Sometimes, reminders of the past pop up in the strangest of places.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I had to drop off some paperwork at another writer’s desk in the office.<\/p>\n
“You have an XFL football,” I said. The XFL was the football league the WWE and NBC had put together in the early years of the decade. It lasted a single season. No one really knew what it was. Wrestling fans were upset because it wasn’t wrestling-meets-football like they thought. Football fans were upset because the quality of play was, erm, poor.<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” he said. “Someone gave it to me.”<\/p>\n
“Cool,” I said.<\/p>\n
“You can have it.”<\/p>\n
“I don’t want it.”<\/p>\n
“I don’t want it, either. You can have it.”<\/p>\n
“I don’t want it.”<\/p>\n
“Take it.”<\/p>\n
“Well, okay, if you insist.” He handed me the football.<\/p>\n
“One less thing in my cubicle,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Y’know,” I said, “strange but true story. I applied for a job with the XFL.”<\/p>\n
He looked at me with a blank stare. “What sort of job?” Doubtless he thought I was going to say, “Yeah, I thought I could start a football career with the XFL.”<\/p>\n
Instead… “They were taking applications for writers, to cover the league on their website. I applied for a job to write web content for them, along with a bunch of friends of mine.” I shrugged. “Obviously, I didn’t get the job. Obviously, given the league’s one year lifespan, that was probably a good<\/i> thing.”<\/p>\n
He gestured at the football in my hands. “Souvenir, then. The road not taken.”<\/p>\n
“Robert Frost,” I said.<\/p>\n
It’s always nice when Robert Frost enters the daily conversation.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, reminders of the past pop up in the strangest of places. A few weeks ago, I had to drop off some paperwork at another writer’s desk in the office. “You have an XFL football,” I said. The XFL was the football league the WWE and NBC had put together in the early years ofContinue reading “On Blasts From the Past”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}