In the winter of 1998, Sweden was all abuzz about a movie about two young girls trying to deal with life, and growing up, in a small Western Sweden town called Åmål.

Two teenage girls in small-town Sweden. Elin is beautiful, popular, and bored with life. Agnes is friendless, sad, and secretly in love with Elin. Åmål is a small insignificant town where nothing ever happens, where the latest trends are out of date when they get there.

Everybody saw the movie, everybody (said he) loved it, so in the spring of 1999, the writer-director Lukas Moodysson got on stage at the Swedish Film Awards to collect his loot: Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Actress awards for the two young ladies who played Elin and Agnes.

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There was a time when I thought I had actual superpowers. Not for long, but just a fleeting moment, I did think I could see through things. I wasn’t even ten years old, and had just recently been introduced to the world of superheroes, thanks to a Batman/Superman combo comic book I had read.

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I’m sitting at a coffee shop in downtown Stockholm, and some three meters from me, right in front of me, there’s Patrik Isaksson, a Swedish pop star. Whenever I see him on TV, or hear any of the songs on his first album, I think of the winter of 1999 when I often drove down to my apartment late, late at night, listening to his songs, singing along, practicing my Swedish, and finding hidden messages in his songs.

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It was a must-win game. A must. Winning was the only option, because a loss would end the tournament for the home team. In fact, losing would also bring the humiliation of having to come back and play another, meaningless, game.

“For the fans.”

The house was packed, people were wearing their flag not only on their sleeves, but also on their foreheads, bellies, cheeks, their pants, their skirts, and their hats. The team was full of homegrown Slovak stars who had returned to Bratislava to win, together.

People were hopeful but worried, confident but afraid, they were both optimists and pessimists at once, going from one end of the emotional range to the other as the puck moved from the end of the rink to the other. They screamed, they sang, they stomped their feet, they laughed – and, when they lost the game, they cried.

He did, too. He listened to the Finnish national anthem, then quickly wiped the tears from the corner of his eye, and walked away from the rink. The tournament may have been over for the home team, but it wasn’t over for him.

He disappeared into a small room, then re-appeared with a hose in his hand. Carefully, he walked onto the ice. He still had a job to do.

The show must go on.

I’m on Twitter. I tweet a few times a day, posting links and very, very short stories. Most of the links take you to my stories, either here, or to some other site that has published my writing. The short, short stories are all mine, as are the fake news I sometimes post.

I created my first Twitter account on May 1, 2007, so I’ve been tweeting almost four years now. I got on Twitter, because at the time, I wrote about the Web and technology for Scanorama, and thought I’d have to know what was going on.

At 10:22 that night, I told the world … this:

just spilled a cup of coffee

I think my second one was along the same lines. What can I say, I spill a lot of coffee. A few tweets later, I started to look around, to see if I could find people to follow, but basically, I stopped tweeting for a few months. Nobody was following me, nobody was listening to me, so what was the point?

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Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
– Cheers theme song

All the cool guys in all the cool movies always have their regular hangout, and when they get in, all they have to say to the bartender is “the usual”, or maybe not even that. Maybe they just nod, and get what they want. Even Homer Simpson.

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Across the table from me, an aspiring alchemist is working on a potion. His formula includes four teabags, hand-washing dish detergent, and nails. The kind you hit with a hammer. The purpose of the potion is still unknown, but it’s also beside the point. He just wants to be a wizard – not unlike a certain Harry Potter, the latest of heroes in Son’s life. And if he was happy to think that Han Solo’s real name was Hannes, just like his, like I told him, he’s also delighted to be “HP”.

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I have a love-hate relationship with cab drivers. While behind the wheel myself, I find their driving mostly arrogant and obnoxious, yet sloppy and careless, and have recently started to add mock admiration – “Oh, sorry, you must be right since you’re the professional driver here” – to my litany of insults and honking when I try to put them in their place in traffic. Gently, but firmly.

That changes when I’m in the backseat myself. Now, I’m the kind of guy who knows exactly what Wife meant when she came back from a massage last week, glowing, and raving about the masseuse, who was “so good, and didn’t say a word.” I never chit chat with the masseur, either, and when I get my hair cut, once a year, or so, I try to fall asleep in the chair. (And succeed).

But I do like to speak with cab drivers.

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Despite the fact that Wife and I shared an office space, and despite the fact that we were two of only about ten people in the office, we hardly exchanged a word during those first summer months. I would see her sit behind her desk, get up every once in a while to go for a cup of tea – tea is her cup of tea – and do whatever it was that she was doing.

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I’ve never been in a fight. Not once in my life. Not as a five-year-old, not as a rowdy teenager, not even as a hockey player. I’m a lover, not a fighter – at least if those two are the only alternatives.

I can imagine that a couple of times I’ve been closer than I realized. Especially that one time when I happened to spit a guy, on other other team, of course, on his visor during a hockey game. At least he said he’d wait for me outside after the game, and that he’d beat me up.

Well, I didn’t see anybody as I ran to my car in the dark.

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