Your Friday Sunday Game Night email

From: Nathan
To: Game Friends

Game Friends,

In response to a boop, or a blong, or a tweet-twoot, you glance at your computer or your phone or perhaps even your smart-watch (how forward-minded of you!) to see what is seeking your attention, and, seeing that it is a new email from that author of those invitation emails you’ve been receiving of a Friday morning, you prepare yourself accordingly: it may be that you first dispel any other distractions, so as to better enjoy the entertaining wordplay that is (you assume) contained within, or on the other hand it may be that you don’t particularly care for that author’s overwrought style and a little distraction might go a long way, or it could be that you will save the email for later today because Friday morning is a particularly productive or busy time for you, and in any case, when you do decide it’s time to read that email—whether immediately, to reduce your number of unread emails to zero (or at least to reduce it, full stop), or when your curiosity gets the better of you, or simply when you have the time or mental capacity or desire—perhaps you open the email brusquely, perhaps eagerly, perhaps resignedly; whichever emotion you impart into the process of clicking or tapping or even speaking a request to a virtual assistant to actually open the new email and have it displayed on whichever screen you are viewing or, if you prefer or require, have its words processed through a speech synthesizer and the resulting audio played on a set of speakers in your vicinity, that emotion will not be imparted to the author and so you feel free to enter into the email-perception process with whatever emotional state you choose or has been chosen for you, without worrying about how your affect will effect the author, and anyways you already know what the pertinent information in the email will be, i.e. that the author is hosting a game night at his apartment this coming Sunday at five in the afternoon, which information in fact you don’t even need to read the email to receive, since the very fact of the email, without a clear message in the subject line canceling the regular weekly event, is sufficient to provide all of the pertinent information on its own, but so in any case you do open the email eventually and scan its lines just to verify what you already know (q.v. pertinent information supra) and, finding the manner in which the information has been delivered to be novel or interesting or entertaining or, on the contrary, boring or tedious or derivative of any number of prior works in literature, you click or tap (or direct your voice-controlled computing device to virtually click) the reply-all button and compose an enthusiastic RSVP in the affirmative, which reads as follows:

From: Kyle
To: Game Friends

tl;dr i assume there’s game night and i’ll be there

From: Trevor
To: Game Friends

Unfortunately, you will not be attending game night, though it is with great unwillingness that you publicly admit this.

From: Lauren
To: Game Friends

Upon receipt of the weekly Sunday Game Night Friday Email I, who currently compose this paltry missive, was ensconced in a chair in a row of chairs, a row which undulated like a brown river, perhaps even, in unintended acknowledgement of these retrograde times, like the Flint water system, below the beacon reading 27, which is to say, gate 27 of the San Jose airport, that purgatory in a constellation of purgatories scattered across this retrograde nation like pearls from a broken necklace, purgatories which demand both absolute haste and absolute patience, which exist (by the existence of its guests) in all time zones at once, anonymous, multilingual, a waypoint to where we do not ask, ensconced, then, in a time which I now trap in the past tense but which permeates the boundary of the past like smoke through cheesecloth, ensconced between Seattle, my home, the home of my family and my love, and San Francisco, the blushing candidate of my love’s career efforts, the city making a play for his future, and thus, for mine, though my prospects are not so dim that I am caged to him, yet accompanying him on this adventure seems a worthy ambition on its own, and one that does not diminish my other ambitions, ensconced, then, between the present and the future-that-may-be, that future flickering before us like a veiled dancer, reading the invitation to Game Night, this Sunday, in the Seattle that will go on even without us, should we leave, that most home-like of activities, the tick of this northwest clock, and despite the purgatory of place and, all-encompassing, the purgatory of choice, Seattle is still and undeniably my home, [—address redacted—] to be exact, and where could I be but present?