitely unsafe about it for the fact it looked to have suffered no damage at all other than the lack of constant maintenance and decades of weathering. The thought of “decades” having passed made his thoughts spin up into a frenzy all over again, assuring him that he truly was in hell and his worst fears would be his eternal torment.
The massive airliner grew larger as he approached, revealing the faded outline of the Southwest Airlines logo. That realization made him pause for a few seconds as he wondered why the jet wasn’t coated in its usual bright southwestern adobe colors and instead looked like a shiny futuristic aluminum version of a Boeing 737. Winfield laughed at his ignorance and continued toward the collapsed plane, chiding himself for thinking every passenger jet was a 737. As he grew closer, he tried to remember all of the model numbers that carried hundreds of passengers. His memories struggled beyond 747’s, 787’s, and the newest 790’s that Boeing had introduced only five years earlier. He was glad it kept him from staring at the eerily silent and dark airport off to his right.
Winfield had flown dozens of times in his life, but he had never once actually stood next to an airplane of this size. He wondered why it sat at the edge of the airport property, its nose hanging twenty feet beyond the perimeter fence, the asphalt tarmac more than a hundred yards behind it. The plane looked like a silent tomb, untouched by time or nature other than the collapse of its landing gear, which had caused both engines to hit the ground, cracking the wings where they met the cabin’s body. Amazingly, other than the fact that the belly of the plane sat in the strangely barren dirt, it looked intact.
Winfield made his way to the main door, arguing with himself over whether or not it was an airlock. The argument ended when he felt the pessimism grow within him that the door would be rusted shut even though everything on the outside of the plane looked to be made of aluminum and some sort of gray composite material. He hoped the cabin door’s locking mechanisms were made of the same materials since he didn’t fancy trying to break into the cabin through one of the tiny (and likely shatterproof) windows. Entering through the luggage storage area was out of the question since the doors rested firmly on the ground.
He glanced back to the airport one last time then stepped to the main door, grasping the cold, metal handles with both hands. Winfield’s shout was cut off instantly, his paranoia overwhelming him with the creepiness of the silence around him and the ease with which the locking mechanism shifted. His light tug on the door was resisted, but a second, more forceful pull greeted him with a slight popping noise. The urge to rush in and see what fate had befallen the humans inside was squashed by a flood of worries about how old tombs sometimes held deadly gas that could kill him within seconds.
“Goddamn nerd,” he whispered, shaking his head but thankful that his paranoid mind was nearly beside itself as it screamed caution at him.
Winfield waited a few yards away until his silent count hit five hundred. He watched the open doorway of the plane as if sure clawed, winged, unimaginably terrifying mutants would boil out in a swarm. The interior was dark from almost any angle, but once he stepped inside, the light from the open window shades illuminated the interior just enough to see everything but the tail end of the plane. He turned to his left and grasped the handle of the cockpit door, giving up after deciding the time wasted to smash the lock was time that could be spent pilfering any surviving food and water stores.
He turned around and slowly walked through the first few aisles, his ears listening for the slightest noise, his eyes attempting to take in every detail at once. A sadness rose from deep within at the sight of at least fifty passengers, their dessicated, mummified corpses in various states of disarray. The air smelled strangely sweet, which set off a new round of alarms in his head that he was definitely breathing toxins that would do him in sooner rather than later.
A woman’s leering, eyeless grin seemed to follow him as he shuffled down the aisle, searching for anything that might contain water. Americans were obsessed with bottled water for some reason Winfield could never figure out, having grown up drinking directly out of the garden hose, water fountains, and plastic cups. Even as an adult he carried around an aluminum water bottle, often forced to endure the chiding from his hockey teammates over his hippie-like, planet-conscious ways. For the first time in his life, he was hopeful that the plane he skulked about in was from the same universe he was, as it would mean a treasure trove of bottled water in neatly packaged, shrink-wrapped 24-packs.
By the time he reached the twentieth row, he realized none of the long-dead passengers would be supplying him with water. He’d seen at least three dozen corpses but no sign of food or water, which didn’t surprise him since refreshments were never served just prior to takeoff. He didn’t know for sure if the world went crazy just as the plane was taxiing to the runway for takeoff, but it seemed more logical since if it had come in for a landing, it most likely would be a twin disaster scene to the wreckage he’d just left.
“Shut up,” he whispered to himself, hoping his brain would focus on something other than making up stories as to what had happened to these unfortunate bystanders of mankind’s insanity.
Winfield ignored the rest of the passengers and made a beeline to the rear of the plane where the flight attendants would load their carts with soda, water, alcohol, pretzels, and peanuts. He had no expectation of finding any edible food, assuming decades truly had passed in the blink of an eye. When his imagination threatened to go off on another tangent, he willed himself to begin opening every door or container he could see.
The first cabinet was filled with disposable plastic cups, plastic stir sticks, and crumbled piles of what he assumed were napkins. The second contained boxes of snacks, all sealed in thin foil packets. Winfield ripped open one, forgetting for a moment that the small pretzels inside might be half a century old. He bit down into it, immediately spitting out the dusty, chalky bits. He put his nose to the opening but was unable to smell anything other than the odd, sweet scent that permeated the plane’s cabin.
Winfield almost whooped in joy when he unlatched the second cabinet’s door. The sight of dozens of individual twelve ounce bottles of water made his eyes moist. He quickly wiped them and refused to admit he’d almost cried. His brain butted in one more time, forcing him to search through his memories for anything about how bottled water that had sat for years might somehow be poisonous—or worse, give him diarrhea. A slow death from thirst seemed worse than dying from drinking tainted water, though he wasn’t particularly keen on suffering either fate. He hoped that if the water was lethal, it would be quick and any pain he suffered would only last a short time.
Winfield pushed the morbid thoughts aside and grabbed a bottle, quickly twisting off the cap and putting the lip to his nose. The sweet odor of decay was barely intruded upon by the faint scent of plastic and his own growing stench. He put the bottle to his lips and took a tiny bit into his mouth, swirled it around, swallowed it, then proceeded to down the entire bottle in less than three seconds.
He stopped after bottle number five, worried he would make himself sick. After stuffing four more bottles into his pockets, he resumed rummaging through the cabinets. He was disappointed that he found nothing useful other than another rack of bottled water, though it did little to lessen his elation that he’d found enough water to last him… Winfield stopped and thought about it, his mind working over how much water he could realistically carry. He patted each article of clothing as he calculated two bottles each in his front pants pockets, two each in his outer jacket pockets, along with the jacket’s two interior pockets, which were good for another bottle or two each.
After striking out on the last cabinet, Winfield opened another bottle of water and made his way back down the aisle toward the front of the plane. He stopped at the first occupied seat to test the dead woman’s purse, expecting it to disintegrate in his hands. He was surprised more by the fact the purse was still in good enough condition to resist a tug than by the disturbing sound the woman’s arm made as the bones in her shoulder shifted. Winfield let out a squawk when a second tug ripped the woman’s arm from her shoulder, her shirt silently tearing as if made of wet paper.
He brushed off the crumbs of skin and fabric, lifting the purse to his face to see what was inside. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a passenger in the row in front of the woman had an actual duffel bag on the seat next to him. Winfield dropped the purse and stepped around the seat, grinning as he gently removed the seat belt the man had secured around the bag. The snick of the zipper opening made him glance around, worried for a moment that all of the corpses on the plane would hear it and awaken at once. A fear-driven giggle escaped him at the thought of how much crap would fill his pants if the plane suddenly came alive with skeleton-zombies.
Winfield pulled out a few books, their pages yellow and crumbling, followed by a number of t-shirts, socks, and boxer briefs. His mind immediately made up a story about how the man was on his way to a secret affair that would only last two days, possibly three. That sent his brain spinning off into forbidden territory as he emptied the duffel onto the seat. Elise Gomez’s smooth brown skin, the scent of her freshly washed hair, the hidden secrets under the practice jersey she’d worn their first night together…
He cut off that thought, afraid he would break down in tears at the realization she and everyone else on planet Earth was dead. Possibly long dead. She had rightly broken up with him after finding out he’d cheated on her during a road trip to play Buffalo State. The sting of a 9-2 blowout had been soothed by Bobbi, one of Buffalo State’s coeds who talked him into a threesome with her best friend—a girl Winfield couldn’t remember the name of but would never forget the enormous breasts she hid under her loose-fitting hoodie.
“Stop, please,” he said to himself.
He’d been standing in the middle of the aisle daydreaming instead of completing his mission of loading up the duffel with as much water as he could carry without exhausting himself. Winfield had no idea where he was going beyond “back to Kansas.” He kept himself busy mentally while packing the duffel with bottled water. Anything was better than remembering the hurt, the pain in Elise’s face when he—
Winfield growled in frustration, taking some skin from a finger as he zipped the duffel shut in a single enraged pull. He shook his head then filled it with thoughts of checking the overhead luggage bins in hopes of finding some normal socks and shoes that hadn’t dissolved into flakes of cotton or leather yet. He was proud of how he looked in his business suit, but the idea of wearing it on a two thousand mile journey through a deadly wasteland was laughable at best, lethally foolish at worst.
He almost gave up the search after finding nothing that was in wearable condition other than a few items that were far too small to fit his size 12 feet. Or wasn’t a dress, a bra, or thong panties. A pair of dainty lace thongs made his mind begin to wander again, which made him decide he was wasting valuable daylight with his fruitless searching. Winfield wanted to be as far away from the airport by dusk as possible, though he was amazed that he hadn’t ran to a window every ten seconds to make sure a fifty foot dragon-shark wasn’t rushing across the tarmac toward the plane.
He pulled down one last suitcase, already assuming it to be a lost cause. His face lit up with joy after unzipping it. A brand new pair of basketball shoes, a decently worn pair of Birkenstock sandals, and a pile of fresh white cotton socks greeted him. The imprints on the sandals’ soles were unreadable, but the basketball shoes claimed to be size 11 1/2.
“Close enough, brother,” he said to the nearest male corpse, a now-black man that might have been identical in size to Winfield. He laughed as he looked around. “All y’all are black now.”
Winfield sat on the floor, removing his dress shoes and sweaty wool socks, letting them air out for a few minutes while he rummaged through the suitcase beside him. He pulled out a Macbook, one of the newer mobile tablets, and two paperback books. Curious, he checked the books, their pages slightly yellowed but showing no signs of cracking. The second book’s cover—a large gang of evil mutants becoming bloody hamburger by two Rambo-types firing machine gun lasers into them—made him grin. .
He unzipped the duffel and slipped the paperbacks into it, unsure of why he wanted to keep the books, other than if he had the chance to start a fire to cook or keep warm, he could definitely use the book’s pages to make the job a lot easier. Winfield doubted he would find time to read during his trip, and when he settled down for the night, he wasn’t stupid enough to light a fire to read by that could be seen from miles away.
The soft cotton sports socks felt like an orgasm on his feet. The brand new Adidas basketball shoes were snug, though he was sure he could predict exactly where the blisters would form until the shoes were broken in enough to be perfectly comfortable. Winfield didn’t care. He’d gladly accept a dozen blisters just to have some arch support and the air cushioned soles padding the bottoms of his feet. He was even more pleased at finding a pair of sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt that fit him, though his thighs stretched the fabric to the point he worried the seams would split.
A pair of baggy jeans and half a dozen t-shirts went into his duffel after trying them on, which meant he had to abandon eight of the water bottles and slip the paperbacks into his jacket pockets. The Birkenstocks fit perfectly, already worn in by their owner, and he slipped them into an outer pocket on the duffel. He pondered leaving his suit jacket behind, but decided to keep it just in case the nights were dangerously cold and he couldn’t find shelter or more paper to start a fire.
Or can’t make a fire because mutated killer hornet-men would see it and ambush me.
“Shut up, brain,” he said cheerily, standing up and shouldering the duffel.
Winfield took one last look around, finding nothing useful that would help him on his journey. Thanks to the sometimes over-cautious airline security protocols, he’d never find a weapon on any of the passengers or crew unless one of them happened to be a U.S. Marshal. He thought he remembered news stories about how the pilots were usually armed as well after numerous hijacking attempts in the years following 9/11, but wasn’t sure if they were factual stories or dumbasses on the internet making up stories to scare potential terrorists.
Winfield stood in the doorway, staring at the airport terminal. The creepiness of it made him shiver. His brain reminded him that logic dictated there would be plenty of useful items, possibly even edible food, still housed within the terminal’s black interior. He crushed that logic with a wave of overwhelming fear at what else might be inside—and believe Winfield Halloway to be edible.
He stepped out of the plane and walked toward I-95. The freeway was choked with even more vehicles, all of them rusted or burned. Winfield marveled at how some things like the plane he’d just left and the airport terminal that scared him more than any crazed hillbilly ever had seemed to have completely avoided any damage from the nuke or its after effects, while others were completely annihilated by both blast and fire damage.
It didn’t surprise him that he’d met no other living human being to that point. Sad, yes, and an extreme loneliness that he’d never felt before, but not surprised. The hope that once he made it out of the northeastern seaboard would reveal a somewhat recognizable semblance of American society still hanging on kept his spirits up as the Newark International Airport receded behind him.

OPENING LINES

Away	Home	Spread	O/U
Hawks	Raptors	-2	200
Nuggets	Grizzlies	?	?
Suns	Bucks	-6.5	211.5
Clippers	Timberwolves	-5.5	212
Knicks	Mavericks	-5	201
Pelicans	Spurs	?	?
Warriors	Jazz	-5.5	205
Wizards	Kings	?	?
Heat	Lakers	-10	207.5

Favorites are in bold
Spreads and O/U from ESPN
Odds Shark Predictions
Sports Thunder Predictions
News
Standings
Season Stats
Injury Reports
Best of Luck!

Max and Chloe don’t exist. They’re Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, the magical child and the manic pixie dream girl. Rachel is Max aged up, reborn and transformed in a ritual of fiery lust. Chloe is the Kewpie mayo, Max is the mustard and Rachel is the ketchup (or hawt sauce) to Frank’s Hawt Dawg Man. This is Brody’s backpack, courtesy of Kalikabanos Apparently, Mushroom is a “reused asset” from Max’s journal. Here’s the little angel Kate, sketching a noose on The Tree from the Overlook. The same tree that 16-year-old Chloe draws 18-year-old Max being hanged from, even though Max was 13 the last time they saw each other. Next up is Kate's diagram of quantum entanglement (maybe?), which looks like Brody’s hobo symbol for “get out quick”- two people escaping through a portal, or two spears penetrating an eyeball (pump the eyeball to get out of class early). The same Kate who drew a little one-eyed wolf wearing a bandolier, just like the bearry-blue Sky Pirate and his 3 foam bullets, just like Captain Bluebeard and her 3 bullet necklace. The same Kate who was saved from falling off Blackwell by Miracle Max the magical child, just like Chris was saved from falling off a ladder by Daniel. Confused yet?
Blackwell is full of artsy kids because they’re all fragments of Frank, the man who animated them. Kate has two classmates who like to sketch, Daniel DaCosta and Stella, and all 3 of them sit at the same table in the nightmare diner. Birds of a feather flock together. Sean and Max are sketch artists too, always outlining their surroundings. She fills her journal with sketches of the day’s events. The Diaz brothers are Kate’s little wolves. Chris is Frank’s inner child, powered by youthful creativity. Charles is Frank as a washed-up athlete in a Springsteen music video, reliving his glory days through the TV. William is Frank all cleaned up, the too-good-to-be-true sitcom dad. He's not content being Dorothy- he wants to be the Wicked Witch, the Wizard of Oz and all the characters in between.
Chris is a sponge, soaking up pop culture from a million different sources to lay the subliminal groundwork for future Frank’s fantasy world. Everything he consumes is thrown into the mental blender along with his own life story. Each time TV’s Frank pushes the button a new schizophrenic smoothie pops out- LiS, BtS, and LiS2- but that same great Frank flavor always rises to the top. Beaver Creek is a combination of Leave it to Beaver and Wolf Creek, Greg McLean’s horror film about Australian backpackers being hunted by a serial killer. When Mark Jefferson calls his class “pesky kids” and yells at Max for snooping around the Dark Room, he’s mimicking an unmasked Scooby Doo villain: “And I’d have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” The scene shifts every time you switch the lens- Rachel sees her lying dad kissing his mistress. James sees himself saving Rachel from a bad influence. Chloe sees a corrupt politician giving an angel the kiss of death.
Red, yellow and blue: The primary colors are very popular with comic book colorists, movie poster makers and Chris Eriksen. USA and Pepsi Cola, Hulk Hogan and Mickey D’s. Combine all 3 and you get Superman, the ultimate superhero. Click the CS title screen and the words flip from mustard yellow to ketchup red. All the logos were hand-crafted by Chris, yellow on the front and red on the back. Sean kicks aside the red, yellow and blue toy truck- the one from Chris’ house- before sitting down with Lyla. Chris uses the blue and yellow Power Bear to recreate Bane breaking Batman’s back. Choosy Diazes choose Bane brand ketchup. You and I merely watch the television. Chris was born in it, molded by it. He’s Max Headroom inside the boob tube, a deer in the snow globe. He’s Eminem (M&M) dressed up as Robin, Franklin the (Teenage Mutant Ninja) Turtle wearing a Fistful of Dollars-style scrap iron vest as his turtle shell. His shirt represents all the characters inside of him, heroes and villains alike.

Got My Mind Hallucinatin’

All of Frank’s hallucinations are birthed from a little seed, something that catches his ear or strikes his eye. It worms its way into his subconscious, a gut feeling that grows and grows until it explodes outward like a psychedelic chestburster. When something irritating invades an oyster’s shell, the oyster will wrap it in many layers of calcium carbonate before finishing it off with an iridescent coating of nacre. The result is a pearl, a strange and wonderful little orb concealing something unpleasant. An alluring fantasy built around a kernel of truth.
Frank’s pearls consist of 3 main parts. The first is an irritant, like a family that reminds him of his own. He responds by smothering it- Frank murders the father and “liberates” the mothechild. As Daniel says, “The mom was nice, the dad was kind of a weenie.” The third piece is the shiny sugar-nacre coating. He reimagines his actions as a sweet and sour adventure in Francis’ Fantasia, the delicious outer layer of Willie’s Everlasting Gobstopper. The dead are resurrected into, in the words of Matt Groening, “a sort of weird, zombified ideal of the American family”. A beautiful lie to protect his own innocence. Sean tells Daniel they’re going on a grand adventure, James hides Sera from Rachel, and nobody knows what William was lying bout. Sean makes a game of it to see how far they can walk. It's reminiscent of Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni’s movie about a Jewish family sent to a concentration camp. The dad spares his son from the horror by convincing him that they're all competitors in a grand game to win a battle tank.
Video games train us to see the world as our piñata. Smash these urns, slash that grass, run over those pedestrians and be rewarded with a grab bag of goodies. Mario bashes blocks and all sorts of powerups and coins pop out. Magic Mushrooms to embiggen the body, Super Leaves for a flying raccoon suit and Fire Flowers to become his fire form. If he snags a Super Star, he becomes temporarily invincible. The gas station is where all the seeds from the woods come to fruition for the Diazes. They read warnings about bears and see claw marks on the trees, then encounter a gas station run by a Mama and Papa bear with a bunch of bear carvings. They find a bunch of crazy mushrooms and up pops Mushroom in a basket. They spot a raccoon and Shazam! there’s a raccoon suit for sale. If Sean checks his bag it’s full of leaves- Super Leaves.
Sean listens to “On the Flip of a Coin”, raids the coin jar and uses a rock to force open the money box at the park. As Daniel plays the Power Bear claw machine he says he’s gonna “beat this boss”. He wins a Minibear, a red plastic egg with a baby Power Bear inside. Like Poké Balls or Chloe’s snow globe collection, the Catcher in the Rye’s gotta catch ‘em all. Frank is Megaman going from boss to boss, collecting their “tiny tools” and leveling up with each conquest. When Daniel power bombs the bear boss, the Super Diaz Bros. are showered in loot. Daniel-Sean is the young bear come to take down the grizzled Hank Stamper. Daniel even calls his bedroom the Bear Lair.
It’s a Peter Pan plan in action, over and over: Frank breaks into a house, kills the father and steals the child. Pompidou, Mushroom, and Baby Rachel were all taken from the rich to give to the poor. When Samuel's waxing poetic about Rachel, he calls her a good egg: a baby dragon. In the drama lab dressing room, Mario’s mystery block is floating behind Chloe. Rachel asks if she brought her flowers. Later they set fire to The Tree together, and Chloe rescues some flowers from her trashcan. The rope from the fallen tire swing forms a question mark as she cracks open the viewfinder to collect its coin. Life needs a little mystery, Chloe.
Flip of the Coin recommends that Sean leave his fate in the hands of a coin flip. But the flip is rigged by you, deciding which fork he should take. Frank can feel your eye gazing down upon him, your hand tugging at the strings. He’s been a very bad boy, so he hides his naughtiness under the blanket. Thomas Bowdler was the man who censored Shakespeare, Big Willie himself. Disney is notorious for neutering their source material this way. Bowers has Bowdlerized his own life- not just to protect his inner child, but also for the home audience. Best freakin’ fighters forever.. That’s a dollar for the swear jar! That is, until the shit hits the fan and the f-bombs start dropping- right before a real bomb goes off. Fun fact: Some freakin' idiot edited a line in The Tempest from “Full fathom five thy father lies” to “Thy Daddy’s dead, thy Daddy’s dead”.

I Think I <3 You

Chris’ favorite book is a twist on Where the Wild Things Are, and references to it pop up everywhere. It’s about an angry young boy called Max who turns his own bedroom into a fantasy world to escape his parents. He tames the beasts within and becomes the King of the Wild Things. Swimmers are Otters, football players are Bigfoots, Rachel’s a dragon and Chloe’s a shark. Max becomes an otter in Chloe’s water, and there’s a graffiti shark eating an otter on the wall outside. When Chloe looks at Mr. Sharkie, she says, “Fun fact: shark babies eat their siblings in the womb. Maybe that's why I'm an only child?" The Tin Man frightens Dorothy with the threat of wild animals the same way Sean teases Daniel. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! What a big foot you have, Grandma!
Daniel is always trying to one-up Sean and wants every animal he sees to be his pet- including the dragon in the clouds. He wants to be King of the Wild Things. Chloe tells Rodney and Rachel that no flamethrower, no army of robot ninjas, not even a dragon on a leash could stand in her way. Rachel is Frank’s Fire Flower flamethrower, his baby dragon in a bottle- the spark that sets Arcadia Bay ablaze, the inferno that roasts Duurgaron, and the hellfire he unleashes against all the raging bulls of his own private nightmare. A sentient tool, like Max the human camera/time machine or Esteban the living compass. On Chris’ wall there’s a drawing of Power Bear punching out Chloe, a ninja riding Rachel, and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fighting Hawt Dawg Man.
The Caped Eyeball is the one-eyed monster (One-Eyed Willie), the All-Seeing Eye, the Bad Dad that must be defeated. Frank is a hotdog harvesting hero, Kate’s backpacking monkey misses his banana, Hayden’s stealing all the pencils, Rachel’s rewriting Big Willie’s script and Barb punches the “stupid man cow” right in the dick. This is neither a banana nor a cigar nor a Mario Bros. pipe. How many sexually suggestive symbols can you spot in this picture of a Penis Bear sheath? Note the red and blue “spears” pointing towards the portal.
Next to the pirate ship in the hospital, there’s a toy robot and 3 stuffed animals: Chris’ Henry, Max’s Captain, and Victoria’s baby lion- which also appears in William’s car when Chloe is apologizing for decapitating Rachel. Mikey leaves a drawing of a time-travelling robot (Max) riding a T-Rex (Rachel) in Drew’s room. There’s a letter asking him for help with a robot in his hospital room. The same toy robot appears next to Robot Rachel, transforming into a Destructicon with the power of love. From magical child to destroyer of worlds, the Wild Thing that makes Frank’s heart sing. Jimi Hendrix, dressed all in red and yellow, made national news by sacrificing his red Stratocaster at the end of a performance of Wild Thing. He dry humped it, he fisted it and he painted it with lighter fluid squirted out of a mustard yellow bottle (positioned at crotch level). Then he set fire to it and smashed the shit out of it. It wasn’t very subtle. Spoiler alert: Max’s guitar is a sexual organ.

Lisztomaniac

Lisztomania was the Beatlemania of the 1800s. Franz Liszt was a composer and virtuoso pianist touring Europe. Fans began swarming him, throwing their underwear on stage and clamoring for souvenirs. Coffee grounds and cigar stumps for vials and lockets, a piano string to make a bracelet- anything to give them a personal connection. This was well before the time of radio and TV, and celebrity worship of musicians was a novel idea. Lisztomania was considered a contagious medical condition.
To use Samuel’s analogy, Franz’s fans went after him like squirrels chasing food. Eliot stalking Chloe is a mirror of Samuel stalking Rachel. Hans Christian Andersen said an electric shock passed through the room when Liszt entered, and a ray of sunlight passed over every face. Eliot writes “when she left the room it was electric” and Samuel says Rachel was sunlight. Eveline Hańska said Liszt’s glassy eyes sparkled like cut diamonds lit by his wit. Samuel says Rachel is a prism and a dragon made of diamonds. Eliot says Chloe’s eyes flash bright like coins (Mario coins?)
Franz was the social equal of kings and queens. Rachel is Blackwell royalty. When he skipped out on a lover in the middle of the night, she broke all the furniture in their hotel room. Like Daniel wrecking the Three Seals room, or Chloe smashing up the Junkyard, or Chloe throwing a fit when she finds the pictures of Rachel and Frank. Doctors tried to immunize people against Lisztomania, so Max says fuck you to the flu shot.
Lyla creeps up behind Sean as the boy on the bus listening to Phoenix’s Lisztomania walks away. Her bookbag straps are covered in little bombs, like the album cover. Manic pixie dream girls are a popular fantasy- the quirky girl that seems to exist solely to break the awkward male lead out of his shell. Chloe takes Max from chickenshit to Everyday Hero and Lyla is Sean’s personal love witch. She’s the devil feeding his obsession with Jenna, the way Victoria fuels Nathan's destructive desire for Rachel.
Figurines, avatars and people are all fungible to Frank. Almost everyone in LiS2 has a hard shell of unmoving hair, like a Ken doll. But Lyla has a headful of snakes that jiggle back and forth with every twitch of her head. There are two other people with living hair: Doris Stamper and post-accident Daniel. The movement is downright unnatural at times, glitching out like Officer Matthews' dashcam, or Sean's souvenirs.. or Max Headroom. Hair is a fixation for several serial killers. Frank from Maniac scalps women to bring his mannequins to life, Quentin weaves Squirrel’s pigtail into a bracelet, and George from The Lovely Bones keeps a bit of his victim’s hair in his secret serial killer sketchbook. The most treasured trophy a Franz Liszt superfan could receive was a lock of his hair. He received so many requests that he bought a dog to send people clippings of dog hair in lieu of his own.

Lyla Versus Powerman

There’s a lot of other weirdness surrounding Lyla. Her name sounds like the deflating lilo from Spanish Sahara, and she could be an aged-up Ayla from Can Ulkay's Ayla: Daughter of War. It's about a little Korean girl who's adopted by a Turkish soldier after her entire village is massacred- Frank's kind of story. There's also a horror movie called Ayla, about a 4-year-old sister brought back to life as an adult woman 30 years later. There’s a fuzzy red ball attached to her backpack, like a moogle’s pompom. Moogles are teddy bear fairies from Final Fantasy that speak in electronic squeaks. Every so often there’s a synthesized chirp in the background while Lyla chats with Daniel. Even stranger, someone keeps revving up a chain saw. Before Sean enters the gas station, he finds an advertisement for an Ash-82 posted by Sam R.
It's a reference to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, the first movie to star Ash Williams- who Frank has blended in his mind with Ash Ketchum, the star of Pokémon. Chloe’s tape recorder, Daniel’s fear of the trees and Daemon Merrick’s fire pokér incident can all be traced to scenes from Evil Dead. In Evil Dead 2 Ash cuts off his possessed right hand and replaces it with a chainsaw, like Hook’s hook or Barb’s ripper fist. He eventually upgrades the chainsaw to a Power Glove. It’s a robotic claw, and before that it was a Nintendo accessory. Combining the two gives us the Power Bear claw machine.
There’s a circular saw in Esteban’s garage, and while he’s down there Lyla will text Sean threatening to take his hot dad. Father and son can discuss Sean’s essay on Slaughterhouse-Five. Remember Mikey’s Slaughter-Maze of Duurgaron? Remember in The Shining, when an axe-wielding Jack chases Danny around the maze? The last thing Sean says before going inside is “Hello, Friday night”, perhaps a reference to the gender-swapping villain of Friday the 13th. In Army of Darkness, Ash travels back to the Middle Ages, where he envisions himself as a king blowing away witches with his “boom stick”: a 12-gauge double-barreled Remington. Chloe helps Rose by fetching her broomstick, and dresses up as a witch for Halloween. First Samuel sweeps, and then he paints. The chainsaw is Sean’s brum-brumstick, and he cleans house with the help of Lyla the Love Witch. Sean is the barbarian slashing, stabbing and bashing his way through hordes of dragonkins. Lyla and Daniel are the mages, terrorizing them with fire and ice, lightning and acid.
In Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional, a corrupt cop named Norman Stansfield doubles as the Big Bad Wolf. He looooves blasting Beethoven and popping pills before hunting little piggies with his shotgun. Léon is a professional “cleaner”, a supernaturally talented hitman who single-handedly blows away teams of bodyguards. He’s strictly a lone wolf, with only a houseplant for companionship- like Louis Bloom or Max’s Lisa- until he meets little Mathilda. When Norman murders her family Léon takes the girl under his wing. As he teaches her how to be a hitman- his partner in crime- he slowly becomes the Woodcutter to her Red Riding Hood. Mathilda even wears a red beanie to match his grey one. Chloe says to Rachel, “I’m the lone wolf, you’re Little Red Riding Hood.” When the Big Bad comes to blow their apartment down with rocket-propelled grenades, Léon hacks open an escape route for her with his axe: The Woodcutter cutting Red out of the Wolf’s belly. Fun fact: In Pulp Fiction, the Wolf is a different sort of cleaner- he cleans up other people’s mistakes, erasing all the bloody evidence.
Now, imagine for a moment that there is no Norman, and Léon isn’t such an amazing badass. He fantasizes about killing trained gunmen while he's slaughtering unarmed women and children in their homes. Fine and dandy when he’s blasted out of his mind- but when the buzz wears off and he sees a little girl return from the grocery store to find her dead family, it’s a rude awakening. So the Big Bad Wolf reluctantly becomes the Woodcutter. At the end Léon suicide bombs Norman and Mathilda goes back to being a schoolgirl. She’s the one telling his story, but she never actually saw who murdered her family. Frank is recreating this, and the noble sacrifice is his ultimate fantasy. Barb impaled on Duurgaron’s blade as she smashes his bracer, Chloe taking a bullet for the Bay, Jesus dying for our sins. Chloe’s sacrifice is her superhero ending.
Frank prepares to “jugulate” the Diazes with Phoenix’s Lisztomania, a song about a broken-hearted boy whose first love turned him into a wolf. For Rachel, it’s Broods’ Taking You There: “In the dead of night I'll meet you in my sleep, and in the morning light you'll wake up next to me.” The camera tracks Rachel and Chloe from the strangest angles: Frank’s POV as he stalks them from the bushes. He listens to Syd Matters’ To All of You, a song comparing American girls to dolls, before following Chloe into the girl’s room. Each time Frank descends into Hell as a devil and comes back up an angel. Reborn from the ashes like a phoenix, with a new face and a new Beanie Baby at his side. Chloe is the Corpse Bride of Frankenstein.

Talkin’ Chainsaws

The unidentified electronic twang from Lyla’s conversation also evokes Terry Cashman’s baseball song Willie, Mickey and the Duke, which has a similar sound effect when Terry time warps to the 1980s. There are many references to baseball: The glass lens, Frank’s cap, Brett and Frank’s tees, Chris’ baseball cards and Chloe’s bat. Harry Aaron Prescott is Sean Prescott’s father, and Hank Stamper is the bearish father figure that Sean must defeat. They’re both nicknames for Henry- as in Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, the man who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. Chloe hammers the vending machine until it gives up its Baby Ruth. Chris’ teddy bear Henry is a chip off the old block. Most important of all is the ball and glove from Sean’s sketchbook. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre features Leatherface, a chainsaw wielding fellow who wears a home-made skin mask inspired by Ed Gein. It makes his head look like the unholy love child of an oversized baseball and its glove. Together, Lyla and Sean are Lilo and Stitch.
Bringing this insane mashup full circle is Fun and Fancy Free, a Disney double feature narrated in live-action sequences. The second half stars Mickey, Donald and Goofy as 3 peasants who face off vs Willie, a magical giant with the powers of flight, invisibility and shapeshifting. Willie the giant is the god-like father figure and Mickey is the rebellious young buck who slays him, like Mickey Knox. Except Willie resurrects at the end of the movie, escaping the cartoon and tearing the roof off the narrator’s house: William jumping out of Chloe’s dreams and into her truck. He’s Chloe’s dark passenger, à la Dexter Morgan: the childhood trauma driving her to kill.
To follow Frank’s train of thought, you have to let your mind flow in an abstract stream of consciousness, each idea merging into the next. He takes Bruce Lee’s words to heart- “Be formless, like water.” Willie, Mickey and the Duke begins “The Whiz Kids had won it”- to Frank, that’s Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz with Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as The Scarecrow. Hence the wizard teddy in Mikey’s room. Willie Mays could be the greatest five-tool baseball player of all time. Frank uses his father’s toolbox to do his work- Torches and icepicks and chainsaws, oh my! Mays shares his birth year and the year of his MLB debut with Mickey Mantle, possibly the greatest switch hitter of all time. Switch hitting, ambidexterity, gender fluidity and shapeshifting- the essence of Frank.
The Duke was a triple threat, excelling at baseball, basketball and football- perhaps why the Eriksens are a basketball family and the Norths are a football family. There’s a baseball movie called Major League where the players have recycled names like Willie Mays Hayes and The Duke. Charlie Sheen is “Wild Thing”, who becomes a star pitcher after getting glasses. Cashman’s song also has a line about Yogi Berra- the inspiration for Yogi Bear- reading the comics all the while. Daniel is Boo-Boo, Yogi’s baby bear sidekick. “Hey hey, Boo-Boo” becomes a text from Lyla calling Daniel her boo, and “We must not forget ze booze!”- that is, the boos.
The first half of Fun and Fancy Free is Bongo the bear’s coming of age tale as he battles Lumpjaw for Lulubelle’s paw. Bongo, of course, is the name of Chloe’s dead cat-not-really-a-cat. Hank Stamper is Lumpjaw. Jiminy Cricket is playing the story on a record player next to a doll (Lulu) and a teddy bear (Bongo). Bongo’s primary weapon is his unicycle, which he uses like a buzzsaw vs Lumpjaw’s vicious claws and giant tree cudgel. Chris plays his angelic mother’s old record when he wants to hear Moon and Moon. The singer is a huntress searching for a bear to lick her clean, a husband to come shoot the big bad hand that’s pushing her down. It seems Papa Power Bear put Baby in the corner.

Travis Keaton

Arthur Miller, the Trinity Killer from Dexter, has a predictable cycle. First he finds a 10-year-old boy and lures him to a hidden location. He pretends to be a cop to gain his trust. He makes the boy dress up in PJs and calls him Arthur as they play trains together. Then he feeds him special ice cream and buries the sleeping boy alive in cement. Arthur is Peter Panning himself, preserving his own innocence before “the accident”.
Next he finds a young woman like his sister Vera. He forces her into a bathtub with him, “hugging” her from behind as he slices an artery in her leg. He uses a hand mirror to watch her face as she bleeds out, then cleanses himself in a scalding hot shower. When Arthur was 10, he peeped on Vera in the shower. She saw his face in the mirror and slipped, crashing into the shower doors. A shard of glass cut her leg and she bled to death. Arthur lost his sister and his childhood innocence on the same day: Chloe losing William and Max back to back.
The third actor is a mother of two. He takes her up to a rooftop and orders her to jump. If she refuses he threatens her children. Arthur’s mother Marsha jumped off a bridge after Vera’s death. The final victim is an older man, preferably an alcoholic. Sometimes he splits this part between two men. He picks a fight with the first, allowing “Henry” to beat him down. Later he returns to bludgeon Henry with a hammer: Hammerin’ Hank. Henry blamed Arthur for Marsha and Vera’s deaths, making his life hell until Arthur got big enough to silence him. Charles blames Chris for Emily’s death and Chris clearly wants to kill him- he shoots Charles’ head, roasts his reflection and blows up his snow effigy. Chloe fantasizes about murdering David as she looks for his wrench. Esteban is in a very vulnerable position when “Sean” enters the garage- he can’t see who came in. When Brett picks a fight with Sean, he’s already covered in bloody hand prints.
Consider Jefferson’s master plan. First he takes photos of Kate “sleeping” like an angel- preserving her innocence on film. He releases the video of her corruption, encouraging other students to bully her. Jefferson acts like an older brother or a cool uncle, and he grooms Kate to see him as a father figure. When she comes to him for support he blames her and says she’s just looking for attention. If Max is sympathetic, he says Kate doth protest too much- basically calling her a slut. Innocent Kate is little Mark, and corrupted Kate is his mom jumping to her doom. If Jefferson and the Trinity Killer ever met, they’d be BFF.

Team Killer

Let me tell you about the other TK that Frank idolizes- Ted Kaczynski, the brilliant mathematician who tried to turn back the clock on civilization and rewind us to our hunter-gatherer roots. As a child he was temporarily quarantined in an isolation facility, leading him to empathize with caged animals. After scoring 167 on an IQ test he was skipped ahead to the 6th grade. Overnight he went from being a leader among his peers to an easy target for bullies. At 16 he got into Harvard on a scholarship, before he even got his driver’s license.
Ted lived in a residence at 8 Prescott St. before moving into the Eliot House dorms. At Harvard he was tricked into participating in a psychological study conducted by Henry Murray, who was rumored to be conducting studies as part of Project MKUltra- the CIA's attempt to create a mind control program through drugs, hypnosis, torture, sensory deprivation, and the sexual abuse of children. You can read about it on the CIA’s website. Ted was required to write essays about his hopes and beliefs, which were handed over to a man paid to bully and humiliate him. The sessions were filmed and the subjects were made to watch their own reactions to the abuse ad nauseam. This happened every week for 3 years.
In Ted’s mid-20s, his social isolation and sexual repression began to take its toll. The sounds of people having sex drove him crazy, and he believed his landlord was turning the other tenants against him. He dreamt of psychologists trying to control his mind and popping back up if he killed them. He went to see a psychiatrist planning to discuss a sex change operation. Ted didn’t identify as a woman, he just thought it was the only way he’d ever get to touch one. After a brief career in academia, he abruptly retired and retreated to a cabin in the woods. He planned to live with as little contact with society as possible, aside from occasionally biking to the library. When developers began to destroy the woods around his cabin, he decided that conflict was inevitable.
When Kaczynski’s mail bombs first started showing up, he was nicknamed the “Junkyard Bomber” because they were all made from readily available scrap. The first was a pipe bomb with wooden plugs inside a handmade wooden box. When opened, a trigger would strike the matches and ignite the bomb. He often included bits of bark, and two of his targets were named Wood. His final bomb killed a lobbyist for Big Timber. Ted worked alone- obviously- but he included little messages between imaginary co-conspirators to throw off investigators. He inscribed his bombs with the initials FC, for Freedom Club. His manifesto never refers to himself in the singular, always we or FC. It’s like he saw himself as a superhero in the Justice League. His nickname was changed to the Unabomber because he targeted universities and airplanes, including a bomb in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444
Warren is the Unabomber. At 16, he’s quite gifted and one of the youngest students at Blackwell. He fights with Nathan Prescott, the typical rich bully riding his Dad’s coattails, and is friends with Eliot: 8 Prescott St. and Eliot House. Eliot’s dorm is almost as woody as Rachel's house, and he argues with Warren about Ed Wood. 44 Cedar St. isn’t just referring to Child 44 and Zombie- it’s a layered reference to Flight 444 and TK’s obsession with wood. Eliot sketched the rocket that appears on Daniel’s t-shirt. The psychic bomber built Sean’s rocket out of a used toilet roll, duct tape and matchsticks. Lyla the love bomber hates airplanes.
Max has to respond to Warren’s text before he blows up her phone. He teaches her to build a pipe bomb from odds and ends lying around the school so she can break into Principal Wells’ office. It’s revenge against the ivory tower father figure who let his cries for help fall upon deaf ears, like when Max tried to report Nathan’s gun. They’re blowing open a doorway into Wells’ mind- making him listen- the same way Chris blows up his ciggy butt snowfather with an exploding “cigar”. The Junkyard is everyone’s secret hideout, a natural location for the Junkyard Bomber and his Freedom Club. Chloe wishes the whole town would get nuked, and if you let the storm wipe it out nature will reclaim Arcadia Bay.

Munchkin Murder

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” is the lyric from Beautiful Boy that Jefferson likes to quote. It’s a song John Lennon wrote to comfort his son Sean after a nightmare. Lennon was a great artist but a terrible person in a lot of ways, including beating women and abandoning his first son, Julian. Mark David Chapman was a Beatles megafan with a troubled childhood. His father abused his mother, his mother constantly told him he was destined for greatness, and the children at school bullied him. He described his mom as “right out of Glass Menagerie”- the Tennessee Williams’ play on Rachel’s board o’ inspirations. Like Max in Where the Wild Things Are, he made a fantasy world inside his room, with a town of people that lived in the walls and worshipped King Mark. When he was happy they went about their daily jobs, and he gave them Beatles concerts put on by toy soldiers on a cardboard stage. When he was angry he smashed the town and murdered little people by the thousands.
After hitting puberty, his fantasy changed to having a secret dungeon in the basement of his school filled with women that he touched but didn’t have sex with. On the plane Max learns that none of Jefferson’s victims were physically or sexually assaulted. At 12 a little girl he’d decided was his one true love broke his heart, and he obsessed over her for the rest of his life. Years after Max left the Bay, Chloe is still writing her angry journal entries (but ready to take her back in a heartbeat). At 14 he started using drugs and ran away from home, living on the streets for a couple of weeks. After one hell of an acid trip he thought he’d become John Lennon. At 16 he discovered Holden, the Catcher in the Rye. His favorite movie was Wizard of Oz and he also identified with Dorothy. As an adult he became a very popular summer camp counselor. The kids called him Nemo, after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Chris has a Nemo submarine in his bathtub. Mark also worked briefly as a security guard.
Mark became a born-again Christian in 1970, four years after John Lennon declared the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The comment stuck with him for the next 10 years. His mental health ebbed and flowed, alternately attempting suicide and trying to reenact Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. The “little people” returned to Chapman’s head and he developed a persecution complex. He tried to change his name to Holden Caulfield and became fixated on saving kids from falling off the cliff of phoniness.
The breaking point came when he found a book full of photographs of John Lennon showing off his wealth- the height of hypocrisy for the man who penned Imagine. Mark started stripping naked, playing Beatles records and begging Satan to lend him his power. In 1980 he flew to New York to stop John Lennon from leading any more children to their doom. He hired a prostitute and gave her a massage instead of having sex with her, mirroring Holden’s experience. He left a little shrine on the hotel dresser with mementos from his life, including a postcard of Dorothy wiping away a tear from the Cowardly Lion. Before shooting Lennon Mark bought another copy of Catcher in the Rye, believing that afterwards he would curl up into a ball and vanish into the pages of the book. In his statement to the police, he said he was split in two parts. The big part was Holden Caulfield, and the small part- his child self- was the Devil, urging him to kill.

Dancing in the Dark

This is Donnie Darko, his little sister Samantha and her stuffed unicorn Ariel. They’re chilling in a motel room watching TV because their home was wrecked in a freak accident: a red and white spiraled jet engine landed directly on Donnie's room. The funny thing is, there was no plane flying overhead. Donnie narrowly avoided being crushed because a man in a giant rabbit suit named Frank told him to wake up and walk outside.
Frank starts paying Donnie nightly visits because he stopped taking his medications. The last time Donnie was unmedicated, he started setting buildings on fire. At night he becomes a sleepwalking zombie, taking his marching orders from Frank. The night that he escapes the jet engine Donnie sleepwalks out to a golf course where Frank tells him the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. He wakes up with a black marker in his hand and 28:06:42:12 on his arm- the same way Chloe wakes up with words like “Nevermore” written on her palm. The same way the insomniac Lyla uses Sean as her human post-it note. She tells Sean he’ll see more of her skills if he falls asleep first. Frank uses Donnie like Dr. Caligari uses Cesare. Every time Frank tells him to “wake up”, Donnie activates and does his bidding. Before Chloe burns down The Tree with Rachel, her dream graffiti options are “wake up” or “wake up”. The episode is titled Awake.
Donnie’s hallucinations are seeded just like Frank Bowers'. The mysterious jet engine was spawned from the roar of planes flying overhead as he waits for the school bus. You can hear the planes as Lyla walks Sean home from the bus. As she points one out the power line bisects the screen, mirroring the moment when Sean considers calling her back. It also hints at a split personality. In the Title Screen there are two porch umbrellas outside Sean’s house, a grey one on top of a green one. In game there is only the green one. Samantha writes a little story about Ariel leading a prince into a magical world. Frank is a twisted Ariel, Donnie’s White Rabbit leading him into Wonderland. Donnie's girlfriend says his name sounds made up, like a superhero. To change into his costume he simply flips up his hoodie, no telephone booth required.
Donnie’s science teacher is a hip young professor called Kenneth Monnitoff. It’s never explained why a professor is teaching at a high school. He tells Donnie that, in theory, a metal spacecraft flying faster than the speed of light could pass through a wormhole to travel back in time. In fact, any metal craft will do- a DeLorean, an airplane or a one-eyed rocket. When Max rewinds her broken camera in Jefferson’s class, she declares herself a human time machine. Her sketchbook has a drawing of a rather phallic looking rocket, with an arrow pointing to the cap that says “me”. Next to it stands a little character that looks like a cross between Frank the rabbit and Max from Wild Things. Both the squirrel in the woods and the demon Mushroom that Daniel is playing with in the motel look like they’re morphing into Frank- who, by the way, is one-eyed underneath the suit. The giant Wild Thing is a baby chick powered up- a magical child wielding its awesome powers on Frank’s behalf.
There’s another teacher at Donnie’s school named Kitty Farmer. She’s the coach of Sparkle Motion, the junior dance squad that Samantha belongs to. Kitty worships Jim Cunningham, a local self-help author and motivational speaker. He runs a talent show that leads to Sparkle Motion being selected to fly out to LA to perform on Ed McMahon’s Star Search. It’s very similar to the setup where Jefferson selects an Everyday Hero to go to San Francisco. Jim Cunningham has a secret “kiddie porn dungeon” in his home, and the implication is that Kitty is grooming children for him: Kitty Farmer is a Kiddie Farmer. Donnie is watching a double feature of The Evil Dead and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ when Frank opens a portal in the movie screen for him, showing him Jim Cunningham’s house and instructing him to burn it down. Donnie commits several attacks inspired by The Last Temptation- he sees himself as Jesus and Jim Cunningham (JC) as the Antichrist. Sadly, that’s a story for Part V.

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REAL G's betslip OKC +7

He is also on the OKC ML

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