Failure of the Day: Sad Story, in Hyperlinks

Not that I’m biased or anything, but Chris has the best blog on the Internet. He’s a blog savant. If you aren’t reading his daily updates, your life is empty and I pity you.

Monday's entry is a semi-linear semi-narrative; a story you have to piece together through a series of links. You can figure out the subject of the story only if you recognize the reference in first picture’s caption.

Now, you don’t have to recognize the caption and realize who the story is about—you can just assume it’s about someone. (Are you getting the idea about how fascinating and strange his fiction is? You might figure out who the main character is, or you might not. He doesn’t care, and it doesn’t really matter.) The story works either way.

There are four important elements in the story, outlined in the four links:
1. Car races in Sonoma
2. Golf Cart
3. Broken Leg
4. Crutches

The story goes like this: Someone goes to the races, gets hit by a golf cart, falls down and breaks their leg, and will be spending the next several months on crutches. Which is almost a funny story, but it’s not—because the caption under the first picture is a lyric from the song Tie Your Mother Down from the Queen album A Day at The Races. So my fellow writers, I dare you: you try to write someting where the emotional content is hidden in a song title that is never even mentioned.

Chris’s mom is OK, thankfully—she’s a trooper and one tough cookie. She was up and around on a walker fewer than 12 hours after the surgery to put the pins in to hold the bones in place of what all the x-ray techs agree is a very impressive tib-fib break. And she was pleased as all getout to tell me about her first ever ride in an ambulance. It’s Chris who puts on the brave face: his hypertrophied sense of personal responsibility the real casualty…he’s the one who gave his folks the tickets to the race.