Several years ago, I started playing a game with a few close friends. We had lost a rental car inside the parking deck of large airport, and were wandering in the vicinity of its last known location, a section of rows consecrated, in the floor’s zoological convention, to the pig. Upon realizing that the car was, in fact, located in an identical structure at the other end of the airport, I turned to my friend and asked, “So when we get there…what is the opposite of a pig, anyway?”

We argued most of the way over. By the time we reached the car, I decided I’d won.

The existential opposite of the pig is the unicorn.

Don’t ask me to explain it. Like the zen disciple, you’re either enlightened in a flash of recognition, or you go back to meditating. I don’t owe you. Existential Opposites is a game about aesthetics, and maybe the ontological balance of the universe. It inquires after essences. It asks, for a person, place, thing, idea, what is its truest counterweight in creation—the entity that, in the right configuration, might annihilate it as purely as matter does antimatter.

It is not for showing off, college boy. It will not make you popular at parties. It is best played with a few close friends—the kind who, like you, know how best to order the world—and at leisure, for as long as this and contemplation still exist.

It can also be funny.

This is my gallery of Existential Opposites. Enjoy.

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