tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55612394943157874452024-03-05T06:53:25.310-05:00small drunken cog in a giant destructive empire*Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.comBlogger233125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-30362798593578416592019-07-29T17:10:00.001-04:002019-07-29T17:10:13.218-04:00Spákonufell <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">03 June 2026<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">“</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Fuck
my life,</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">”</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">
Jonah wheezed, his voice drowned and forgotten in the subarctic gusts cascading
over the tightrope-thin ridge that, according to locals, was the easiest path
to the mountain</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">’</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">s summit. Looking down at the serrated, viciously eroded slope of the
ravine they</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">’</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">d just scaled </span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">–</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"> still peppered with the dirty gray corpses of the last spring snows </span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">–</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"> he couldn</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">’</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">t imagine a more difficult route.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">“</span></u><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Crazy ass Icelanders,” he said to himself, adjusting the hood of the
too-thin parka he</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">’</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">d bought four days earlier in Reykjavík.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ragnar
trotted a couple dozen meters ahead. Every minute or so, as the trail had gotten
steeper, he’d stopped to make sure his client was keeping pace, to flash that
same stupid gap-toothed grin at Jonah, his white-blond ponytail flailing like
the tail of an annoyingly eager puppy that</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Gothic";">’</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">s worn out its welcome but still wants attention. How the seemingly
late-middle-aged man wasn’t brutally hungover after the previous night’s idiocy
was as much of a mystery to Jonah as the reason for their climb. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Now, as they
approached what looked like the toughest incline they’d encountered so far,
Ragnar swiveled, shouted something that sounded like <i>summit</i> (Jonah
hoped), and scrambled spider-like the rest of the way up, quickly disappearing
over the top of a massive, tabletop-shaped outcropping.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Ten minutes later, after
a far less nimble ascent, choking on the fumes of Brennivín, synthetic bourbon,
and god knew what else leaking from his pores, Jonah saw that they were, in
fact, at the top of Spákonufell. A volcanically flattened, moss-covered
plateau, where, a semi-lucid Ragnar had explained during their debauched
marathon at the café, a sorceress called Þordis used to hike every day 1,000
years earlier. Apparently, she’d also buried a treasure somewhere on the
mountain, one that could only be discovered by a non-baptized woman. The only
thing Jonah could think about, as the burning sensation slowly dissipated from
his legs, was how impressive Þordis’s calves must have been. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ragnar
was perched on a nearby boulder, typing something on his phone. He looked up,
the perma-grin already stretched across his too-smooth cheeks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You
look tired, Mr. Overhill,” he said, vaguely incredulous. “I hope this wasn’t
too much for you to handle. Perhaps we should go through another round of
diagnostics before Thursday?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“It’s
fine,” Jonah said, reaching into his backpack for a water bottle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ragnar
motioned at the thick layer of pillowy vegetation suffocating most of the
nearby rocks. “Normally we would tell people not to sit or lie down on the
moss,” he said, “because once disturbed it won’t grow back for maybe 70 years.
But if you need to take a, what is it, a breather, please be my guest. It’s
really quite comfy. And by the time we plan on bringing you back, it’ll be –”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
was cut off by his own obnoxious ringtone – “Live Like You Were Dying” by Tim
McGraw. Was that meant to be some kind of ironic joke between Ragnar and his
coworkers at the lab? Did people in Iceland actually listen to Tim McGraw?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Ragnar looked at the
screen, shook his head. “Sorry, I need to take this.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Jonah grunted and shuffled
past him, leaving a trail of semi-permanent footsteps in the moss. Looming
toward the western edge of the tabletop was a large and clearly unnatural stone
formation that had built to look like an altar, where a shoddily made treasure
chest had been placed, clearly a nod to the sorceress whose odd influence was
still so deeply felt in the town below. A sequence of images from the café suddenly
flashed in Jonah’s mind: the woman who ran the prophetess museum, her
unnerving, coal-black glare, the paper she’d slipped him. Taking a deep breath,
he shook off the sudden chill that had begun to creep up his sweat-drenched
spine. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">The farther he
walked, the more the view opened. He could see the upper slopes of the mountain
and several neighboring peaks, the impenetrable basalt and rugged gravel
cascading down to gentler hills rippling in the sunlight, bursting with purple
lupine, alpine bistort, and reindeer lichen. And farther down, the hyper-green
jigsaw of fields where horses grazed lazily and sheep with red and green
markings on their backs nursed pairs of greedy newborns. Then the red and beige
corrugated roofs of Skagaströnd’s tiny suburban sprawl, the smoky blue Arctic
Ocean leading to nowhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Maybe that was why
Ragnar had suggested they take the hike. To give Jonah one last glimpse at what
he would be giving up. To feel the heat in his muscles, the wind against his
flesh, the intoxicating briny aroma of the sea, while there was still time for
him to change his mind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
couldn’t deny that it was beautiful, outrageously so. But as he squinted for a
more detailed assessment of the town – the ghostly harbor and shuttered fish
processing plant, the community center that had been rebuilt as a refuge for
those smart (or lucky) enough to get visas before the quarantines in Brooklyn
and Miami, the upside-down American flag flying outside it – he had never been
more certain of anything in his life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In a
little less than 24 hours, his body would die. His brain would be extracted and
embalmed, kept in hyperbaric slumber in the sterile basement of the BioPol
laboratory until… He didn’t really know. He hadn’t paid much attention to most
of the emails Ragnar had been sending him for months, the dozens of forms he’d
signed, the endless biometrics. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">But whether he awoke
from the cocoon into some wildly distant, unanticipated new reality or didn’t
wake up at all, it didn’t matter. Anything – or nothing – would be an
undeniable improvement over the last three years. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">“Mr. Overhill,”
Ragnar said, suddenly inches away. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Jonah flinched,
tripped on something and fell forward, his head careening toward the altar. Ragnar
grabbed his shoulders from behind at the last moment, held on tightly until
Jonah was sturdy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">“Where the hell did
you come from?” Jonah stammered. “How did I not hear –”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">“Mr. Overhill,”
Ragnar repeated, ignoring the question, “are you still sure you want to do
this?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">Jonah took a breath,
instinctively slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and lightly fingered his
phone, tracing the outline of the two faces that always appeared on his home
screen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;">“OK,” he finally
managed to get out, scarcely more than a whisper, but audible in the first
windless silence since he’d come to Iceland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He meant it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-63232520360966440502017-06-08T17:40:00.001-04:002017-06-08T17:40:50.925-04:00The Long and Hairy of It: Part One<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">2.
<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The first time I saw him
was in the summer when I was thirteen years old, ninety miles north of Fresno
in the Sierra National Forest. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">We
were on a family vacation to visit my father’s half-brother, Gregory, a
successful San Francisco-based actuary. A week before we were scheduled to
arrive, Uncle Greg decided that a lively – but mostly silent – hiking excursion
in the middle of nowhere would be preferable to discussing the particulars of
his latest divorce – Aunt Margo had left him for a t’ai-chi instructor named Lotus
or something similarly floral – or subjecting us to his undecorated condo with
eggshell-colored walls that reeked of the desolation inherent in unforeseen,
late-middle-aged bachelordom. I was just happy to get away from Andrea, my
first crush, who had recently dumped me over instant messenger in a savage
proto-emoji assault. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Today
I probably wouldn’t be able to pick Uncle Greg out of a police lineup of pale, foie-gras-livered
insurance executives, but I’ll never forget the visual details of that trip: wandering
through dense, pine and oak-covered foothills and wildflower-strewn meadows,
watching Chinook salmon break water in the Merced River, climbing up to the
sparse, chilly tundra. And arguing with my little brother, Gordon (who was
still talking at this point), about whose turn it was to use one of the three single-use
cameras we’d been allotted. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">On
the second-to-last day of hiking, we were descending the western slope of a
smallish peak, heading back to civilization. Gordy, as usual, was being a ten-year-old
shithead, wasting the last of our Kodaks to snap away aimlessly at the dense
vegetation on either side of us, creating splatter-pieces that would, once they
were developed, probably make Basquiat look like a Dutch master. Around a sharp
bend in the trail, I noticed a cool multi-colored rock pile that someone had
built to resemble a pyramid. Knowing that there probably only two or three
exposures left on the camera, I snatched it from Gordy’s sausage-link fingers
and aimed it at the rocks. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“You
stupid dingleberry!” he screeched at me in that weird, wavy voice that never
ended up dropping to the octave it should have. He scampered away to find my
parents, muttering a few more PG-13 curses along the way. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
adults in our party were farther along the trail, out of sight, having what I
imagined was a very somber discussion about the three empty bottles of
navy-strength gin that had tumbled out of Uncle Greg’s sleeping bag when we’d
been packing up camp the previous morning. I had at least a few seconds to
myself before Gordy tattled. I squinted into the Kodak’s viewfinder, turned the
flash on, and aimed at the rocks. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Before
I was ready to snap the picture, I heard rustling in the woods, maybe thirty yards
from where I was crouching. Whatever it was, it sounded big, way bigger than
the bobcat my dad had spotted scaling a red fir a couple days earlier. I crept
into the forest to get a closer shot, my free hand reaching into the pocket of
my cargo shorts for the canister of bear mace that my mom had made me promise
not to use on my brother. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
wasn’t quiet enough. A massive head and torso emerged from behind a moss-colored
log. He was covered in reddish-brown fur, had a wide, simian nose and dark,
brooding eyes that pierced me with a combination of curiosity and mild
annoyance as he munched on some leaves with teeth the size of wheat crackers.
He was standing upright, must have been at least eight feet tall. And even
though I couldn’t be sure of his actual gender – “He” just seemed to have some
really strong, stoic masculine vibes going on – his species was obvious. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
snapped the last three exposures on the camera’s roll as fast as I could. The
Bigfoot stood motionless, silently chewing and pondering the situation, probing
the depths of my early-teen soul with a gaze that felt decidedly empathetic.
Time suddenly seemed to slow down. To my adrenaline-addled mind, I had found a
hairy father figure, one who would understand the pain Andrea’s endless streams
of digital frowny faces had caused, and wouldn’t just tell me to suck it up and
to disconnect the modem because he needed to use the phone. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As
weird as it sounds, we were having a moment. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Until
the shrill sounds of Gordy’s increasingly louder whining broke the forest’s
silence. I swiveled for a couple seconds to glare back in the direction of the
trail. When I turned around, Bigfoot was gone. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Before
we left California, my parents took the Kodak to a one-hour-photo place near
the airport, just so I’d shut up about what I’d <i>thought</i> I’d seen. I tore open the envelope that contained the
developed pictures while were waiting to check our bags. The first picture I’d
taken looked like one of Gordy’s: a chaotic sludge of green and brown streaks.
The second was only a little better, you could see a blurry but somewhat
defined figure that was clearly mammalian, in that it might have resembled
anything from a gorilla to a Rottweiler, depending on the viewer’s perspective.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
third picture was a keeper. It wasn’t the clearest shot, the creature seemed a
little farther away than I remembered, but you could plainly see the details of
his hair, nose, teeth, and, most importantly, his eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Bear,”
my dad said, looking over my shoulder as he handed me my plane ticket. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Definitely
a bear, hon,” my mom said, giving me another half-hearted scolding for leaving
the trail before returning to rummaging the confines of a carry-on bag for her
in-flight vampire romance novel. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Gordy
cupped his hand around my ear and craned his head in my direction. “I believe
you, Vance,” he whispered defiantly, which almost made me stop hating him for
breaking the bond Bigfoot and I had so briefly shared. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
lukewarm response to the photograph did little to quiet my manic enthusiasm.
When we got back home to Connecticut, I sent photocopies of the picture to the
zoology departments of all the local colleges and a handful of promising-sounding
“research” organizations – the North American Bigfoot Alliance, the Sasquatch Exploration
Society, et cetera. I got their addresses from a mulleted thirtysomething named
Todd who played Magic: The Gathering at the local library (until a couple
months later when a custodian found the cameras he’d been hiding in the
bathrooms near the children’s section). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Though
the colleges never got back to me, the non-academic response was more than anything
I expected. Not only did the higher-ups at the organizations I’d contacted
believe me, they wanted to know more. Was I able to collect any hair or stool
samples? Had I heard any distinct vocalizations prior to making visual contact?
Did I know the exact GPS coordinates of the sighting? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Unfortunately
the picture was the only tangible thing I had to offer, but nevertheless, I was
asked to be interviewed, invited to join online chat forums and to attend
biannual gatherings, and offered the chance to go on an all-expenses-paid
scientific expedition, retracing the hike I’d taken through the Sierra National
Forest with a rogue primatologist who called himself Abominable Andy. For the
first time I felt like I was part of something special, a community, albeit one
that seemed to contain more than a few greasy basement-dwellers, the type of men
who, like Todd, probably had pictures of a much different variety hidden on
secret hard drives somewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This
was also right around the time that Gordy stopped talking. One day he came home
from school and walked upstairs without his daily ritual of begging for a
forbidden pre-dinner Pudding Pop, which was strange, but not an immediate cause
for concern. For the next five hours he sat on his bed staring at nothing,
totally emotionless, an activity that would become his preferred pastime for
the better part of three decades. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Initially
the consensus was that he was faking it, that the zombie routine was just
another baby-of-the-family cry for attention, that it would run its course. The
first few days followed a similar routine. Gordy would get sent home from
school early for insubordination, he’d go up to his room and sit there while
one or both of my parents would threaten, then plead, then beg for him to stop
messing around, that the joke or the protest or whatever it was had gone on
long enough. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
tried a more aggressive approach. About a week into his silence, I walked into
Gordy’s room and jacked him between his stomach rolls, hard, a gut-shot that
normally would have caused a five-alarm screeching session. He made a quiet
whooshing noise and hunched over a little, but that was it. I opened his
dresser and pulled out a handful of his sacred comics. I held <i>Captain America</i> #443 in front of his
face and slowly tore the cover in half, followed by the rest of the pages in
the book. No response. I crushed <i>Venom</i>
#1, Gordy’s all-time favorite, into a ball and whipped it at his head, hitting
him square between the eyes. He didn’t flinch. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He
wasn’t faking anything. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It’s
not like he became a full-on vegetable. He would sit at the dining room table
and slowly shove food into his mouth, staring at his plate the entire time. He
would turn on the TV and plop down in front of it, cross-legged, but you
couldn’t tell if he was looking at the screen or something beyond it that the
rest of us couldn’t see. It was quickly decided that going to school would be
an impossibility for him, but Gordy didn’t seem to mind my parents dragging him
to an ever increasing number of appointments with psychologists, neurologists,
hypnotherapists, and any other –ist that might offer up something better than
“I don’t know.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Instead
of deflating them, my brother’s condition seemed to energize my parents. They
joined committees, attended symposiums, organized charity bicycle rides, and
contemplated the merits of rubbing shoulders with the anti-vaxxer crowd. They
cocooned themselves in a constant stream of questions – Where was he on the
spectrum? Which spectrum? Would the medication help? Would the medication hurt?
What about a third opinion? A fourth? – that were asked with the steadfastness
of caregivers who had accepted their reality and were choosing to thrive in it.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">My
own reality was more complicated. What good was being a perfectly healthy son
to parents who had suddenly transformed themselves into bleeding-heart
champions of the disabled? What good was being an older brother if you couldn’t
even protect your younger sibling from himself?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
didn’t want to look for answers. Instead, I retreated deeper into a world that
was far beyond the scope of what stuffy science types and the doctors who
probed my brother would consider possible, a world that the picture I’d taken
in California proved was the real deal. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
expanded my Bigfoot research to include every unsubstantiated creature I could
get information about, from the Loch Ness Monster and Jersey Devil to the
Man-eating Tree of Madagascar and Iceland’s Lagarfljót Worm. I subscribed to
every unconventional magazine I could afford, planned unfeasible multi-continental
excursions, and spent countless hours scouring internet chat rooms and message
boards with the focus of a monk pouring over scriptures. I understood how lucky
I’d been on the hike; I don’t think that I ever really believed it would happen
again, that I’d come face to face with a Nessie slowly emerging from the lake
in all its scaly glory, or hear the notoriously chilling shrieks of the Honey
Island Swamp Monster. But the idea of something like that being possible awoke
a hopefulness in me that I couldn’t find anywhere else, a feeling that died a
little whenever I saw Gordy strapped onto an examination chair with spider webs
of nodes crisscrossing his skull and tubes coming out of his bruised arms that
already looked like a junkie’s. A feeling that stayed with me once I stopped
going to the doctors’ offices. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">My
budding career as a cryptozoologist was short-lived, however. High school (and
puberty) came and I learned early on that lecturing about the alleged human
menstrual blood involved in Chupacabra mating rituals or the impressive length
of a recently discovered Yeti turd wouldn’t get you into Maggie Furman’s jeans
or get you invited to your first raid of an unguarded liquor cabinet. There
were plenty of discoveries to be made that didn’t involve trekking through malaria-ridden
jungles or holding sonar equipment over the side of a flimsy canoe for hours at
a time. You only had to have a decent excuse to borrow Mom’s Subaru, and a
knowledge of whose parents were out of town for the weekend and/or who had the pot
with the least amount of seeds in it. Information that was easy to come by for
someone with as much well-honed online communication experience as myself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">By
the time I finished my first semester at a well-known hipster haven in Upstate
New York, the (mostly) legendary monsters of my pre-adolescence had almost
disappeared from my memory, replaced by a steady, pseudo-spiritual diet of Beat
poets, the Tao of Whoever, and abundant helpings of LSD and mushrooms. I found
myself tapped into a mysterious, invisible world that existed everywhere, even among
the growing piles of Taco Bell wrappers and bong-water stains of my dorm room.
One that could be accessed easily if you knew the right combination of
substances to introduce to your bloodstream. <i>The real adventure is in your mind, bro! No, wait, the adventure IS
your mind!<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
only problem with college is that it ends. Your brain, even when it’s hopped up
on enough acid to make Antiques Roadshow tolerable, doesn’t have the ability to
instantly vaporize thousands of dollars of student loan debt. I graduated and
moved to Manhattan, got a job doing PR and marketing for a swanky art gallery
in the Financial District frequented by generations of moneyed douches and
their trout-lipped better halves. I was paying my bills <i>and</i> helping to rip off the corrupt corporate overlords. Win-win
situation!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> But this was early 2008, which meant that in a
few months the economy would collapse, and every suit on Wall Street would be
far more concerned about saving his own ass than about which Haring print would
best complement his collection of coke mirrors. I would be laid-off, faced with
the very real possibility of moving back into my parents’ house, of spending
the foreseeable future sharing a bathroom with my conversationally challenged
brother.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Luckily,
it didn’t come to that. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
owner of Fat Frank’s, a crusty Upper West Side pub where I was rapidly spending
my unemployment checks took pity on me, offering to make me his new apprentice
bartender. What I thought would be a stop-gap gig was only the first in what
would become a decade-long trudge through the recession-proof (but not
pain-free) world of booze-slinging. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Many
people who have spent any significant time working in a fast food restaurant
will tell you that the aroma of deeply fried chemical-meats becomes intolerable
after a while, that they’d rather swallow roach poison than eat a Big Mac.
Bartending isn’t like that, at least it wasn’t for me. After-shift beers
quickly turned into before-and-after-shift-beers, which turned into Jameson
shots whenever I felt like it, or whenever Mr. Francis (the bar’s owner) and
the neighborhood bar flies who congregated around him felt like it. Which was
pretty much constantly. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Weeks
became months and then years, and I became a dive bar all-star. I got to know
most of the regulars and the semi-frequent drunks better than my own family. If
I couldn’t remember your name, I’d still remember your drink of choice, and I’d
have it ready for you before you took your seat. I could pour up to six beers at
once while reciting the recipes for an entire pantheon of disgustingly sugary
shooters, from Buttery Nipples and Redheaded Sluts to Kamikazes and Russian Woo
Woos. My efficiency had nothing to do with trying to get better tips. The less
time it took me to interact with people meant more time to sip my own
Jack-and-gingers, to fiddle with the music playlist, or to sneak a glance at
the Yankees or Knicks game beaming above my head. The customers I should have
been so eager to please were little more than minor pests on the periphery of
my vision, annoying but brief pauses in the whiskey-tinged party I was having
mostly with myself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Fat
Frank’s became such an extension of my being that I stopped noticing the
casualties: the former classmates who were initially so pumped to be friends
with someone who had the power to douse them in free drinks, the girl I’d been
dating off and on since graduation, the girls I went home with after work who
I’d never see again. They all became ghosts, abandoned by an attention span
that lasted as long as it took me to pour another shitty domestic draft, or to
slug another shot. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
lifestyle was antisocial and viciously unhealthy, but it was steady money if
you had the stomach for it. Which I did, as long as I didn’t have to get up
before two-thirty or work anything resembling a sober shift. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> During the afternoons, when the hangover demons were
spitting shards of fire into the deepest parts of my dehydrated brain matter,
when crawling from my bed to the toilet seemed like an impossible, Odyssean
journey, I would occasionally curse my position in life. How had things gotten
to this point? I’d come to New York with a promising career, a healthy social
life, and something vaguely resembling hope for the future, only to have it all
swept out from under me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> The government and the banks were obvious scumbags, sure,
but I couldn’t help but think that something bigger was going on, something
that went beyond a few Washington, D.C. lobbyists, beyond the interest rates
and subprime mortgages that the talking heads kept harping on. Starting the
research was as easy as a few keystrokes on the crud-stained laptop that lived
on the floor next to my bed. The internet had grown exponentially since my days
as a monster junkie in the late nineties; there were countless alternative news
and history sites dedicated to secret worlds that went far deeper than anything
CNN or the BBC had ever reported, narratives that were far crazier than
anything my alcohol-dulled mind could concoct on its own. I pored over alleged
evidence of systematic fluoride poisoning, the Vatican’s knowledge of ancient
aliens, libido-altering chemicals infused into meat products, mysterious
experiments and underwater pyramids in the Bermuda Triangle, secret Nazi bases
in Antarctica, staged moon landings, thousands of false flag operations,
underground fake news factories in rural Virginia, centuries-old elitist cabals
ruled by reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system who had
orchestrated everything from the fall of Rome to 9/11. All that I’d taken for
granted about history and my own daily life now seemed to ripple with sinister
undertones, the feeling that I was a tiny, unwitting cog in a machine I could
barely comprehend. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> I’d wanted something, anything, to break the monotony of
my literally and figuratively wasted days and nights, and I’d found it in a big
way. But what did it all mean? Where was the White Rabbit (my search engine)
taking me? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"> The longer I spent trying to untangle the Great
Conspiracy Mindfuck Rubik Cube, the more I kept coming back to the same date:
December 21, 2012. It marked the end of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar" title="Mesoamerican Long Count calendar"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; text-decoration-line: none;">Mesoamerican Long Count calendar</span></a><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">,
but its significance didn’t end with a few star-obsessed Mayan priests trying
to make sense of the heavens. There were New Agers who thought that the winter
solstice would bring a major physical and spiritual change to the Earth, that
we would all be ushered into a new, ostensibly trippier age. Ancient astronaut
theorists spoke enthusiastically about the <i>Independence
Day</i>-style return of the Annunaki, an alien race worshipped as gods by the
Sumerians, who now lived on a seldom-appearing planet called Nibiru. Proof of
the End Times could be found just about everywhere, from the writings of
Nostradamus to patterns of mass extinctions supposedly observed in the fossil
record. A retired tour guide in Arizona announced that he would jump off a
cliff near his house and into an intergalactically aligned portal that would
open at exactly midnight on the twenty-first, saving him from whatever
catastrophe might befall our doomed civilization. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Something
was coming. I didn’t know what it was, but I would be ready for it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
whittled my drinking down to a minimum, started taking Krav Maga lessons in
Brooklyn and urban survival classes in Central Park, did pushups until my palms
bled. I filled my apartment and a nearby storage unit with camping gear, fire
starters, first-aid kits, gallons of bottled water, machetes I bought on eBay,
throwing stars I found in Chinatown, and enough cans of Spam, tuna fish, and
baked beans to feed me through at least three apocalypses. I spent the quieter
hours at work glued to my phone, studying evacuation routes and off-grid living
strategies. I took practice escape hikes through the Bronx and over the George
Washington Bridge, cruising the wilds of northern New Jersey and Westchester
County until my feet blistered and peeled. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
closer it got to The Big Day, the more prepared I felt. I barely recognized the
confident, chiseled human who stared back at me through the bathroom mirror
every morning, and neither did the patrons of Fat Frank’s. I was handed more
napkins and credit card receipts with phone numbers scribbled on them in the
first four months of 2012 than in the previous four years combined. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
attention did little to break my focus. Whenever I was asked about my improved
physique and stoic, non-bleary-eyed demeanor, I’d mumble something about training
for a half-marathon and quickly change the subject. I wasn’t dumb enough to
share my beliefs with people who thought that the Military-Industrial Complex
was the name of an electronic music festival, and it wasn’t like I could bring
any prospective hookup back to a fifth-floor walk-up that now looked like the
ideal bunker in a doomsday prepper’s wet dream. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
had one goal: witness some wild, world-changing shit – whatever that might be –
and figure out how to survive it. Nothing else mattered. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As
September, October, and November rolled by, I stayed quiet, kept my head down,
and finished my preparations. Every afternoon when I came home from the gym, I
cleaned and catalogued my growing weapons and food stockpiles. When I wasn’t doing
Yoga or tinkering with homemade squirrel traps, I kept my eyes glued to every form
of media available. But besides the occasional rehashed History Channel “documentary”
or someone claiming on their blog that they’d seen a massive dark object enter
the solar system through their hobby telescope, there wasn’t much new information
to be gleaned. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">The calm before the storm</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">,
I told myself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">December
twentieth was a Thursday, but Fat Frank’s was oddly quiet, even during happy
hour. Which was fine by me. I set up my laptop, two tablets and my phone behind
the bar, each one tuned to a different obscure message board or subreddit. I
turned three of the TVs to mainstream news networks of various sociopolitical
persuasions. My bug-out bag was parked next to my feet, stuffed with enough
supplies to weather society’s collapse, or at least get me out of New York. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
hours went by and I focused on the screens, unconsciously pouring drinks and
not caring if anyone paid for them. The main news stories on the TVs were about
health care legislation, an increase in botched plastic surgeries, and a
decrease in teen smoking rates. The conspiracy sites were maddeningly quiet. A small
sliver of anxiety rose from my stomach, then another, building until I felt
like the kid who spends all night working on a history paper and wakes up realizing
she forgot about her first-period calculus test. Or maybe school had been
cancelled and I was the only one who didn’t know about it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Then
it was midnight. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A
newscaster made a joke about putting his “survival ark” on eBay. A live feed of
the retiree in Arizona showed him peering over the edge of cliff, shrugging and
walking off-screen, past several of his clearly disappointed followers. Someone
on a preppers forum posted an apology for mistaking a Nutella smudge on his
laptop screen as a fiery gateway to the underworld enveloping his Google Earth
maps. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Outside,
a snarling bum pressed his bare chest against one of the bar’s windows, manipulating
it seductively in a counter-clockwise motion. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Nothing
happened. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
frantically studied the monitors for a few more minutes, my anxiety at
full-throttle, before looking up to scan the room I’d been neglecting. There
was Mina, the heavily tattooed waitress from the Asian tapas place across the
street, a trio of flush-cheeked finance bros, and a scrawny, asthmatic ecstasy
peddler named Big Rickey. They stared mindlessly at their phones or at the
basketball game I’d left on one of the TVs. Their spirits hadn’t suddenly
ascended to a higher level of consciousness. They were the same boring,
willfully ignorant sheep they’d always been. But that made them smarter than
me. They hadn’t spent the last several years suckered into the false belief
that anything truly interesting could ever happen. And they definitely hadn’t
spent the better part of a week comparing deer urine and crossbow prices on Amazon.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I
sighed, grabbed two bottles from the well and placed them on the bar. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Who’s
trying to get fucked up?” I asked, rhetorically, before taking a monstrous slug
of cheap tequila that my now-healed liver was only too happy to accommodate. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
next two or three hours were a collection of blurry snapshots: handing out shots
of whiskey, shots of rum, shots of vodka, shots of whatever was left on the
quickly dwindling shelves behind the bar. Pretending to be Tom Cruise in <i>Cocktail </i>by flipping bottles behind my
back, then watching those bottles shatter on the floor in slow motion.
Mistaking Mina’s enthusiasm for my antics as an invitation to make out. Rickey
and two of the bros going into the bathroom and staying there for a long time.
New people coming and going, faceless and unimportant. Someone cutting me off
mid-sentence and saying, “At least with Y2K there was <i>some</i> credible evidence,” and me half-heartedly trying to stab his
or her hand with a wine opener. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> I took the last bottle of Jameson off the shelf, poured a
glassful, and disappeared into it. </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-32753122423415929912017-03-14T17:37:00.000-04:002017-06-08T17:41:16.726-04:00The Tunnel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>1.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>“Fuck Bigfoot.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> Michael’s brow creased and his lips curled into a slight
frown as he considered those two words I’d just muttered, a phrase I’d really
only meant for myself. He looked down at the phone-like device in his hand,
then at the tunnel in the warehouse floor that the device had made visible a
few seconds earlier, presumably trying to think of an appropriate response.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “I’m not sure what that means,” he said, finally, “but
you have to understand that –”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> He was interrupted by a vague hissing noise and a muffled
thud from one the building’s upper floors, maybe twenty or thirty feet above
the basement where we were standing. He looked up nervously at the pipe and
valve-covered ceiling, shoved the phone-slash-decloaking-thing into the breast
pocket of his navy-blue jumpsuit, and motioned at the gaping hole in the ground
that was looking more and more like the last place any marginally sane,
non-suicidal person would want to jump into. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “They’ll get down here in around ninety seconds,” he
said. “Mark was compromised, I don’t have the weaponry to fend them off. We
need to leave now.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “Compromised?” I snorted sarcastically, listening to
another hiss-and-thud sequence that sounded much closer than the last one. “Remind
me again which one Mark was. The guy with whom I was conducting a routine,
confidential business transaction, or the guy who he vaporized when the two of
you busted into the room?”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “It’s called CMD,” Michael sighed sadly. “Complete
molecular destabilization.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “Huh?”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “What your dealer did to Mark,” he said. “He was my
buddy.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “Well, <i>I’m</i> not
your buddy,” I said, “and I don’t know who “they” are, but when “they” get down
here I’m going to explain to them that I’ve never met you or Mark or the guy
who I thought was going to sell me a gram of kush. I have nothing to do with
whatever special ops craziness is going down right now. I’m an innocent, mostly
law-abiding citizen just looking to get buzzed enough to forget how shitty my
life is for a couple hours.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> Another hiss and thud, this one only a foot or two above
the ceiling, strong enough that it caused the basement floor to vibrate.
Suddenly the air around the tunnel began to shimmer and pop, a living layer of
bubble wrap expanding and altering the depth of what was visible. Which would
normally have been cause for a major bug-out, if the last few minutes hadn’t consisted
of watching a dude’s molecules rip themselves apart and another guy getting
offed in a more conventional manner, being chased by unsavory – and clearly
misinformed – military types, and seeing the entrance to what looked like a
complex, underground passageway system materialize out of thin air. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> At this point, the bubble-wrap air was just par for what
was quickly becoming the most ludicrous course imaginable. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> Michael stepped onto the tunnel’s rim, then turned and
faced me. “You can tell them whatever you want,” he said, his pale eyes
widening as he went into dramatic-speech-mode. “They might keep you alive to question
you first, but probably not. It’s enough for them that you saw the CMD. You’ve
become a liability. On the other hand, if you continue to follow me and do
exactly what I tell you to do, you’ll be safe. More than safe. I can show you all
the crazy shit you’ve ever been curious about, the truth behind everything you’ve
ever wanted to know. This is your blue-pill-or-red-pill moment, Vance. Except
in this case, opting out means a one-hundred-percent chance of extermination,
possibly involving quite a bit of pain.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> I had to admit, the opportunity to avoid certain death
did sound enticing. But what was up with all of that truth mumbo jumbo? “How do you know what I’m curious about?” I
asked, as the pipes above us began to tremble. “Is that decloaking thing in
your pocket capable of reading my brain waves as well?”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> Michael shrugged. “You were at the convention,” he said. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> A
few yards from where we were standing, a large square-shaped section of the
ceiling turned purple, then orange, giving off enough heat to immediately raise
the temperature in the basement by several degrees. At least two distinct – and
decidedly displeased – human voices were barely audible over the hissing that
had now reached the volume of a commercial lawnmower. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> The goddamn convention. Rudy and his nerd brigade and
their stupid plans to get me out of the house. I wanted to hate the moron, but
staying mad at Rudy was like staying mad at a two-legged dog trying to take a
piss; it just wasn’t worth it, especially when he was only trying to make me
feel better. When it was obvious who the real culprit was. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> <i>Fucking Bigfoot</i>,
I mouthed silently, fingering the folded-up photograph in my pocket. That abominable
jerk-wad had gotten me into this, whatever <i>this</i>
was. And, considering that the epicenter of his alleged habitat was roughly
three thousand miles west of Midtown Manhattan, he probably wouldn’t be getting
me out of it any time soon. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> Michael frowned as the ceiling near us started to
collapse, the pipes and valves gasping out wafts of chemical-tinged air as they
severed and scattered across the floor. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> “Ten more seconds and the entryway will disappear for
good,” he said. “Make a choice.”<br />
He took a step backward into
the bubble-wrap air. There was a brief pneumatic whooshing sound as he
disappeared down the hole. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b> The square in the ceiling turned a blinding yellow color,
then suddenly evaporated, leaving a gaping hole. Before I could make out what
was on the other side, three bodies leapt through. It was the same goon from
earlier, the one who had turned Mark into space dust. He was now joined by two
other similarly gargantuan specimens, all of them wearing the same black
SWAT-team gear, all of them pointing hand-held, gun-like objects in the direction of my midsection. Their faces twisted into annoyed scowls, definitely not seeming like they were in the mood to listen to any rational
explanation for my presence that I might be able to offer. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The lead goon nodded. His blaster started to glow, illuminating his clenched fist. </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Oh, hell no.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>I
cursed Bigfoot once more and jumped into the tunnel. </b></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-69823843457958057012016-10-27T13:29:00.000-04:002016-10-27T13:29:42.987-04:00if you liked marine mammals<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">A story, <i>Porn with Condoms</i>, is in this <a href="http://www.crackthespine.com/2016/10/anthology-xiv.html">anthology</a>.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghH9b7uCECYp4GDaS4L5X6sUPGYbIQ0CiN_M0yy2f4N0Wq1-44LMiGqMd81P6IGAO47UIzvE6d3cdc7j5t7E9a511hJc6C-_bW55elJUiEpJaU2UCxVk1oItAC35smn3zuMzNdPWKin1Yq/s1600/515uzObMJML._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghH9b7uCECYp4GDaS4L5X6sUPGYbIQ0CiN_M0yy2f4N0Wq1-44LMiGqMd81P6IGAO47UIzvE6d3cdc7j5t7E9a511hJc6C-_bW55elJUiEpJaU2UCxVk1oItAC35smn3zuMzNdPWKin1Yq/s400/515uzObMJML._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-13448237076876734322016-10-19T15:39:00.000-04:002016-10-19T15:39:09.627-04:00I sipped. The tea was strong. Those two words in my throat sweetened it. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfIa2Q1kHStL3N1X-z2AGj_jXd-G1wcNMMGtHEk2CCVOe-m-AL6unkw0NxOaFAD4o0NHOx3LXhwgfhl5QxbfmQQpslPCzH0VHMztYpZWNKbHv7wPPXQrqQioGP4x2462PNL_EULAXdH18Z/s1600/1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfIa2Q1kHStL3N1X-z2AGj_jXd-G1wcNMMGtHEk2CCVOe-m-AL6unkw0NxOaFAD4o0NHOx3LXhwgfhl5QxbfmQQpslPCzH0VHMztYpZWNKbHv7wPPXQrqQioGP4x2462PNL_EULAXdH18Z/s640/1.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-29381163466645727412016-10-08T23:02:00.000-04:002016-10-08T23:07:22.981-04:00capricorns are the worst<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: large;">HOW TO FIND A FLOCK, a collection of stories, will be published as a limited, numbered edition by <a href="http://www.unsolicitedpress.com/">Unsolicited Press</a> on <b><span style="color: lime;">January 8, 2017</span>:</b></span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">A man decides to transform himself into a bird to escape his phone-wielding, formaldehyde-scented girlfriend. A professional clipboarder spends her days enduring the humiliation cast upon her by potential donors and her nights conjuring visions of the Appalachian Trail. A streaming video epiphany jumpstarts a drug-addled outcast’s plan to become the person she’s always wanted to be. A tiny spider creates just the right amount of potential chaos to inflate a dejected husband’s spirit. The stories in “How to Find a Flock” reveal characters and settings – both implicitly and explicitly connected – that explore the inherent difficulties and the unforeseen elation in forming connections – romantic, spiritual, economic – amidst a post-empire landscape that inevitably crumbles as it retreats further into its digital self. Fatally marred by the cynicism, anxiety, and selfishness inherent in their generation’s version of cultural currency, the mostly young and unhinged protagonists of these stories realize, sometimes too late, that even the briefest moments of genuine human touch are more potent than any keystroke or screen swipe. Featuring a prose that is variously biting, reflective, caustic, and exuberant, “How to Find a Flock” is a collection for anyone who has ever felt the crush of loneliness, the indifference of a blinking monitor, the cruelty of utter boredom and hopelessness, and the exhilaration of finally doing something to change it.</span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-53766912602813475192016-08-25T14:47:00.000-04:002016-08-25T14:47:05.055-04:005/30/2017<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdUDWNAnng4nIOVsdcWl_WMl3-Vobd4N-C5qKyerbOHCU2sqrjPQVw-ItGOcaS7t3zHM6Cug1aWI3yShfQe9Ous4xaF9mpvawBZLDjgDUWhoKBBE6OhVk8EY5ywnyvfHr70vlbBlSc-3NC/s1600/Only+the+Dead+Know+Brooklyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdUDWNAnng4nIOVsdcWl_WMl3-Vobd4N-C5qKyerbOHCU2sqrjPQVw-ItGOcaS7t3zHM6Cug1aWI3yShfQe9Ous4xaF9mpvawBZLDjgDUWhoKBBE6OhVk8EY5ywnyvfHr70vlbBlSc-3NC/s320/Only+the+Dead+Know+Brooklyn.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-10129893757699152942016-07-11T17:24:00.001-04:002016-07-11T17:25:53.668-04:00news from the world<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="256" scrolling="no" src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fmacmillanentertainment%2Fposts%2F479625785560674&width=500" style="border: none; overflow: hidden;" width="500"></iframe></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-89383020501895064032016-01-14T18:46:00.002-05:002016-01-14T18:46:23.677-05:00Manhattan's abundant underground rat kingdoms<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-large;"><b>"<a href="http://issuu.com/crackthespine/docs/issue_173/18">Porn with Condoms</a>," a story of mine, is in <i>Crack the Spine. </i></b></span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-39216649885082207342015-09-03T19:20:00.000-04:002015-09-03T19:20:52.090-04:00An Occurrence at the Only Place You've Ever Known<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Full dick or get the fuck out.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He absorbed
Allison’s message, the acknowledgment of his cop-out deflating Roger’s
confidence faster than the flushed, un-full dick that was still drooped sadly
across his knuckles like an ulcer-prone salamander.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Drawing the
blue alien thing and/or palm tree over it in the Snapchat he’d sent her had
been a gamble, stupid enough for her to forgo an acronym and use proper
punctuation in her Gchat response. He’d done it because Allison had told him
about how she, before sending a pic, would sometimes doodle Pac-Man ghosts
skirting across her cleavage, how she and her friends would turn their nipples
into rabbit noses or penguin eyes or a “titmouse,” her favorite pun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">When he
couldn’t find flattering lighting in his room or seated on the toilet, when
he’d only managed to achieve the thin-blooded hard-on of a gun-shy flesh rookie,
when he’d found it impossible, given the length of his arm, to get a proper
dick selfie angle that wasn’t an anatomy-book close-up but didn’t provide too
much unnecessary perspective, he’d decided to compromise. Life was compromise.
A breast partially blocked by a stick-figure rendition of a woodland creature
was still a breast. He could live with that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He’d
positioned himself at his desk, scrolled through a few of Allison’s recent Facebook
photos, worked himself to a state of semi-stiffness, gripped the base, extended
his phone and tapped. The image had been fuzzy, the lack of contrast between
skin and white tee shirt making for a less-than-enthusiastic representation of
the focal appendage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He’d used
the app’s drawing tool to make a blue outline, expanding its parameters,
shading it in. He’d added green palm leaves and/or antennae on top of the head,
and two eyes and/or coconuts about halfway down the shaft. Not bad, he’d
thought. Open to interpretation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">There would
be neither interpretation nor reciprocation from Allison.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Doesn’t count since I can’t
even see it.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">you racist against blue dicks?</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">a little. come on roger. Full
dick or get the fuck out.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; padding: 0in;">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">fine, fine.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Roger
listened for distractions, hoping his suitemate might need to borrow laundry
detergent or ask why the bottle of Lubriderm was missing from the bathroom. He
glanced out his window to see if any of the likely green-card-less Asian guys
working construction on the adjacent building were having one of their frequent
smoke breaks-slash-bullshitting sessions but the rooftop was empty except for
plastic bags doing battle in the breeze. He remembered a movie where a
maladjusted loner filmed a similar scene with a 90s camcorder and told his
girlfriend that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. To Roger,
the twirling sacks reminded him of a sadness he couldn’t quite place, emptiness
under the guise of total freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">More
importantly, he had no excuses for Allison, whose emojis had gone from
tongue-flicking and joyous to crying/barfing zombies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Roger
removed his boxers a second time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">She’d gotten his email from the
bottom of an article he’d published on an obscure site curated by a former
professor. Some drivel about the evolution of celebrity worship syndrome
focusing on the potential illuminati symbolism of fingerless gloves worn by
Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a diabetes fundraiser. She wrote to Roger that she liked
his acknowledging that the “legal framework in post-racial America relies on
the myth that racist concepts no longer exist,” and was impressed with his
portrayal of Beyoncé, noting that it reminded her of “that slutty girl who you
keep around bc she’s a hot mess, makes you feel better about your life and
always has good stories bc she’s a pathological liar – who i havent talked to
after she got married at age 18 to a guy who needed a visa, just messaged me
asking if she could use my email because she lost her pw. wut?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He’d given
up actual psychological research as an undergrad, and writing was a hobby in
the downtime between preparing invoices and market analyses, but it felt cool
to have a fan. Even if she didn’t seem like the throws-panties-on-stage type.
Even if she didn’t seem like any type.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Allison Anvil.
Her name sounded like a proto-feminist but retroactively offensive comic book
character, like her online persona was administered by a psoriatic identity
thief trolling in his basement for passwords and social security numbers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Roger knew
she was real, though. As in, not a dude.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Their
exchanges followed a natural progression: Gchats, texts, following, friend
requests. Her mobile uploads and posting history formed a more or less complete
depiction of her last five years, too thorough to be forged. There were
throwbacks of beach trips, a blurry ride on Disney World teacups. Diatribes
about Holocaust Remembrance Day and World of Warcraft. A Young Democrats dinner
highlighted by a Bill Clinton handshake and an ex-boyfriend Roger thought
looked like a younger version of himself minus ~fifteen pounds of beer
inflation. And the most recent ones – drinking simultaneously with lip-glossed
companions from a bowl of neon-infused sludge, their duckfaces straw-induced
and therefore permissible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The kind of
stuff Roger imagined he’d see and read from Jocelyn – the neighbor who did her
laundry at the same time as him in their building’s communal basement dungeon
and, when she wasn’t buried in her phone, appeared to be around the same age as
Allison – if they’d been friends on Facebook or in reality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Roger was a
man who had done so much laundry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He still
lived in the first apartment he’d found on Craigslist, stayed put through
several drug- and career-related roommate transitions and absurd rent
increases, worked as a headhunter at the same IT company where he’d started even
though he was mostly bored and there wasn’t much chance for upward mobility. He
used the same hair product – “power putty for a windblown surfer look!” – long
after his faux-scraggle days had ceased.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In the nine
years since he’d graduated and moved to New York, his only relationship had
been brief and on FaceTime with a girl who was still at the school he’d gone to
in Maryland, who couldn’t deal with the distance between them and her desire
for at least two members of the ultimate frisbee team.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">That
someone who seemed to crave stability would remain single for so long was
puzzling to the friends and coworkers who populated the periphery of Roger’s
life. He didn’t suffer from a recurring skin condition or extraordinarily gross
breath; he was no better and no worse than the majority of his boat-shoed,
IPA-swilling comrades.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">There were
women, maybe one or two a month. Bar-hookups, Tinder dates, alumni functions.
Connections that lasted a couple hours, or petered off after a few increasingly
foggy mornings after, and ranged from the outrageous – the day trader who let
him put it in her ass after he bought a $400 bottle of Grey Goose and told her
his Kindle sales rivaled James Franco’s, the daddy-funded poet from whom he
received a period blood mustache and who later tried to cover it up by asking
if he’d had a nosebleed – to the more pedestrian: a texting moratorium, an
unrequited friend request.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">It wasn’t
that he was incapable of reciprocating passion, that his moments of sensitivity
were feigned and served an ulterior motive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He was
alone because above all else, Roger loved ideas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Age seven
or eight, he would sit in Sunday school, listening to a watered-down version of
Revelation, thrilled by the cartoon chaos it evoked. He would spend hours in
his room creating his own action-figure End of Days – Mumm-Ra as the
Antichrist, Princess Leia and Wonder Woman as angelic mediators, Ninja Turtles
as the Four Horsemen. But a couple of years later, during a stretch of summer
that included the demise of a second cousin, a cat, and a Siamese fighting
fish, death became something far more brutal than the easy deus ex machina
redemption found in dismembering a villain’s plastic limbs. If there was a god,
Roger no longer wanted to be a part of his or her utter fucked-up-ness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Instead, he
focused on another portal that was mostly reliable and seemingly infinite,
where age/sex/location was as malleable as his grasp of geography and his
desire to blend in with whatever chatty den of liars and pedophiles his clicks
would lead him. His first girlfriend was ninety-eight percent instant messages
and two percent hugs before and after school. When she broke up with him
in-person before the seventh grade winter formal, using more audible words than
she’d spoken to him in the past month, he was only shocked because her messages
the previous evening had included the requisite number of extra vowels and
punctuations – <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">byebyeee talk to u sooooon!!!!</span></i> – to make it seem
like everything was going smoothly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">High school
nights, holed up in a parental home office suckling on filched Bacardi, he
would scroll through his AIM contacts. He devised and honed a system for
gathering information, for establishing a connection that seemed more meaningful
because it usually played out on his own terms, the rehearsed-yet-casual
sequences of manipulation that belied the painfully ordinary insecurity that
consumed his non-typing life. He’d start with a simple, <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">hi, hey, hello</span></i>, wait
for the <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">nm u?</span></i> response.
The trick was in dictating the movement, carving its direction. If KatyKay40286
complained about the frumpy patterns rimming her newly issued field hockey
skirt, he would commiserate by mentioning how his swim coach had screwed up
everyone’s Speedo sizes – <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">yea sucks its a little uh…tight hehe</span></i>. After her
expected LOLish response, he would write that it was probably nothing compared
to the sports bras she was forced to endure (KatyKay40286 being a notable
subject of bust-related speculation). Roger would then suggest that they play
The Question Game. You had to alternate asking each other questions, one at a
time, and that while the questions could be about anything, yes/no answers were
discouraged. The game would start innocently enough – <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">what life decisions caused Mr. Neary to become the kind of teacher
whose coffee mug reeks of Kahlua every other class</span></i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">?</span> – but would quickly veer toward the erotic:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">whats your favorite position?</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br />
<span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">how big is/are your
[
]?</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
questions were far tamer than what he’d encountered as a pubescent smut room
devotee, but there was a thrill in the forging of textual intimacy, an arousal
on par with what he imagined actual physical contact would elicit. If the girl
got skittish and stopped playing or signed off, he would resort to another
slightly less gratifying pastime: scouring the streaming video landscape in
order to check in on which of his favorite starlets was farther along on the
oft-tread arc, from casting couches and coy handjobs to triple penetration and
rectal prolapse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To an adult
Roger, Allison was a welcome throwback to that indispensable era, though not in
any sexual sense; the need to fulfill unrequited horny-boy urges no longer
existed. Instead, they traded the facts – the loan-drowned reality of her
recent graduation from a small school in a rust-colored Ohio city, his summer
share on the straight part of Fire Island – and the obsessions – her resentment
of a single-mother childhood and the sperm donation that led to her creation,
his fear of developing colorectal cancer due to chronic Burger King gluttony –
that comprised their inner and outer lives. She was fascinatingly ADD,
filterless, able to jump, in the space of a few lines, from her internship at a
law firm where she was trying hard not to perpetuate “America’s meritocracy
myth,” to her quest to pillage the interwebs for the most awful sounding white
baby names (<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">my personal favorite so far is
Kamdyn – aka murder capitol of the east coast</span></i>), to the vitriol she
posted on random people’s walls: <span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">“You do realize that Native
Americans are a marginalized ethnic group that still exist, not a cutesie
halloween costume. and your baby isn’t cute, fyi. is this an ad for birth
control?”</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">For all she
confessed, she never demanded the same from him. She could discuss how her
roommate was a popular webcam model who got paid to play videogames in an elf
costume and how sometimes Allison would try on the ears to not feel lonely, or
how her bulimia phase had been so extreme that she wouldn’t go to class unless
she was guaranteed a seat by the door and a clear path to a bathroom or garbage
bin, and Roger wouldn’t feel compelled to tell her about how he cried
constantly for months after he beat a pregnant squirrel to death with a nine
iron or how he and his neighbor Timmy, before his mother found out about it,
would take turns wiping themselves, post-toilet, as part of a game Timmy called
“family time.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">All he had
to do was keep the conversation going.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He would
come home from work or a bar or wake up late and activate one of his devices and
know that in a moment he’d be inundated with the same pleasing stream of
pathos:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">ugh roggerrrrr im dying</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">i took a vicodin</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">but i just took it</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">whenever i get really bad
insomnia i get scared that i’ve developed bipolar</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">because that’s an early warning
sign</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">and this is the age when people
show their first symptoms</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">like stay awake for a week
straight babbling like a homeless veteran</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">oh no. katy perry is back on
Reddit.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">save me from myself.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He could
absorb her brand of damage until sated, take what he wanted and give back
nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Sounds awful :(</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">gotta pick up a jacket at the
dry cleaner. Later</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">After a
year Allison started trying to meet Roger in person. At first it was subtle.
She was thinking of staying at a friend’s in Hoboken, would he be around if
they took the train into the city? She had to come in from her mother’s house
near Trenton to get her passport renewed at a Midtown office that happened to
be near Roger’s office, would he want to get smoothies?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">His limp
excuses – he was sick, he had to attend a company-mandated retreat at a
mud-covered obstacle course upstate, he would be starting a juice cleanse that
would render him unbearably flatulent – awoke in her a directness that Roger
found difficult to combat. They could hang out on his schedule. What weekends
did he have free? When was she going to finally meet the famous suitemate who
used Febreze as body wash? She would have no problem sleeping on the couch as
long as fewer than three sex offenders lived in his building.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Roger knew
that it might go down like this, that she would try to sabotage the idea of
herself he had worked so hard to cultivate and maintain. He wasn’t skilled
enough at Instagram to keep conjuring images of the places that coincided with
his cop-outs, so he tried broaching the subject honestly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Do you ever think that if we
met in person it would ruin our internet bond?</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;"> just
that once you meet in person, that’s it, it’s no longer an internet friendship
and there’s no turning back and reinternetizing it.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Her
middle-finger emojis were swift, relentless.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He was
selfish. He was a solipsist. He was needy. He was too privileged to understand
the consequences of cultural appropriation. He wore the same Third Eye Blind
tee shirt in at least fifteen of his pictures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Though
Roger agreed with most of her accusations, he didn’t feel the sting of her
absence until the third day of signed-off silence. His coworkers had left their
usual happy hour spot and he had secured a seventh pint. He was looking at a
Buzzfeed list of horrible-sounding Trader Joe’s products that “seem vegan but
shockingly aren’t!” and wanted to text Allison the link. He tried thinking of
someone else whose opinion about the article he would find interesting or
worthwhile. The bartender was mostly ignoring him, occasionally glancing at the
dwindling pile of singles in front of his beer with increasing trepidation.
With Allison he could drink to the point of being a dickhead and send her
stupid shit and regardless of her response he would know that they were on the
same wavelength for at least a few moments, feeding a deeper need, what he
imagined it would be like to have someone worth coming home to.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Now he was
simply another lonely dick.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">When she
signed back on (<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">heyyy dummy I still h8t you and
im never coming to nyc but hows ur week been??</span></i>) he decided he would
be more present, give a little more of himself, enough to keep her appeased.
Even if she only wanted to tell him about sending her ex-boyfriend Photoshopped
pregnancy tests or her ideas about the patriarchy’s relationship to
anti-Semitism that evolved into a treatise on the shortcomings of biology. He
would try.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">if i could redesign sexy parts,
balls would be on the inside, as would clits, and there would be no vagina,
just a little hole, covered by the labia. and nobody would have hair.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">it would be like the iOS 11 of genitalia.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">isnt that pretty much what a
vag is</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">no there’s the other shit
inside</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">i don’t know what it’s called</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">the labia minora!</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">idk i kind of like my genitalia</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">you’re the only one.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">the worst is when guys send dick pics.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">like okay, i can tell if someone has a nice
dick but i don’t need to see a picture of it.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">note to self do not send dick
pics anymore</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">i’m not going to get off to a
picture of an erect penis</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">lol</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">you would never send a dick pic</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">haha only if asked</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">send me one</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">thats what snapchat was made for</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">i dont have an erection tho</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">that and me sending pictures of
my boobs with animal faces drawn on them</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">how hard is it to get an erection? pun intended</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">very punny</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">now i’m inspired to send
another boob creature</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; padding: 0in;">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">do it<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">not to you. i would only send
it to you in exchange for a dick pic.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">i just sent my friend a boob puppy.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">are you going to have me
arrested if i send one</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">no!</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">as long as you don’t screenshot
mine</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="line-height: 200%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">-<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">i dont even know how to do that</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He didn’t
know how, either, and wouldn’t have done it if he did. He didn’t want to deal
with pissing her off again. The reference to a relative state of photographic
permanence awoke in him a twinge of memory, an ugliness he tried to shake off
while looking for his phone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">While
Allison waited, faceless and soundless somewhere in New Jersey.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Roger took a second photo – this
one blatant, unaltered – and pressed send.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">As the
image slid through the data channel to Allison’s screen, he felt a sharp
pressure on his throat, a sense of suffocation that sped down through his
limbs, a putrefying heat. Then a dizziness like when he was a child and would
intentionally spin in a circle until falling to the ground, except now he was
trying not to move, fighting the downward plummet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">At some
point his vision ceased and he was aware of nothing but a feeling of fullness,
a widening, a roar of liquid forcing him towards an artery-choking torment. He
was swimming in near-darkness, submerged in a milk-thick sludge that, while
alternatively burning and sponging his lungs was also buoying him in the
direction of a faint light that kept getting closer until he collided with an
earthen hardness a few feet beneath the surface where the water was now
soup-thin, gleaming. He reached for one of the root-like structures whose ends
rippled and flickered from the embankment and it broke loose, rubbering down
into the murk. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He reached
for another, another until he gripped one that held, pulled himself and emerged
into an air that convulsed, engulfed his chest. He crawled onto a sandy outcrop
and closed his eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">When he
opened them he was upright, walking on a path that reminded him of a
condo-stunted nature preserve where he and other ambitious young degenerates
would share saliva and hastily rolled joints. Except here the sun-doused
vegetation pulsed with a velocity that made him giddy, growing denser as he
whirled into what became a vortex, a sequence of spirals that disintegrated and
regrouped as irregular rows of hulking columns, multi-shaded and huge and
formed of a substance that was softer than bark and free of branches. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Giant
dicks. Thousands of them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">And tiny
ones, lining both sides of the path, a sea-smelling undergrowth of brown and
pink mushroom caps. The members implied an entire pulsing diaspora of masculine
possibility: erections with varying degrees of height and curvature, throbbing
and agitated, drooping, foreskinned willows, boulder-balls jostling the exposed
earth, a coarse pubic lichen that could be dense or peach-sparse, leafy dark
ringlets curling and twisting past the base of shafts, others manicured to a
new-purse sheen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">As he took
in the now-sharp environment, he realized that he had seen these dicks before,
their context obvious in the memories with which they corresponded. Timmy’s
baby carrot dangling in a toilet bowl. His first timid side-glances at adult
equipment (including his father’s) in the piss-trough at the old Yankee
Stadium. A fraternity brother whose primary career aspiration was to join an
off-Broadway troupe of “genital origami” artists and who would practice his
craft during chapter meetings. The ex-roommate he found one morning passed out
naked on the couch, shit drooling onto the carpet, a sheet of bruised tinfoil
splayed across his lap. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The path
began to widen and bend, and as he followed its curve, he noticed that while
the skin foliage was thinning out and revealing shards of waning sun, the
individual dicks were becoming over-rigid and mammoth, redwoods where once had
only been saplings. He easily recognized which porn actor each belonged to,
remembering the many holes that had contained them. Billy Glide’s barrel-girth,
a ring of freckles just below the circumcision scar. The pale English hammer of
Danny Dong, thinner at the base and rouge-tipped. And Lexington Steele, an
obsidian tower stabbing and combining with the dusk, glossy with lube. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The path
ended in another shock of color and vertigo and he found himself in a field at
night, standing at the entrance to what looked like a medicine man’s sweat
lodge he’d seen set up at a “pow wow” near an Indian casino where his mother
bought wolf-claw necklaces and he watched complacent men pound drums and yodel.
The structure, under the clamor of frozen stars, bubbled like a marshmallow,
hissing from the pressure of whatever resided inside. The entrance was
concealed by a curtain of six-foot-long chrome dicks, tips swaying a few inches
from the muddy ground. He spread them apart, gently, and walked inside. As he
tried to adjust his eyes and to not gag on the corrosive fog that now contained
him, a groan flared from somewhere close and the hut expanded, recoiling at his
presence. A spurt of flame – a hearth? – throbbed in a far-off distance and he
moved toward it, coughing, lifting the crew neck of his tee shirt over his
nose. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The smoke
pulled and ebbed and spewed a montage of images, each featuring the same
expanding and contracting protagonist. He saw himself in an earth-toned
bathroom he barely recognized, his tiny pink nub sud-shielded and bobbing
alongside rubber Sesame Street toys; slouching in a ski resort’s communal
shower, peach-fuzzed and shy-shrunken; adjusting to the unwelcome rawness of
his first jock strap; cautiously assessing the welcome friction that resulted
in his first unexpected dollop of salty release. An assortment of time-lapsed
close-ups, varying levels of pubic hair, razor stubble, the sores last year
that were only a harmless reaction to defective latex. And then, the twinge
that had gnawed earlier when he’d sent the Snapchat to Allison: pictures he’d
taken with a primitive digital camera and sent over AIM a decade ago – some
full-body, others side-posed, spread-eagled – to someone named peachez00100 who
never sent anything back, and who, he found out much later at a reunion, from
snickering classmates who had seen the pictures, turned out to be a guy he’d
gone to high school with. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He let the
old embarrassment rise and blind his brain with a shattering percussion that,
when it subsided, left him cold and feverish, tongue swollen with thirst. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He was a
few yards from the source of the hut’s light, a tube of fire that loomed
phallic and enormous, though it emitted no discernable heat. The flames in his
direct line of vision parted and realigned as a projector screen that appeared
to be operating at an archaically low definition. The video was a point-of-view
shot, missionary position, the first girl he’d slept with – whose name he
couldn’t remember – her pleasure-stunned stares at him while he surveyed her
neck, breasts, belly button, plunging in callow, arrhythmic excitement. Then a
flicker and she changed, her body’s outline blurring. Lighter hair and lips, a
thickening of thighs, paler skin, still familiar. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">His dick
remained. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The screen
wasn’t deficient, he realized. There were many screens layered against each
another, a living composite of everyone he’d ever fucked. The length of time
that each body would rise and dominate the surface appeared to correspond to how
many times he’d been with that person and the duration of the encounter(s). The
college-era girls cycled through at a brisk rate, the end results of mostly
un-remembered brownouts or casualties of his prematurity. As the bodies beneath
him aged and held their focus longer, it grew harder to look at them, though he
had no choice but to absorb the emotions that manifested the same way every
time: the pleading for something greater, a future not predicated on his dick,
a future he would never give them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">After
several minutes he watched himself pull out and deposit a belly-smearing load,
but instead of the relief and fade-to-black he expected, the girl/girls
remained and he was still inside, though not in any way he’d felt before. He
was the negative space that his dick had created, a shadow that nevertheless
had the ability to bore beyond any untested womb, to inflict a greater pain
that he now shared, the pain of never transcending a definition, of
once-harmless ideas destroyed in a searing of flesh. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He knew
what he was. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">He tried to
run from the flames and the screens that had separated and surrounded him in
every direction, the lives he could no longer thwart, a white light and sparks
and the stars were above and whirling and he leapt into it, screaming, and the
light snuffed out and he was alone in a dim halogen glow and silence. Something
soft in his hand and he knew without looking down that he was in the old
recurring dream, the one where his dick had come off and he couldn’t figure out
why there was no blood and he forced himself to wake up but when he reached
down he touched a smoothness, a nothing of skin, and he heard a humming
laughter, receding with the light, a joy from which he would forever be
sundered unless he could reattach himself, if he could find a way to avert the
stars’ dissecting gaze, if he could convince his feet to move, if he could
only…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Allison’s message blinked at the
bottom of the screen: <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">nice, roger!!</span></i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;"> </span>followed by a
sequence of emojis that included various salutatory hand gestures and what
looked like a frog with a potentially hazardous goiter. He reached for his
phone, opened Snapchat to view the response picture she’d sent. One visible
breast – large, pale, mostly unremarkable except for a nipple that was pinker
than he’d imagined and possibly larger, if it hadn’t been obstructed by the
nostrils of a monochromatic alligator head. Ten seconds later it was gone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Outside, on
the adjacent rooftop, a hooting. Construction workers on their break, smoking,
chugging Powerades. Most of them were lined up near the ledge, tossing junk
from the vacant apartments they’d been renovating. Whenever one of them found
something worthwhile – a scarred Blu-ray player, a pack of Parliament Lights –
they would take turns aiming and dropping garbage bundles into the commercial
dumpster positioned near the front of the building. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Whoever’s
bundle landed closest to the dumpster’s center, Roger assumed, would win the
prize.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One of the
workers was cradling a filthy doll, clothed in the shreds of a baby blue dress
and stockings. The head was missing an eye and most of its orange curls, and
those that remained looked like they’d been burned. Each time someone hovered
over the ledge, ready to toss, the man with the doll would move behind him and
pretend to hump it, hold its arms and make it dance, simulate oral sex. The
other workers would crack up and the tosser, also laughing, would turn around
and smack the doll across the face or stomach, as if blaming it for his poor
aim.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">When
everyone else had tossed, the man with the doll snatched one of the plastic
bags that were swirling around the roof and placed his projectile inside. He gripped
the bag by its handles, swung it in a series of circular arcs, and released. As
the bundle flew upwards, doll and bag separated, terminating on the horizon, a
black rift in the sun. A flutter of garments and for a second it looked like
she might float down, saved by a parachute of fabric and air.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">She fell no
slower than the rest of the trash, made the same echoing crunch against the
dumpster’s metal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The
unencumbered bag drifted and landed where it had been thrown, where the workers
stomped out butts, jostling and grinning, shuffling into the building through
the fire exit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Roger sat
down and waited for whatever Allison was typing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-86136959776529522342015-05-21T20:58:00.000-04:002015-05-21T23:36:01.450-04:00lizard people unite<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-large;">at <a href="http://chrisvola.net/">chrisvola.net</a>.</span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-53766950907099602022015-04-24T16:36:00.001-04:002015-04-24T16:37:41.865-04:00You convince yourself, // held // to the earth, // that pigeons // are only creatures // with no // names.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoJtp2DD47DXQCH4YH6vc6fuai_I6uXj6qbZWRbD4k5FJDar33lRhKxm8rJ0VPMPkiJVYEZQleH4NgdG4ORjaVr_L4sgRDx2qoeV_0c1FPzUI0KK6BPLeqCqOA5eYQradwzZ0E0Vsukojd/s1600/front.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoJtp2DD47DXQCH4YH6vc6fuai_I6uXj6qbZWRbD4k5FJDar33lRhKxm8rJ0VPMPkiJVYEZQleH4NgdG4ORjaVr_L4sgRDx2qoeV_0c1FPzUI0KK6BPLeqCqOA5eYQradwzZ0E0Vsukojd/s1600/front.JPG" height="400" width="263" /></a></div>
<br />
My book of poems, <a href="http://leafgardenpress.blogspot.com/2015/04/e-is-for-ether-by-chris-vola.html">E is for Ether</a>, published by Leaf Garden Press, has gone live today on the interwebs. Glad to share this weird one, much of which first appeared on this blog in its original unedited form. </div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-5118192859171546522015-03-06T12:52:00.004-05:002015-03-06T12:52:41.223-05:00Golden Age Redux<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Close to
hyperventilation, you can mouth a few of the mantras you’ve developed until you
find one that seems to work. “All of my electronic devices have abnormally long
battery lives,” you might repeat, lips scraping the pillow. Other lapses in
composure require variations on the theme. “I’m a white man with a Nordic
complexion living in a state with harsher than average gun laws. I have better
medical coverage than the majority of nightlife industry workers. My frequent
customer card at the local deli is one hole-punch away from a sandwich valued
at up to $10. In the event of any significant hair loss my head is nicely
shaped and conducive to shaving.” The talismans that, with varying degrees of
success, hold back the dreams that are always about running, running that’s
never recreational. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">At
28, you tell yourself in another black moment, your world is failing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You’re
fucked. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But
you’ve got to remember, you’ve always been a headcase. There were the night
terrors that started at age four or five, when not being able to sleep meant
death was inevitable. The time when you puked Raisin Bran before school and for
the next three months, automatic reflex, you woke up around dawn and started
dry heaving, sometimes making it to the toilet but usually not, bile stains on
the hallway rug, a routine that was squelched by a prescription for what you
years later found out was high-end Pepto-Bismol that tasted like red velvet
cake. And even distant relatives still remind you about the time when you watched
a news story about a girl who underwent a tracheotomy to remove a nickel she’d
swallowed. You spent the next week choking yourself because you had just
upgraded your piggy bank and something could have slipped and who knows? You
had to be sure. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Now
it’s summer and you’ve just gone on a fishing trip back in Connecticut because
your old man’s retiring and he wants to see you more. Late afternoon, you’re
sitting in the garage, cleaning the fish you caught and swatting flies away
from your beers. You watch your old man examine your subpar work, the messy
fillets that are plentiful of bones and skin fragments, the perfectly good
chunks of flesh you accidentally flung into the blood-crusted bucket reserved
for organ gunk and skeletal remains. You brace for another lecture about
technique but your old man stays quiet, places a fillet knife on the cutting
board. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“When
I’m gone,” he says, “who’s going to show your kids? I won’t be here forever.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">At
night in your childhood bedroom in your parents’ house, you look at yearbook
pictures of someone you don’t recognize. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Now
you’re choking yourself again, saying the mantras. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It
doesn’t take much. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">When
you return to the city where you live you make an appointment with a shrink
with an ethnically androgynous name whose mostly positive online reviews you’ve
been tracking for months, even though you couldn’t find any pictures of him/her,
but you’re cool with it because the office is one of only a few that take your
out-of-pocket plan. You sign in with the doorman in the lobby of a 70s-ish
concrete abortion that looks like every downtown building, read headlines on
the elevator flatscreen about a man falling 65 feet at a baseball game and the
Dalai Lama’s website inflicting viruses on its visitors. You get off on the
correct floor where you assume there will be an office with a comfortable couch
in a dimmed setting, a Morgan Freeman type with the gravitas and wisdom of two
centuries of psychoanalytic progress. You walk into a hospital-light cubicle.
Behind a purring desktop and a tissue box sits a mousey South Asian woman who can’t
be more than five or six years older than you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I’m
Dr. K—,” she says, standing up and extending a hand. “Have a seat and tell me
what’s going on.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
clinical florescence of the overhead light accentuates the shrink’s mottled, child-scar
complexion. Your chair is comfortable enough but you wouldn’t want to watch TV
in it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about dying,” you say, getting right into it
because you’re on the clock, eyeing the tissues. “Actually it’s pretty much all
I’ve ever fixated on. Not really my own death. I think about my parents getting
old, the elderly people I see limping alone down the street, fat kids snarfing Tropical
Skittles and Doctor Pepper. I guess it’s not that weird but for me it’s like,
palpable. I think I’m losing weight, circles under my eyes. My mother says
they’re hereditary but I never really noticed until recently.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Are
you religious?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“No.
Spiritual maybe. I don’t know.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“This
is something that people have been wrestling with since before the language
existed to express it. The ultimate hang-up. There aren’t any real answers, at
least none I’m qualified to provide.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Morgan
Freeman’s voice wouldn’t have made it sting any less. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Morgan
Freeman is a false god,” you whisper to no one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">She
asks you about your education, your hobbies, your sexual preferences. You
imagine that each of your thoughts about death has contributed one mile-per-hour
to the speed of a car you’re driving on a road with a singular destination, a
cliff of an unknown depth. “You’ve got to try to stay in the moment,” she says
at the end of the session, “in the present, stay busy. If the negative thoughts
start to creep in, think of something positive in your life. It’s much more
beneficial to be your own architect than to focus on things no one can
control.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
pep talk is beyond hackneyed, but you’ve always been susceptible to
encouragement. It’s why you got good grades. When you leave the office and
watch the video streaming in the elevator about a circus bear in Azerbaijan who
has learned to ride a motorcycle, your hands stop shaking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
terms of demographics, pigment, and the geography of your birth, you are lucky.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
stop smoking weed every day, lift free weights a few times a week, have coffee
with friends you haven’t seen in a while who you consider “optimistic” and not
“coke-jaded.” You initiate conversations with women at the restaurant where you’re
a manager and at the bars where you drink and these encounters are occasionally
successful, i.e. frictional. You re-read the Eastern philosophy textbooks that you
were drawn to as an undergrad and that now make the tattoos that say “BE HERE
NOW” in Sanskrit on your hip and the Chinese character the guy in the shop said
means “Tao” on your back a little less like Phish-related mistakes and more like
the fulfillment of a promise you made without knowing it. If everything exists
in one moment, <i>before</i> might be
irrelevant, and more importantly, maybe there won’t be an <i>after</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">One
night you burrow deep in a Wikipedia hole that ends with dozens of open tabs
related either generally or explicitly to transhumanism, which, you read, is “a
class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition,
including radical life extension to the point of biological immortality,
fostering a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a
valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life.” The idea that you
might, in the tangible future, be able to overcome physical limitations through
radical technologies that are already being funded, to diffuse the death
switch. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
love this shit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“You
crazy fuck,” you say to yourself, giggling, but for the better part of a week you
surge through websites that extol the possibilities of nanomedicine, mind
uploading, postgenderism, cyborgization, artificial wombs, chemical brain
preservation. You skim through the less interesting rebuttals from neo-Luddite
haters bitching about the trivialization of human identity, hubris, coercive
eugenicism, and dozens of other killjoy buzzwords. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your
parents are probably screwed, but you will still be middle aged in 2045, the
estimated year of the Singularity, when things are supposed to really start
going down, transcendentally speaking, when negligible senescence won’t be
limited to lobsters and jellyfish. You join Beta Race, an organization that
publishes a monthly e-mag aimed “to
deeply influence a new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity's
next steps” and begin following the group’s transhumanist lifestyle
recommendations. You practice caloric restriction and supplement your mostly
raw and vegan diet with up to 50 daily supplements that increase mental
clarity, reduce cortisol release, and promote optimal health and energy in
convenient, antioxidant-rich doses. Your coworkers start calling you PT, short
for Purple Teeth, for the red wine you consume daily (one per meal and another
after an acceptable cardio session) in order to maximize your resveratrol
intake, and you ask them what you should wear at their funerals, when your Body
Mass Index will still be at an optimal 18.5 to 20. They can’t tell you to go
fuck yourself because you’re their manager but you know they want to. You
couldn’t care less about hurting the feelings of weaklings who have already
given in to self-immolation. You learn to use group collaboration tools on
your phone and visit personal networking sites to meet and communicate with
other proto-posthumans. You download an app that turns your phone into a device
to supplement your memories, constantly recording conversations and other
audible events. You purchase better insurance that’s more than you can
realistically afford but ensures that
the co-pay will be low enough for the regular examinations and blood tests you will
have to undergo ad nauseum. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Your stomach might convulse sometimes at work or when
you pass a pub, anticipating the succulence of animal fat, the release of hard
liquor, but these are necessary casualties of the focus on everlasting
survival, and denial is an essential quality for success in the cyborg nirvana you
are destined to inhabit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">One
afternoon you’re jogging in a park on a trail that’s almost the exact distance,
if run every day, that will lower your blood pressure to an optimal level in
only a few weeks. You avoid eye contact with the idle dying you pass – an
liver-spot scarecrow reading a newspaper to a neck-lolling woman in a
wheelchair, a trio of shagged-out kids smoking cloves, an otherwise
hale-looking guy wearing a Ballpark Franks tee shirt thereby declaring his
affinity for nitrate-induced gastrointestinal carnage. Close to a personal best
time, you build up speed for the last few hundred yards, glancing at the
occasional female runner heading in the opposite direction. One girl slows down
as she passes, eyes wide, points at your midsection, sort of trying to hold
back a laugh but also sort of concerned, and resumes her original pace. It’s
humid, you’ve sweated through your shirt and there are probably some serious
swamp ass issues going on, but you <i>are</i>
exercising outdoors during an abnormally warm autumn. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Water
transfer isn’t just normal, it’s necessary. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Uninformed
bitch,” you whisper.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
pull off your ear buds, turn to flag her down or at least pretend she’s the
reason you stopped and not because you’re totally winded. You feel an unnatural
squishing between your sock and cross trainer. You look down at the athletic
shorts that were Carolina blue but are now crotch-covered in brownish stains,
at the thin red stream that’s coursing down your right leg, congealing, pooling
under the tongue of your shoe. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">An
alert beeps and blinks on the activity tracker attached to your wrist. Your
heart beats per minute have tripled. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your
grandmother had been afflicted by hemorrhoids for most of her later years,
referring to them as her “piles.” You’d always been careful to avoid the
slime-capped Preparation H tubes and stool softener bottles that resided openly
in her bathroom. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What’s
currently sticking out of your ass isn’t like the gargantuan protrusions you’d
seen in waking nightmares while listening to her graphic complaints, a relief
that does nothing to ease the throbbing that makes it impossible to sit down. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Curled
on your side in bed, tablet-addled, you learn that fifty percent of Americans
will suffer swollen veins in the anal canal at some point in their lives, usually
after age 30 and usually due to the strain of soft bowel movements,
constipation, obesity, or pregnancy. Though initially painful, the prognosis is
rarely serious, and can usually be corrected by a combination of increased
fiber, drinking more water, drinking less alcohol and caffeine, exercising
frequently, and applying an over-the-counter ointment when necessary. Except you
can’t be certain that what you have is actually a hemorrhoid. You’re too young,
you don’t drink coffee, you’ve been laying off the booze for the most part, and
your diet has been endorsed after years of studies by Beta Race’s team of
board-certified nutritionists. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
bleeding might also be caused by a similarly shaped polyp, tumor, or abscess.
You analyze the risk factors for each. Until recently and for as far back as
you can remember, you’ve been a happy guzzler of red meats, processed cheeses,
over-proof spirits. Roughly seventy percent of your penetrative experiences
have been sans condom, meaning that HPV is more a certainty than a possibility.
The human papillomavirus accounts for approximately ninety percent of anal
cancer diagnoses, and the three dozen or so partners you can remember make this
risk exponential. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your
activity tracker starts blinking. You remove it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
look up Google reviews of the primary care physicians in your neighborhood.
You’re about to schedule an appointment when you remember hemorrhoidal Nana
telling you in a brief moment of opiate-free clarity before she succumbed to
the tumors that had spread to her marrow, to “never go to a doctor. I didn’t
for twenty-three years and it wasn’t for lack of aches, there were plenty of
those. It was because I knew, deep down, that the second they started prodding
around they’d find something. You can’t find anything if you don’t look for it.
Here I am, a few months past eighty, feeling okay, and I have the nerve to
listen to your goddamn mother. A simple check-up. It’ll take a load off
everyone’s minds, she says. Now look at me. Fucked. Take Advil, get enough
sleep, don’t get married and you’ll be fine.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">She
died two hours later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
don’t want to be fucked. You want to be a sentient machine. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">So
you’ll wait. Say the mantras, wait. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But
every morning there’s the same blood-streaked shit, the same WebMD links. One
day you notice two identical lumps behind your ribs on both sides. Cancer
already spreading from your lymph nodes? Maybe they aren’t lumps, but areas of
organ-related swelling. Early onset kidney failure is a possibility. Nausea in
the mornings, your skin crackled at the joints, a bit of fatigue. You begin
documenting the frequency of bathroom visitations, checking each urine deposit
for color, opaqueness, bubbles, activating the stopwatch app on your phone to
get an accurate measurement of its duration. You check your semen for blood and
other potential abnormalities with the thoroughness of a tea-leaf reader,
cupping it in your hands, sniffing. While pressing your fingers to your jugular
to confirm suspicions of an abnormal heart rhythm, you press on something like
a growth that clicks when you move it – a clear indication of a thyroid
disorder that might lead to hyperactivity, irritability, memory problems,
psychosis, and paranoia. Brief episodes of dizziness: fluid on the brain. A
shoulder ache is an aneurysm in-waiting. You keep clicking the links. Sleep is occasionally
possible, but only after the forced repetition of the glass-half-full self-talk
that you haven’t really believed in a long time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
can’t find anything if you don’t look for it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
stop looking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There’s
no point in continuing a transhumanist regimen if you aren’t even going to be
around for the next upgrade of your phone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">WebMD
can fist itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
bury most of your electronic devices in your closet. You stop responding to what
few texts you still get from long-estranged friends. Afternoons: bong rips,
HBO, Thai lunch specials. Nights, you drink with a fervor. More often than not,
your super, who also occasionally sells you Percocet and mushrooms, knocks on
your door to tell you about the previous night, how he stopped you from
flinging a slice of take-out pizza at a passing bicyclist after another
sidewalk puke session outside your building. You give him money, change the
channel. Mornings don’t exist. Your cross trainers are ashtrays. You get all
your shifts covered at the restaurant. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">At least you’re sleeping.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You’re
out alone one night and you meet a girl whose face you won’t remember and who’s
almost as toasted as you are, but who sobers up fast a few hours later at your
apartment when you ask her if she won’t mind biting a mole off your back that
you assume is malignant. You wake up alone in piss-heavy boxers, roll off the
bed onto the floor, a howling emanating from your balloon-swollen abdomen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your
time has come. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The clinic’s
waiting area is well-lit, featuring plush couches, a silent BBC news broadcast,
an impressive selection of gender-neutral magazines. The only noise as you fill
out your insurance information comes from the ambient nature sounds pumping
from invisible speakers and a little kid making fun of his brother for coloring
an eagle green and orange in a book in the children’s play area. A nurse enters
from a side door and pronounces your name wrong. You take a last breath of
willful ignorance and follow her into the examination room. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
don’t remember the questions she asks you, and you don’t remember your shorter
answers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">She
tells you to sit down, wraps a blood pressure machine around your arm and slips
a thermometer under your tongue. “Ninety-eight-point-three,” she says. “Very
good.” She frowns a little as the blood pressure machine relaxes from your arm.
“BP’s high.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I’m
always nervous,” you say. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">She
nods, jots something on a clipboard, tells you to roll up your sleeve. You
watch the plastic pouch expand with truth juice. The nurse divides the blood
into vials with different color caps, slapping stickers on each. As she flicks
her gloves into the hazardous waste bin, you imagine being sucked down with
them, crushed against the loose needles and emptied piss cups, pierced and
filth-bathed into a strangely melodic silence, a soft gray place where you have
no concept of gravity and the squirm of your days. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
nurse tells you to strip, walks out of the room, not making eye contact. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
man who enters a few minutes later is tall, thick with the traces of what must
have once been an impressive musculature, with an unassuming salt-and-pepper
beard and a dignified hairline. He introduces himself with a deliberate, Julep-swilled
drawl and a mitt-shake that’s rigid but oddly pacifying. He motions for you to
have a seat on the examination table and flips through the papers on the
clipboard that the nurse gave him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">He
looks up. “You decide to request all these tests yourself?” he asks. “Seems a
little unnecessary for someone your age without a history of,” he looks down at
the clipboard, “anything.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But
you know that’s not how it works. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
know there has to be a first time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I’ve
done a lot of research, and given my distinct set of possibilities, yes I need
them.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
doctor shakes his head, reaches for a box of latex gloves in a nearby cabinet.
“Well all right then,” he says. “Hopefully your insurance isn’t going to murder
you for this.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> “I have better medical coverage than the
majority of nightlife industry workers. I have –”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> “Uh, ok. So which one of these
possibilities will we be starting with?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
guide the doctor’s hands toward every abnormality and inflammation, watching
for a glitch in his serene face, the flowering of concern, but nothing changes.
He asks you to flip over and assume a position normally reserved for canine
submissives so he can get a look at the scabbed-over flap whose throbbing
existence can’t be denied by even the most untrained eye. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Yup,
that’s a real big one,” the doctor says, almost chuckling. “This looks pretty
straightforward, but I’m going to digitally examine your rectum for any
irregularities, polyps, et cetera. This might be uncomfortable.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
realize he doesn’t mean “digitally” in the technological sense. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
clench at the release of pressure and the snap of glove removal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Everything
appears to be fine internally,” the doctor says, marking something on the
clipboard. “You’re probably going to want to get the hemorrhoid removed for
hygiene purposes. Shouldn’t be too painful since it’s mostly external. In the
meantime, make sure you’re eating vegetables and drinking lots of water. Easy
on the alcohol.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
doctor tells you to put your clothes on. They’ll have to wait for the blood
work results, but all of your vitals seem well within the healthy range for
someone your age, with the exception of your blood pressure, which he’ll chalk
up to a natural aversion to clinical settings. No need for a prescription.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“On
a one-to-ten, how confident are you?” you ask. “I mean, I’ve read that
misdiagnosis rates can be as high as forty-seven percent in a preliminary
examination like this.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
doctor sighs, stares at the phone you’ve taken out of your pocket. “This is the
golden age of hypochondria,” he says. “You should get back into a more
consistent workout routine and maybe find a couple hobbies that will keep you
off WebMD. Make an appointment with a rectal surgeon to get that hemorrhoid
removed. Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
leave the office as you entered it, trailed by a rotting, skeletal version of
your dead grandmother’s face mouthing the word <i>fucked</i> on constant repeat. Three days later, sleeplessly camping on
the couch amidst untouched plates of disintegrating drunken noodles, you get
the call. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
bird-pitched, Mouseketeer twang belongs to someone who introduces herself as
Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics who sounds like she’s barely
qualified to read lottery numbers, but at least she’s bubbly. That might be the
point. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Syphilis
with a smile!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“So,
um, I’m going to read you the blood work results from your recent visit with
Dr. E—? Please let me finish before you ask any questions, but honestly honey
you’re not going to freak. All the blood cell counts are great! Liver, thyroid,
and kidney function are good…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">She
reads off every result and she’s right. You know because you’ve already checked
what the numbers should be. She’s “super jealous of your cholesterol?” and your
STD panel is “totally negatory!” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
hang up, scoop solidified chunks of MSG into the garbage, and go into your room
to find your cross trainers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
next day you call your boss and tell him you won’t be coming to the restaurant
that night, or ever. You’re going to look for a job where you can utilize your
philosophy degree: arts conservatories, historical organizations, cultural
think tanks. You run a little every morning because it feels good to be outside
and moving. When you get tired you stop. You shave every day and dabble in some
of the facial products that had been lying dormant on your dresser since before
your thesis defense. You buy groceries at a store that doesn’t sell kombucha or
wild broccoli and supplement your non-organic vegetables with ground beef or
boneless pork chops or whatever you feel like cooking. Your phone resides in closet
purgatory when the retro flip model you purchased on Amazon arrives in the mail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Whether
everything is one big moment whose meaning shines perpetually or a collection
of seconds adding to nothing, you don’t care. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> You’re not fucked. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You’re
alive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">One
afternoon you’re getting ready for happy hour drinks with an environmental
lawyer whose pictures are all taken from questionable angles and no full-body
shots but who comes across in her profile as “relaxed” and “balanced.” The
phone rings, unknown number, but you’re expecting a follow-up from the
interview you had the day before for an archivist position at an online
Nietzschean database. Or it might be the lawyer, XOXO-Jennie88, calling because
she has to work late or something. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Hello,
is this J—?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Monotone,
rehearsed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Telemarketer
scum. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Mm-hm?”
Your thumb slides along your well-moisturized cheek toward the hang-up icon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“J—
this is Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics. I’m calling again in
regards to some blood work you recently had done.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
twang is gone. The harmless questioning cadence replaced by stoic certainty,
the weight of bad news.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your
thumb slides back, gripping. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
hear your grandmother’s chalk-scraped cackling. You feel the soft gray place
spiraling farther away into the bowels of a basket you’ll never grasp.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I’m
glad I was able to reach you. I’ve been trying to get in touch for the past
week but your inbox is full.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Uh-huh.”
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Well,
I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience but there was a mix-up in the lab
regarding the samples we received. An obviously undesirable administrative
error. These things are rare but they do happen, and we make it our primary
responsibility to notify those affected as quickly as possible. There’s
probably no need to be super concerned just yet – your cholesterol is still
excellent – but there were minor incongruities in a few of the readings and
we’d like you to make another appointment to draw more samples and to discuss
with your primary care doctor the possibility of –”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I
have surprisingly good credit for someone my age and it increases with every
punctual student loan payment I make.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I’m
sorry but that doesn’t have anything to do with –”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“In
the event of a natural disaster my apartment is ideally situated along a major
evacuation route.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Um,
congratulations?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I
have three point five times as many Twitter followers as the global average.
The shoe store on West Broadway is finally having its annual end-of-summer
clearance next week and the mid-cut suede boots that match most of my collared
shirts and a fair number of my jeans will be sixty to seventy percent lower
than their current value. My cholesterol is still excellent…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-68624327981058828192015-01-28T02:08:00.000-05:002015-02-14T15:03:42.180-05:00great uncle charlie<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /><br />Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) citation:<br /><br /><br /> Charles F. Cymerys, 31021808, Corporal, Company C, 505th Parachute Infantry, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism in action on 10 July 1943 on Sicily. With utter disregard for his own safety, Corporal Cymerys, who was second in command of a rifle squad, crawled to his unit's equipment bundle to secure automatic weapons needed in the attack on enemy positions. In the face of heavy enemy machine gun and rifle fire he secured the weapons, but was wounded in doing so. Despite his wounds he crawled 150 yards toward the position where the enemy was hiding and threw hand grenades, killing two of the enemy and forcing the others to abandon their position. This heroic act enabled his squad to procure its equipment and organize for an attack. Corporal Cymerys later succumbed to the wounds he received during this gallant action.</span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-61063571427825890032015-01-26T14:28:00.001-05:002015-01-26T14:34:11.540-05:00subway pamphlet erasure poem #1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>Jesus Coming</b><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Rapture the “snatching,” the immediate twinkling rise,<br />remain caught in the clouds<br />to meet the air. <br />In the near future Christ will descend <br />and take brides and this will be awesome, <br />the moment for the raptured ones<br />since they all shall be glorified bodies tasting hard God, <br />who created the universe by coming. <br />Now learn this parable:<br />When his branch has already become tender<br />and is near to shoot forth<br />with all the fulfillments of heaven, be alert, <br />as the Lord only comes for death and hades.<br />The key to salvation is found in sinful, idolatrous ways,<br />defiled virgins, the ones who cannot see the kingdom<br />and melt with fervent heat. <br />Look for a new earth<br />in which prepared brides, earthquakes, <br />drugs, sexual immorality, the New World Order, <br />the media, energy companies, judicial systems, <br />the government, the military, <br />and most importantly the banks, will be increased. <br />With technology you can run, but you <br />cannot hide. Your only chance is to stay <br />and endure Christ’s second coming, <br />unparalleled in trouble and horror. <br />You can expect to unfold before God enters<br />strongly in you – every torture will be used <br />in order to force you to Christ, even your children,<br />killed in front of you to force you to take the motion. <br />Although you may suffer, don’t give up hope:<br />The Tribulation will end <br />with the triumphant return of the Antichrist<br />and you will be rewarded greatly!</span><div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjTgbpghvjyFwWckNDRqJGqa3zmlyGrjEHydbh1j5cB5Qh8clHGDXMjvgkHomPIN7NzIv1Vu9cmWTa8EFMls-2otaAx_-KFfusW031GSG-m76UKxdssHFaMoGGp1HNwAK554ZIpT7KgmEg/s1600/IMG_20150126_141339_065.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjTgbpghvjyFwWckNDRqJGqa3zmlyGrjEHydbh1j5cB5Qh8clHGDXMjvgkHomPIN7NzIv1Vu9cmWTa8EFMls-2otaAx_-KFfusW031GSG-m76UKxdssHFaMoGGp1HNwAK554ZIpT7KgmEg/s1600/IMG_20150126_141339_065.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-85274481648611833932015-01-19T13:23:00.000-05:002015-01-19T13:23:50.257-05:00the departure of echoes from a scrubbed-out space<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-large;">A new story, <a href="http://www.theheavycontortionists.com/blog/dams">Dams</a>, is up at Mark Cronin's new publishing venture The Heavy Contortionists. It's the longest piece of my collection-in-progress <i>How to Find a Flock</i>, and a companion/sequel/prequel to <a href="http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2012/08/12/sunday-stories-last-girlfriend/">this</a>.</span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-82747801048298082492014-12-11T04:59:00.000-05:002015-02-14T15:03:22.306-05:00Simply absorb fluids. Keep your shit together.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-large;"><b>The Terrible Softness of Tongues is up <a href="http://www.cleavermagazine.com/the-terrible-softness-of-tongues-by-chris-vola/">at Cleaver Magazine</a>.</b></span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-16447268155502293942014-10-15T13:48:00.000-04:002014-10-15T13:48:51.967-04:00Her middle-finger emojis were swift<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-large;">A new story, <a href="http://revolutionjohnmagazine.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/an-occurrence-at-the-only-place-youve-ever-known-by-chris-vola/">AN OCCURRENCE AT THE ONLY PLACE YOU'VE EVER KNOWN</a> is up at the excellent Revolution John Magazine. </span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-2596315506335958542014-08-21T21:09:00.001-04:002014-08-21T21:09:14.186-04:00Immigrants<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Your immigrant
grandmother <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">sipped the bones <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"> of shorelines, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"> kneaded
their </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">splinters <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">into a faith <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">built on <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">a freak of nature.<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Your immigrant
grandfather <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">rejected legislated
fun-bags, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">plastic trees <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">and disaster relief, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">yelled his mangled
un-responses <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">in groves of goatees <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"> and Cadillacs.<br />
<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Your immigrant uncle <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"> wore a belly full of corn syrup, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">slid off </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">his skin
junkie’s charisma <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">into a Brownstone bowl <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">and buried it <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">with soft-boiled
consequences.<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Your immigrant mother <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">licked the cigarette’s
copper coil, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"> synchronized her lungs’ waste. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Beneath the branches <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">of a fire escape, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">her breast curved <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">like a pomegranate.<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Your immigrant brother<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">sees the reflective
lights <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">of the helicopter’s
ugly <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">bubble cockpit, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">knows that <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">within certain limits, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">the Moon is as imitated </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">as a cop's fist.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">
<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">My immigrant fingers <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"> hide behind a </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">swelling glass abscess <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">and next week’s podcast, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">afraid to touch <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">this city <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -3.25pt; tab-stops: 45.0pt 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">through an astronaut’s
suit.</span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-41793184582737283482014-08-18T21:51:00.000-04:002014-08-18T21:51:47.581-04:00The Only Place pt2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">She’d gotten
his email address two or three months ago from the bottom of an article he’d
published in an obscure site run by a former professor. Some barely serious,
stoner-philosophizing drivel about the evolution of celebrity worship syndrome
that focused on the potential illuminati symbolism of matching fingerless
gloves worn by Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a diabetes fundraiser. She wrote to Roger
about how she liked his acknowledging that the “legal framework in post-racial
America relies on the myth that universally held racist concepts no longer
exist,” and was especially impressed with his portrayal of Beyoncé, noting that
it reminded her of “dat slutty girl who you keep around bc she's a hot mess and
makes you feel better about your life and always has good stories bc she's a
pathological liar - who i havent talked to since high school aka before she got
married at age 18 to a guy who needed a visa and a jap to support him, just fb
messaged me asking if she could use my email to send an email....????? because
she lost her pw. wut?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He’d given
up actual psychological research as an undergrad, and writing was just an
at-work hobby in the downtime between preparing invoices and market analyses,
but it felt cool to have a fan. Even if she didn’t seem like the
throws-panties-on-stage type. Even if she didn’t seem like any type. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Her name was
Allison Anvil, which sounded like a proto-feminist but retroactively offensive
comic book character, like her profile and online persona could actually be
administered by a balding dweeb-turned-identity thief named Kevin trolling in
his basement for passwords and social security numbers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Roger knew
she was real, though. As in, definitely not a dude. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Their
exchanges followed a natural progression: gchats, texts, friend requests. Her
mobile uploads and posting history formed a more or less complete depiction of
her last five years, too thorough to be forged. There were throwback shots of
high school beach trips, a blurry ride on Disney World teacups, split-screened
celebrity lookalikes, vodka-happy off-campus posturing. Diatribes about
Holocaust Remembrance Day and World of Warcraft. A Young Democrats dinner
highlighted by a Bill Clinton handshake a cheek-nuzzle from an ex-boyfriend who
Roger imagined looked kind of like a younger version of himself minus ~15
pounds of beer fat. And the most recent pics – an intentionally unflattering
wedgie shot on a zip line in El Salvador, drinking simultaneously (with work
colleagues?) from a mammoth bowl of neon-infused sludge, their duckfaces
straw-induced and therefore acceptable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The kind of
stuff Roger imagined he’d see and read from Jocelyn – the neighbor who
sometimes did her laundry at the same time as him in their building’s communal
basement dungeon and, when she wasn’t buried in her phone, looked to be around
the same age as Allison – if they’d been friends on Facebook or in reality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Roger was a
man who had done so much laundry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He still lived
in the first apartment he’d looked at on Craigslist, stayed put through several
drug- or career-related roommate transitions and absurd rent increases, worked
at the same firm where he’d started out even though he was mostly bored and
there wasn’t much of a chance for upward mobility. He used the same hair
product – “power putty for a windblown surfer look!” – long after his scraggly
faux-surfer days had ceased. But in the seven years since he’d graduated and
moved to New York, he’d allowed himself to be snared by commitment only once,
and that was brief and mostly on Skype with a younger girl who was still at the
school he’d gone to in Maryland, who couldn’t deal with the distance between
them and her desire for at least two members of the ultimate frisbee team. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">That someone
so steeped in routine, who seemed to crave stability above all else, would
remain single for so long was puzzling to the friends and coworkers who populated
the periphery of Roger’s life. He wasn’t overly antisocial, didn’t suffer from a
recurring skin condition or extraordinarily gross breath; he was no better or
worse than the majority of his blue-collared-shirted and IPA-swilling comrades.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">And there were
girls. One or two a month, sometimes fewer during dry spells. Standard
bar-hookups, Tinder dates, encounters at alumni functions. Connections that
lasted a couple hours, or petered off after a few increasingly half-hearted
(and foggier) mornings after. Companionship reduced to a series of exploits
where the names had been redacted or forgotten, from the occasionally
outrageous – the day trader who let him put it in her ass after he bought a $400
bottle of Grey Goose and told her his Kindle sales rivaled James Franco’s, the
daddy-funded poet from whom he received a period blood mustache without proper
warning and who later tried to cover up by asking he’d had a nosebleed – to the
more pedestrian and sadder: a text-message moratorium, an unrequited friend
request.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It wasn’t that
he was incapable of reciprocating passion, that his shallow-seeming emotions
were feigned and served an ulterior motive. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He was alone
because above all else, Roger loved ideas. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Age seven or
eight, he remembered sitting in Sunday school, listening to a watered-down
version of Revelation, thrilled by the cartoon chaos it evoked. Afternoons, he
would spend hours alone in his room, creating his own action-figure End of Days
– Skeletor or Mumm-Ra as the Antichrist, Princess Leia and Wonder Woman as
angelic mediators, Ninja Turtles as the Four Horsemen (duh). But a couple of
years later, during a particularly rough stretch of summer that included the
demise of a grandparent, a cat, and a Siamese fighting fish, death became something
far more brutal and uncertain than the easy deus ex machina redemption found in
swiftly dismembering a tiny villain’s plastic limbs. If there was a god, Roger no
longer wanted to be a part of its ineptness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Instead, he
focused on another portal that was plastic and mostly reliable and seemingly infinite.
A penetrable citadel of unsupervised mischief where age/sex/location was as
malleable as his grasp of geography and his desire to blend in to whatever chatty
den of liars and pedophiles he’d clicked into. His first girlfriend was
ninety-eight percent instant messages and two percent hugs before and after
school. When she broke up with him in-person a few days before the eighth grade
semi-formal, using more words than she’d spoken to him in the past month, he
was only shocked because her messages the previous evening had included the
requisite number of extra vowels and exclamation points – <i>byebyeee talk to u sooooon!!!!</i> – to make it seem like everything
was going smoothly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">High school
nights, holed up in a parental home office suckling on filched Bacardi, he
would scroll through his AIM contacts, initiating conversations with girls
whose screen names he’d acquired in mostly sheepish exchanges or gleaned even
more awkwardly from nonplussed friends. He devised and honed a system for
gathering information, for establishing a connection that somehow seemed more
meaningful because it usually played out on his own terms, the rehearsed-yet-casual
sequences of manipulation that belied the painfully ordinary, pimple-skinned
insecurity that consumed his non-typing life. He’d start with a simple, <i>hi, hey, hello</i>, wait for the <i>nm u?</i> response, and then it was on. After
enough practice, it wasn’t difficult to always act interested and to keep the
exchanges flowing with as little dead time as possible. The trick was in
controlling the flow, carving its direction. If KatyKay40286 from French 201 complained
about the frumpy patterns rimming her newly issued field hockey skirt, he would
commiserate by mentioning how his water polo coach had screwed up everyone’s
Speedo sizes – <i>yea sucks its a little
uh…tight hehe</i>. After her expected LOLish response, he might conjecture that
while he was certainly uncomfortable, it was probably nothing compared to the
sports bras she was forced to endure (KatyKay40286 being a notable subject of
bust-related speculation). If everything was progressing at an acceptable pace,
Roger would suggest that they play The Question Game, basically formalizing
what they’d already been doing. The only rules were that you had to alternate
asking each other questions, one at a time, and that while the questions could
be about anything, yes/no answers were strictly discouraged. The game would
start innocently enough – <i>what series of
decisions do you think caused Mr. Neary to become the kind of teacher whose
coffee mug reeks of Kahlua every first period?</i> – but would quickly veer
toward the quasi-erotic: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i>whats your favorite position?</i> <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">how big is/are your [ ]?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
questions were tamer than much of what he’d encountered as a barely pubescent
chat room devotee, but there was a thrill in the forging of textual intimacy, an
arousal that was on par with what he imagined actual physical contact would
elicit. If the girl got skittish and stopped playing or signed off before the
game turned interesting, he could always resort to another less pleasurable,
but not-without-its-merits hobby: scouring the streaming video landscape in
order to check in on which of his favorite starlets – souls he felt he had
grown to understand almost as well as the minds behind the screen names he
hoarded – was farther along on the oft-tread path from casting couches and coy
handjobs to triple penetration and rectal prolapse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">To an adult
Roger, Allison was a welcome throwback to an almost-forgotten era, an aspect of
himself that had once been indispensable. It wasn’t anything sexual; the need
to fulfill unrequited horny-boy urges no longer existed. Instead, they traded some
of the facts – her recent graduation from a small school in a rust-colored
Pennsylvania city, his summer share house on Fire Island – and the obsessions –
her resentment of a single-mother childhood and the sperm donation that led to
her creation, his constant fear of colorectal cancer due to rye whiskey and chronic
McDonald’s addiction – that comprised their inner and outer lives. She was fascinatingly
ADHD, filterless, able to jump, in the space of a few lines, from her internship
at a law firm where she was trying hard not to perpetuate “America’s
meritocracy myth,” to her quest to scour the internet for the most awful
sounding white baby names (<i>my personal
favorite so far is Kamdyn – murder capitol of new jersey</i>), to delightfully
random and gross conjectures: <i>would you
rather be murdered and have your corpse jizzed on by 1000 men while it lies at
the bottom of a ditch OR your corpse + ditch + 1 man with a bucket of his semen
that he has been storing for years OR 1000 women menstruate on you your corpse
+ ditch?</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The best
part was that for all she confessed, she never demanded equal revelations from him.
She could discuss how her college roommate was a popular webcam model who got
paid to play videogames in an elf costume and how sometimes Allison would play
with herself and wipe her fingers on the plastic ears, or how her brief bulimia
phase was so extreme that she wouldn’t go to class unless she was guaranteed a
seat by the door and a bathroom/garbage bin was nearby, and Roger wouldn’t feel
compelled to talk about how he cried every night for a couple years after he
and some friends beat a pregnant squirrel to death with a nine iron or how he
and his neighbor Timmy, before his mother found out about it, would take turns
wiping themselves as part of a game they called “family time.” All he had to do
was keep the conversation going with a word or two, feign the vaguest interest.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He would come
home from work or the bar or wake up late on a weekend morning, turn on one of
his devices, and know that in a few moments he would be inundated with the same
pleasantly unchecked stream of Millennial pathos and pop culture:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>ugh
roggerrrrr im dying<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">i
took a vicodin<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">but
i just took it<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">whenever
i get really bad insomnia i get scared that i've developed bipolar<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">because
that's an early warning sign<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and
this is the age when people show their first symptoms<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">like
stay awake for a week straight babbling like a homeless veteran<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">oh
no. katy perry is back on Reddit.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">save
me from myself.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He could
absorb her unique brand of damage until sated, take what he wanted and give
back less.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>Sounds
awful :(</i> <i>I gotta pick up a jacket at
the dry cleaner. Later</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: 69.0pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">After about
a year Allison started trying to meet Roger in person. Initially it was subtle.
She was thinking of staying at a friend’s in Brooklyn in two weekends, would he
be around if they took a train into the city? She had to come in next Wednesday
to get her passport renewed at a Midtown office that happened to be near where
Roger worked, would he want to get smoothies? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Foiled by
half a dozen limp excuses, she became painfully direct. They could hang out on
his schedule. What weekends did he have free? When was she going to finally
going to meet the roommate who used Febreze as body wash? She would have no
problem sleeping on the couch as long as less than three sex offenders lived in
his building. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Roger knew
that it might go down like this, that she would eventually try to sabotage the
idea of herself he had worked so hard to cultivate and maintain. He wasn’t skilled
enough at Instagram to keep conjuring images of the imaginary places that
coincided with his cop-outs, so he tried broaching the subject honestly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>Do
you ever think that if we met in person it would ruin our internet bond? <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">its
just that once you meet in person, that’s it, it's no longer an internet
friendship and there's no turning back and reinternetizing it.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Her middle-finger
emojis were swift, relentless. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He was
selfish. He was a solipsist. He was needy and emotionally dependent. He was
gross and old. He was too privileged to understand the consequences of cultural
appropriation. He wore the same Third Eye Blind tee shirt in at least 15 of his
pictures, none throwbacks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Though Roger
agreed with roughly two thirds of her accusations, he didn’t feel the sting of
her absence until the third day of signed-off silence. His friends had left the
bar and he had secured a reluctant seventh pint from Jessica, who knew his
tipping calculations would begin to suffer greatly. He was looking at a
Buzzfeed list of horrible sounding vegan Trader Joe’s products and wanted to
text Allison the link. He tried thinking of someone else whose opinion about
the article he would find interesting or worthwhile, and couldn’t. Least of all
Jessica, who was viewing the possibly dwindling pile of singles in front of his
beer with increasing trepidation. With Allison he could drink to the point of
being a dickhead and send stupid shit to her and regardless of her response he
would know that he was on the same wavelength with her for at least a few
moments, what he imagined it would be like to have someone worth coming home
to. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Now he was
simply another lonely dick. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">When she
signed back on (<i>heyyy dummy I still h8t
you and im never coming to ny but hows ur week been??</i>) he decided he would be
more engaged, give a little more of himself, enough not to lose her again. Even
if she only wanted to tell him about sending her ex-boyfriend pictures of her
armpit stubble or her ideas about the patriarchy’s relationship to
anti-Semitism that evolved into a treatise on the ineptness of female biology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He would
try. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>if i could
redesign lady parts, balls would be on the inside, as would clits, and there
would be no vagina, just a little hole, covered by the labia. and nobody would
have hair.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">it
would be like the iOS 11 of genitalia.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>isnt that
pretty much what a vag is<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">a hole covered by labia<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>no there's
the other shit inside<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">i don't know what it's called<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">the labia minora!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>idk i kind
of like my genitalia<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>you're the
only one.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">the worst is when guys send dick
pics.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">like okay, i can tell if someone
has a nice dick but i don't need to see a picture of it.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>note to
self do not send dick pics anymore<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>i'm not
going to get off to a picture of an erect penis<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>lol<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>you would
never send a dick pic<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>lol only
if asked<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>send me
one<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">thats what snapchat was made for<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>i dont
have an erection tho<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>that and
me sending pictures of my boobs with animal faces drawn on them<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">a new hobby of mine<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">how hard is it to get an erection?
pun intended<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>very punny<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>now i'm
inspired to send another boob animal<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>do it<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>not to
you. i would only send it to you in exchange for a dick pic.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>what about
a soft dick pic<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>nope<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>haha ok<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>i just
sent my friend a boob puppy.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>are you
going to have me arrested if i send one<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>no!<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">as long as you don't screenshot
mine <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">-<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]--><i>i dont
even know how to do that<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">He really
didn’t know how, and wouldn’t have done it anyway. He wouldn’t piss her off
again. But the reference to a relative state of permanence awoke in him a
twinge of memory, an ugliness he tried to shake off while looking for his phone
in the bowels of a clothes pile. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">While
Allison waited, faceless and soundless. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-61957313479385950492014-07-19T20:12:00.002-04:002014-07-19T20:12:45.409-04:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">How has it
come to this, he would think, zoning on the pixels that flickered like a CAT
scan from the screen on his blanket-covered stomach. Regardless of how hard I try,
I can’t seem to keep my shit together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Fundamentally,
he knew you couldn’t keep any kind of shit together. Everything was carbon and
particles smaller than carbon and those particles were always corroding,
breaking, collapsing against each other with the terrible softness of tongues.
A rapid, infinite sequence of shifts that were at once fragile and impenetrably
brutal. If he felt an uncommon pang of irrational strength, he would try to
fight the changes: he would dismantle his power cord, close the screen, his thoughts,
his head, and for as long as he could, forget the events, faces, and hips that
had come to define his particular disintegration. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">He would
stay in one place and keep staying still. He would hold his breath and try not
to desire it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Simply
absorb fluids.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">Keep your
shit together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">The dense
and desperate oscillations, though muffled, continued unabated, buzzing in
directions he wasn’t even aware of, reminders of his task’s impossibility. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;">He would open
his laptop and jerk off and sleep soundly. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-67653454863188140182014-06-26T14:52:00.004-04:002014-06-26T14:52:52.521-04:00I Wanted to Go There<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">If X is the sum of two differentiating equations</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I didn't write the answer in my graphing calculator</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if graphing calculators served a purpose</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if one of those purposes was paying my bills </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I sold my graphing calculator on eBay</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got enough money to pay my bills</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I spent the money on a fifth and three dimebags</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got drunk</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got stoned</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got stoned</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if Mr. Jones shut off the water</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if Mr. Jones shut off the electricity </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if Mr. Jones shut off the gas</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got stoned</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if my parents lived in Connecticut </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I took a Greyhound </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if we saw a homeless black man passed out in the road</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if the kid next to me had an Incredible Hulk blanket</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if we stopped in Triangle, Virginia </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if we stopped in Baltimore</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if we stopped in New York </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if my parents were gone for the weekend</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got stoned</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I slept on the couch in the T.V. room</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got drunk</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I broke Dad's collection of 19th-century whiskey glasses</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if my parents came home while I was looking through their closets</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I walked a half-mile to Grandma's condo</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if Grandma asked me why the trees look so big this year</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if the trees really do look so big this year</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if we're one happy family (sure we are)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if they build a colony on the moon in 2024</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I wanted to go there</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if the shuttle's cost was comparable to flying from Newark to Atlanta </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if the density of atmosphere gradually decreases as the altitude increases</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I got sick from space travel</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if I vomited on an astronaut</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if he hit the wrong button while cleaning his boots</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if we got sucked into a vacuum </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if 'vacuum' didn't sound so slippery</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if there was no afterlife in space</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if that idea didn't sound so bad</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if most ideas don't sound so bad</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if ideas are combinations of words</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">and if words are more fun than calculus</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">then X equals 7. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-small;">[originally appeared in the 2007 edition of The Messenger]</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-79626409597946278322014-05-28T16:54:00.002-04:002014-05-28T16:54:37.781-04:00a river's perfect scar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: large;"><b>Psyched that my smallish (~50pgs) book of drug poems, <i>E is for Ether</i>, will be published by Leaf Garden Press at some point in the future, if there is a future. Hopefully there is. </b></span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-56693675860007630282014-05-20T13:26:00.003-04:002014-05-20T13:26:21.964-04:00There's a mist hanging over the forest<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-large;"><b>My story "<a href="http://www.literaryorphans.org/playdb/bodies-chris-vola/#">Bodies</a>" is in the latest issue of Literary Orphans.</b></span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5561239494315787445.post-59298511197637838222014-05-12T17:34:00.002-04:002014-05-12T17:36:10.608-04:00no one hears me sing this song<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: black; color: #3d85c6; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">It's kind of crazy to think that Weezer's Blue Album is 20 years old. Still my favorite album hands down, the second CD i ever bought at age 9 (after the seminal Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em) because I'd seen the Buddy Holly music video an</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; line-height: 20px;">d I liked the cover and my mom was cool with it because there wasn't a parental advisory sticker. I remember playing it in the living room, developing what would become some formidable air guitar and lip syncing skills, always starting with the opening catchy acoustic guitar jingle of "My Name is Jonas" and ending with "Only in Dream"'s nerdcore bombast. No tracks were ever skipped -- unless I had swim practice or someone was yelling at me because my Legos on the kitchen floor had become hazardous. I was too young to understand Rivers Cuomo's post-adolescent angst but there was an addictive power in the three-power-chord homilies, a seductive rebellion that drove me to learn drums and then guitar, that spurred my first attempts at songwriting and my eventual love of the written word. As I got older, middle school and high school, the lyrics became painfully and beautifully applicable, spoke to me as if in a mirror, because as many friends as I had, as successful as I was in school and sports and extracurriculars, I always felt like that lonely unrequited guy crafting odes to sadness and missed romantic opportunities in his garage, or like Rivers once said in an interview: "I've sold two million records, I've toured around the world singing in front of thousands of people. And there's a girl sitting across from me in English 101, and I just look up at her every once in a while and put my head back down. I'm still a pathetic fool. No matter how many records I sell, I'm never going to be in Kiss." I remember checking weezer.com relentlessly, praying that each subsequently released album would at least approach the Blue Album's perfection, and always being disappointed. Disappointment became acceptance one muggy July night in 2001 at the Meadows in Hartford when during a 20-minute encore performance of "Only In Dreams" I understood, after some beer tears, that nothing would ever be this good and that I needed to be thankful that something so powerful would always be a part of my life, would always remind me of simpler, better times. I didn't need to keep buying Weezer's crappy new albums, hoping in vain for something that would never happen again. Even though I did buy most of them. But in college, when my friend Adam and I would sit in parking lots on campus at night with nothing to do, jamming out to tunes in his car, the Blue Album, the entire Blue Album, was the first and only option. And it still is. Because I'm still a pathetic fool. Because sometimes I still hurt for the old times. Because I can never go home.</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; display: inline; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><span style="color: #37404e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TkpLVkKpJ_c" width="420"></iframe></span></span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03871144590321587399noreply@blogger.com0