52. The Decemberists “This is Why We Fight” The King is Dead [Capitol]
“And when we die, we will die with our arms unbound.”
Trolls are real; I’ve met one. He was a grubby little thing, that’s for sure, but on the whole his exterior didn’t quite rival his inner monster. A master at deceitful plotting and dreadful acts of manipulation, he once took me for everything I was worth. I met him underneath the New Jersey turnpike (where else?) and he went on a harangue about the oppression of his people and blah blah blah, so I naturally thought this would be a good opportunity for me to be a helpful and understanding fellow being, to help out a troll down on his luck. We hit it off immediately and quickly became joined at the hip, though his hip was far closer to the ground than mine. But no matter - I welcomed him into my home, I made him a delicious plate of scrambled eggs for dinner with just a little bit of cream in them (a trick reserved for special occasions only), and we watched copious amounts of bad action movies on Netflix. It was honestly the first night in a long while that I fell asleep with a smile on my face. Man. A smile on my face and a troll in my guest bedroom. I should have seen this coming. I woke up a full and almost exact eight hours of sleep later to find that my entire townhouse had been ransacked. Valuables were likely out the door first, but even the little stuff was gone too. Family photos I hadn’t looked at in months, non-perishable food items I had planned on donating to the local food shelf but hadn’t gotten around to yet, even the bags of leaves that had been sitting on my stoop for pickup (it wasn’t garbage day) had disappeared. So I did what any normal functioning person would do in such a situation: I went back the turnpike and now as of writing this missive have been waiting to meet another one for three days and counting. I can’t wait to bring a new troll back to my empty townhouse.
