If you care about your image, dying should scare you to death. For years, the final moment of our lives has been glorified as some serene, almost beautiful process: we die peacefully then cut-scene and bam—tux, flowers, funeral. Nothing in-between.

The first thing he did was ask me on a date. It was in the bitter cold of a California winter, and the mall was decorated with all kinds of winter festivities. I could hear the sounds of steel blades scratching the ice behind me as little children attempted to push their feet forward on the foreign temporary terrain.

Winslow knew exactly what was going to happen. But why stop a show, right?

It is a family legend that my great-great granduncle Ezekiel used to go on fishing trips with his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, at the end of which, Waldo—he preferred the name Waldo to Ralph, if you can believe it—inevitably dragged my relative to a local brothel (no one in my family believes this, but still).

All seasoned gamers have their own sack of dice. Maybe even several sacks of dice. Those are the greatest gamers of all.