Sam Adler-Bell in The Baffler:
THERE’S A GAME my girlfriend and I sometimes play. Well, really, it’s more of an argument: “Fuck, Marry, Kill” with the past, present, and future. My answer, which I take to be a good, solid American answer, is fuck the present, marry the future, and kill the past. My reasoning is that you should always want to fuck the present, to live in the moment (as the advertisers say), screw every hole of the now. Likewise, marrying the future is admirable, like monogamy, and prudent, like monogamy; it’s a wish, and a promise, for stability and grace. You have to believe in the future, be loyal to what comes next, to what and who you are always becoming. And that leaves only the past to kill. Which, so what? It’s the past. It’s already passed.
My girlfriend—who is also an American, but an American writer and lover of fiction—has a different answer. She says you should fuck the future, marry the past, and kill the present. I definitely see the appeal of fucking the future; it’s where the action is, the excitement, the unknown. The future is a stranger, and we all want to fuck strangers. And for her, the past is too precious and monumental to kill. Memory is a repository, a treasured burden worth bearing; it’s what you can’t seem to get rid of, even if sometimes you want to. So, you marry it. But here’s where the trouble starts: I can’t allow her to kill the present. When we get going on this topic, she says, “Well, what’s the present? Isn’t it always slipping away? Isn’t it gone the moment you try to do something in it?” And I say, “No! The present is this,” slicing my hand through the air, as if to catch it. “Isn’t this precious?”
More here.