It is only sitting down to post about how disappointingly intimidated I feel not just by the tone but by the content of J. Theophrastus Bartholomew's introduction to his Games You Can Play In Your Head - a book promoted by my new youtube heroes the Corridor Crew, and edited down by two of their number from an initial, sixteen-volume set found in a yard sale in Bayport, Minnesota - a book I was incredibly excited to receive, but whose opening pages contained such red flags as "You might think to yourself: but what about all my friends? To which I retort, of course, and without hesitation: who needs them?" or "if you are an adult who attempts to function as a cog in the blood-soaked machine we call the American Dream..." or "Say it aloud: I am playing a game, Father. A game that requires you to leave me in peace and allow me to be a more fully formed human" - it is literally only now, sitting down to write about how worried I am to continue reading this book, that it occurs to me what may already have been blindingly obvious to you: that there is of course no J. Theophrastus Bartholomew. That there never was an original sixteen-volume set, that this is an original work which would explain why J. Bartholomew's name is not on the cover, and that Sam Gorski and D. F. Lovett are entirely aware of how intimidating he sounds because they made him up to sound like an embittered, nihilistic kook because that's the joke. So all I want to share with you now, having sat down, is my absolutely genuine relief at that realisation. He never existed. Oh my god. It's okay. It was a joke. Oh. That feels so good.
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