The Beginning of the End 

The reason we hope for a Mayan apocalypse—or any pre-ordained disaster—is that it gives us an excuse to believe in a sensical order, gleaned, if not by us, at least by our betters. It is an excuse to believe in our betters.

Armchair Steve Jobs 

 

Armchair Steve Jobs. Noun. The practice of critiquing Apple Inc.'s business decisions with the benefit of retrospect: e.g., "The new iTunes sucks. Steve Jobs would never have done that." 

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Homesteading 

There was a psych study: people were asked if they would be interested in receiving a surgical procedure that would guarantee to make them happy—but would require removal of whole sections of the frontal lobe of their brain, the exact parts of the brain that made them them. So, they would wake up from the procedure blissful and worry-free, but with no memories or sense of who they once were. 

Not a single person agreed to participate.

To a person, everyone preferred to stay their same miserable unique self to being a happy person without an identity. 

There is a maxim in law known as the "Homestead Principle," adopted from Locke, which says that we fairly begin to own a thing as soon as we have "mixed our labour" with it, and I figure it applies to our identity as well, because identity isn't found or discovered so much as it's earned, appropriated through laborious collecting, staking, branding, herding, tilling, and maintaining. And wherever we choose to put our work, this becomes a part of our identity, because underneath every endeavor is this question: "Who am I?" (and underneath writing most of all).

Postcards 

You always collected postcards, everywhere you went, imagining some day you'd sit at home, the solid comfort of your desk, and send them out to your friends and family. You saved them up for years, waiting for the opportune moment, the moment when you'd have enough repose to be able to pause your various projects and anxieties, to sit at that desk and unselfishly write by hand, each one a loving collection of words to make its recipient feel, if not loved, then at least known—known, and on your mind.

You collected postcards from Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona; from Petaluma, South Dakota, Zion; from Salem Massachusetts and Alcatraz; Portland Oregon, Portland Maine, Paris and Prague, Disneyland and Disneyworld; postcards from truck stops, postcards from a convenience store in your hometown; postcards from hotel desks and restaurant lobbies, postcards you picked up at a garage sale, postcards from places you never visited; postcards of 50s pinups; postcards that sang tinny music box tunes; popup postcards; scratch-and-sniff postcards; postcards hollowed out and filled with wildflower seeds; large-format postcards that required extra postage; postcards from days gone by, which said "5¢ stamp required;" custom-made postcards of your face, posing in front of real or fake scenery; plain postcards; postcards faded with age.

So few words fit on a postcard, there's only space to say hello and describe one or two circumstances, usually spent on the reasons for writing now, today after not writing for so long.

"I miss you." "This place makes me think of you." "Wish you were here."

The writing takes so little time. The time goes to thinking, feeling, pining, wishing, wondering, and then to the not-writing. It's the time we waste that makes it precious. Time is like salt in the sea: its expanse is useless to us and we drown in it, and our awe does nothing to tame its indifference. Lick your lips and taste it. It's already over.  

The Man in the Ghillie Suit 

There was a story in the news recently: a man had started dressing in one of those big, bushy "ghillie" camouflage suits and standing near the side of the road: he wanted people to think they were seeing a Bigfoot.

But the cars drove by without noticing him. (The suit was designed for camouflage, after all.) The man realized he'd have to get bolder. He decided to wait alongside forest roads at night, and when a car approached, he'd wander into the road.

First time he tried it, the car hit and killed him.

The people in the car didn't even see him till it was too late.

(The suit was designed for camouflage, after all.)

This happened toward the end of the summer, which means he'll almost certainly be nominated for a Darwin Award during this calendar year.

What was he thinking?

Why did he do it?

Most people imagine hoaxers must be vain: they're looking for a chance to get in the news, feel smarter than the people they've duped, have a laugh.

But I like to think this man wanted to inject our lives with something a little more interesting, a little less banal, a little more mythic, than what our daily American lives have to offer. I like to think he was trying to do us a favor, using our curiosity about Sasquatch to break our monotony, to make us ponder, briefly, something fantastic.

Thank you.¹

 

1. This is what I want to do, too. 

Outage 

The power's been out on my block for about an hour now. I knew immediately when it happened, even though it's daytime and there weren't any lights turned on in the house, because of an ominous pop from somewhere down the road, followed by an uncanny quiet, as all of the house's little motors and fans came to a sudden stop. These things are like a kind of heartbeat, a kind of breathing, and when they stopped, it was as if the air in the house hung suddenly still where it was: no pulse.

It hasn't occurred to me to call the electric company, because I assume someone else on the block will have done it by now—but then I wonder, how long would we all sit here in the quiet, in the dark, waiting for the others to call? How much direct inconvenience would I need before I reported the situation to the someone who might be able to resolve it? And, is this what it was like in Nazi Germany—a community of otherwise good people, sitting in the dark, lighting candles, writing in their journals about what's wrong with the world, and doing nothing?

The Subway 

After I died, I went to a bardo that looked like a subway car, filled with many of the people I'd known and loved during my life. Whenever the subway came to a stop, one or two people stood up, shuffled to the door, and exited the train.

I noticed my dog was underneath my seat. He got excited to see me, wagging his tail and nuzzling me with his nose. But as the train slowed to its next stop, the man sitting next to me, a stranger, got up to leave, and he was holding the leash of my dog in his hand.

I understood now, my dog would be going with this other man.

When the doors opened, the two of them made their way off the train. My dog looked back at me, and I said, "I'll see you around," though I knew I wouldn't, because once we get off the train, we begin our new lives, and leave the old ones behind.

Caption from an As-Yet Undrawn Cartoon 

“ I'm sort of in between personal brands right now.

The Book 

I climbed down to the basement, the basement I'd nearly forgotten, the basement I'd given back to the spiders and grubs and mice and dust and mold. When Janine died, our children boxed up her things, so I didn't have to look at them, and asked me what to do. A stronger man, a man more inclined toward healing, might have taken those boxes to consignment or Goodwill, where they'd have done some good. Janine herself would have done this. She'd have found new owners for all my suits, men who would fit in them, probably, better than I do. She'd have found new feet for the shoes cluttering my closet. Janine, my wife, rest her soul, was a stronger man than I am.

I asked the kids to carry her things to the basement. There, I could retrieve them and rummage through the memorabilia whenever I wanted, and I wanted to, often, but I never did. It was perfect dark dankness down there, like climbing into the coffin itself, and I couldn't do it.

So the boxes sat in the basement, enduring whatever seasons pass underground: a steady rain of dust, water weeping through the walls, sometimes floods, the burrowing of animals. Who knew what went on down there? I certainly didn't.

Then the day came I needed something, something of Janine's, a nothing thing, a trinket: an old wind-up music box that my daughter had always loved. I decided to find this thing and wrap it for her, for her birthday, because she had children of her own now, and I wanted to give her a gift of this, of history and her connection to it.

"Try to Remember" was the song it played.

The basement bulb had burned out, so I climbed the stairs in the dark, clutching a flashlight in my good hand and the railing in my bad one, till I set foot on the dirt floor. The boxes were piled onto shelves along the wall, unlabeled and in various states of decay. Knowing no other way to begin, I tore into the nearest one. It was stuffed with Janine's hand-sewn wedding dress, yellowed with age, and, on top of the dress, the strangest thing: a book, a thick, hardcover book with a faded cover. "The Story of My Life," it said, and then, where the author's name should be, I saw my own name.

This book, this autobiography, a book I'd never written, a book I'd never seen.

I turned to a page, and this is what it said:

The Cave 

The four boys were playing in a field on a Sunday afternoon. One of them lost his footing when his leg slipped into a hole. Trying to climb out, he noticed the dirt around the hole kept sliding downward, like an hourglass: he had accidentally carved out an opening to an underground cave.

This is the sort of thing boys dream of, when they go outside to play in a field.

The three of them helped each other into the cave. They lashed together their belts and shirts into a short colorful rope, to help ease their way back up, whenever they were done exploring. Then they crawled down into the opening.

They were scared, maybe, a little. It was dark in the tunnel. It smelled like an old, wet basement, slippery with mud and mold and earthy water. The tunnel wasn't designed for people; maybe people had never been here; and that was exactly what thrilled them and drove them to continue climbing downward.

They climbed in the dark. The cave walls here were sharp, and cut at their hands and their clothes, and one of them lost his footing and almost lost his courage, too, but the others goaded him to keep climbing. He was glad he did:

At the end of the tunnel, the cave opened enormously, into a cool chamber where even the quiet had a kind of echo. The air tingled with static or magic or maybe just with the boys' excitement. They held up their cellphones for light, and could make out, just barely, the etchings on the walls, painted in ochre and charcoal: stick figures of hunters hurling arrows and spears; deer and horses and antelope bounding in herds; majestic bison and bear; and handprints, with outstretched fingers standing in for ancient signatures. The boys knew they'd stumbled upon something unique, humbling, and powerful. They knew, even while it was happening, that this feeling they felt was one that they would never, across their entire lives, feel again: this feeling of connection across so much time.

The boys laughed and cheered and celebrated their extraordinary luck, and dreamt immediately of the fame and fortune that awaited them when they climbed back to the outside, and they never noticed the far end of the cave, with its stanchions and railing and walkway leading to a locked door: the boys never imagined for a moment that what they'd discovered was a back entrance to the "replica cave," opened by the government as a sort of historic theme park, to help share an ancient and treasured heritage while also preserving it: locking the real cave away, and opening the replica to tourists six days a week, every day but Sunday.

The Spider 

This entry is not currently available.

Oddfellows Local Volunteer Fire Brigade, pt. 2 

What happened next was this:

Those boys, the Oddfellows, were out in the woods. It was summertime, and as soon as school let out, the three of them went into the woods and settled into that cabin of theirs, and used it as a kind of home base. They said they were up there fishing, and for the most part, they weren't lying. They legitimately loved fishing, or at least the two of them, Will and Phil, did, and Bailey tolerated it well enough, standing next to the other two in the river, wearing matching waders and talking almost nonstop about anything, about his theories, theories mostly about conspiracies and government cover-ups and why the news was reported one way when facts and circumstances made it obvious to anyone who'd look that the reality of things must be quite different.

Will and Phil weren't really the political sort, but Bailey's rants amused them and they'd play along and laugh good-naturedly, and gradually, over time, they probably came around to believe some of his theories, themselves, even if they didn't know they did. His talking didn't bother them in the slightest, as long as he didn't talk too loudly and scare off the fish.

Before you go thinking it's strange a few boys who weren't old enough to drive would be allowed to spend days on end, alone and holed up in the middle of the forest, you have to consider the boys' home lives. Phil was the youngest of seven kids, three brothers and three sisters, and every one of them was the sort of person you'd meet and think, "That person must have had good parenting as a kid." Phil's family were all good people, and they were all raised to treat everyone else like good people, and Phil, growing up in that sort of environment from the moment he was born, well, no one worried much about Phil. He got away from the house for a little privacy, and by his measure, the constant company of his two friends was a lot more private than the constant company of his six siblings; and with all the coming and going in that house, sometimes his parents didn't even realize he'd been gone. But they wouldn't have worried, overly, even if they did notice.

Will was a sweet kid, too, but at the other end of the spectrum, parenting-wise. He'd never known his dad, and his mom took more and more solace from the bottle, and sometimes worse than the bottle. Sometimes she'd worry when she discovered Will missing, but more often, she felt relief: one fewer thing for her to worry about. From Will's perspective, that cabin in the woods was his home, and his mom's place was just somewhere he visited from time to time, to wash dishes and replace the empty rolls of toilet paper.

Bailey was a separate story, as you might expect. No one tried harder to understand Bailey than Bailey's parents did. But Bailey defied most understanding. Even his birth was something of a mystery: his small, blonde, soft-spoken parents had birthed a dark-haired, fourteen-pound bawler. The hospital held him for two days' observation just to try and puzzle out why the kid was crying. Then, suddenly as he'd started, he quieted down, and, at least according to his parents, never cried again.

Instead, it seemed, Bailey internalized. When other babies were already forming sentences, Bailey sat silent, watching, almost brooding behind his black curly hair. His parents took him to a doctor, worried his development was somehow stunted. The doctor offered reassuring words but was at a loss to explain what might be going on inside Bailey's brain. Then, in the kitchen one day, without so much as clearing his throat, Bailey spoke his first words, in an almost-baritone voice: "I don't think I want anymore peas today." His mother was so shocked, she dropped a glass pitcher of iced tea onto the floor, shattering it to pieces.

Most of Bailey's early years were disappeared into books—children's books, naturally, but very quickly soon after, he began devouring texts of all shapes and sizes. His favorites had dragons or spaceships and scantily clad women on their covers, though he also enjoyed horror stories quite a lot. The ones he liked best involved some kind of overt or covert demonic possession—human behavior that couldn't be explained without some nod to the supernatural. Bailey didn't believe or disbelieve in demons; he just knew he enjoyed the thrill of reading about them.

His parents didn't understand their son's interests, but they tried to be open-minded about them. They took him on a family outing each payday to a bookstore, and let him pick out two new titles each visit, so that, by the time Bailey entered middle school, his shelves and his imagination were both overflowing with fantastical and terrible ideas.

No one knew what precipitated the day that Bailey returned from school, piled his entire collection of books in the backyard, doused it in kerosene, and lit it on fire, watching the flames slowly lick over each page before reducing them to small black leaves that floated, each one, skyward. The process was slow and captivating. Gasoline might have consumed the whole pile of them in a roaring blaze, but his choice of kerosene had a decidedly more hypnotic effect: each page took on a blue glow and shrank, its words still intact, before turning suddenly black and taking to the sky. Bailey had finally discovered something that fascinated him as much as the books themselves: fire. His parents stopped taking him to the bookstore after that day. He kept reading, but he had to get his fill from the library; and there weren't any extra kerosene tanks in the garage anymore, either.

Bailey wasn't the social misfit you might expect: the boy held his own. He was surprisingly able with his peer group; he just didn't particularly seem to care about most of them. He had a respectable outside shot that made him a threat in any game of H-O-R-S-E, and he was better than almost anyone at a pool table. He was also one of the first boys in school with a gun, an heirloom squirrel rifle that Bailey's father had received from his father at the age of thirteen, which made him more adamant and less reasonable than usual about passing the gun onto Bailey at the same age. Bailey pretended to listen avidly to his father's safety instructions before marching off, the very next day, to school, with the small rifle tucked in a duffel bag to show his friends.

The three Oddfellows were an unlikely pair, which is to say, Phil and Will probably would have been friends no matter what, and the two of them fell in with Bailey partly because the boy had a strange charisma, and partly because he lived nearby. Phil's dad, one of the town's last remaining actual lumberjacks, started bringing the other two boys on the hunting and fishing trips he took with Phil into the woods, and this quickly became the thing the three boys had in common, regardless of their other differences. They spent enough time together that their particular differences didn't do much to drive them apart: Phil's growing interest in football and in girls; Will's almost obsessive absorption in fishing generally, then fly-fishing in particular, or the nagging idea he had to fix up his old snowmobile and then ride it across Canada, a not-so-secret quest, the other boys knew, to find his dad; or Bailey, Bailey's interest in Bailey things, which is to say in almost anything, the more arcane the interesting—politics, chemistry, medieval history—the subject changed from week to week, but the intensity Bailey brought to each subject never changed. He was curious, and the subject of his curiosities was in itself a curiosity; but this did nothing to dissuade the other boys, who regularly, loyally, and earnestly called Bailey their friend; and even though he'd never once said the word back to them, at least not to their faces, they trusted that Bailey felt the same, or at least felt something similar, in that Bailey sort of way.

The cabin, which Bailey had dubbed the Oddfellow's Local Volunteer Fire Brigade, was a three-mile hike from the nearest fire road and about ten miles outside of town, so often, when the boys went there, they stayed at least overnight and sometimes longer. The water from the stream was drinkable, though Phil's mom insisted they boil it or treat it with iodine. They'd load their backpacks with apples and peanut butter and chocolate, a flashlight and a lantern and some kerosene taken from Phil's, not Bailey's, garage; books and comic books and old Playboys and some puzzle games; ammunition for Bailey's .22; Will's compass and collection of topo maps and rods and hand-tied flies; Phil's first aid kit and hatchet and 17-tool Swiss Army knife, and a walkie talkie that his dad had him bring along in case of emergencies; and Bailey's assortment of matches, lighters, flares, firestarters, and flares. They'd pile, all three of them, onto the back of Phil's dirt bike, ride precariously up the fire road to the trailhead, and then walk the overgrown path up the mountain, the rest of the way.

The boys did their best to keep the exact location of the cabin a secret, intentionally covering their trail with brush every time they came or went. Each of them had been there so often they could find it, maybe literally, in the dark; and, far as they knew, no one else had set foot in the place ever since the original homesteader abandoned it all those years back. They were, intentionally, as isolated as they knew how to be—and that's why what they saw that day made no sense to them whatsoever:

The man, stumbling, confused, dirty, thirsty, delirious, sun-burned, bruised, lost in the woods, and wearing a black suit and tie and dress shoes nicer than any of the three boys had ever seen, outside of magazines. The man staggered toward them, out of the trees, and then collapsed at their feet, unconscious or maybe dead.

The Outbreak 

This entry is not currently available.

Oddfellows Local Volunteer Fire Brigade 

This was not an expedition that was bound for success. Anyone could see that, plain and simple, except for those of us who were on it.

When the Bigfoot craze hit our town, and the tourists started arriving in bunches, Dad saw it as an opportunity, a chance to make good after a long succession of making not-so-good. A fresh start. Almost overnight, with no particular field of expertise whatsoever, Dad opened up a "Bigfoot Safari," offering guided tours into the wilderness, promising "real Bigfoots" [sic] and (here's the kicker) "satisfaction guaranteed."

Still, it was good to see Dad excited about something.

The whole plan hung on the Oddfellows, three boys from high school who spent all their free time in the woods, fishing, smoking pot, and lighting things on fire. The Oddfellows' ringleader was a heavyset bandito named Bailey, who'd spent really all of his walking-around life lighting and then extinguishing small controlled fires. That Bailey was a full-fledged pyromaniac, no one doubted; but this habit had also given him an enormous amount of experience with fire, including putting out fire, and when Bailey was fifteen, he was recruited as the first junior member of our local fire brigade. He was on the scene for every major fire in town, anyway—even the ones he hadn't started—and the chief figured they might as well put him to use. 

It was while fighting a small wildfire in the forest that Bailey had come across the old cabin in the woods, abandoned years ago by a logger or prospector or homesteader or hermit, and he returned there later with his two friends, to fix it up—which mainly meant clearing out the bulk of trash and spiders and burrowing animals that had been nesting there, and installing a table and some chairs and a kerosene lantern. Who knows what they did up there. Anything along the gamut between penny ante poker and devil worship seemed plausible enough. From what I saw, mainly Bailey would set things on fire while the two other Oddfellows, Will and Phil, liked to go fishing.

But the three of them knew that part of the woods as well as anybody, and when Dad decided to go into business, his first move, after buying the truck, had been to enlist the services of the Oddfellows. They became his first-ever employees, though the scope of their responsibilities only became clear to the rest of us later.

The Ionizer 

There's dirt everywhere in this house, on every countertop, every swatch of upholstery, and every inch of floor, a thick grit of it that feels, under foot, like powdered cement and sand. We've become that house, those people, who let the housekeeping get ahead of them till it's overwhelming. We sweep often, mop almost as much, but the surface area of our floor seems as big as Iowa, and it's already started collecting a new layer of dust before we've finished sweeping up the earlier layer. It's too much.

I start dreaming of a machine, the sort of machine that a craftier man might invent, in long nights, after work, in his garage: a kind of ionizer that would work, maybe like Air Hockey, to keep the dirt from ever settling: a gravity defiance device. It would repel dirt altogether, pushing it away, like mosquitoes from citronella or like a reverse electromagnet, always humming, always working.

I imagine this device, left running at all hours, defending us from the accumulation of dust, so all the offending particles would pile up instead at the perimeter of the device's range, forming a small then larger bump ringing the house, then a mound, then a bulwark or balustrade that would grow, month after month, into an actual fortification, piling high as my waist, high as my shoulders, too high now to see past; and eventually, after passage of enough time, we'd become that house, those people, pristine, dirt-free, surrounded by a wall, no one ever going in or going out, like all the other houses and people.

We Watch 

This entry is not currently available.

Conestoga Wagon 

(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of DOGZPLOT.)

International Talk Like a Pirate Day 

I care about "International Talk Like a Pirate Day" as much as the next guy. I enjoy it, I really do. But I think you guys took it too far when you hijacked that cutter from the marina. And yes, it was fun and funny when you replaced the boat's flag with a Jolly Roger, but I don't think you needed to run the boat's old skipper up the mast, or rape his wife, or make his son walk the plank. 

And while wearing that parrot on your shoulder looks kind of cool in an ironic sort of way, I disagree that you should have sawn off your brother's leg and replaced it with a piece of broomstick. It's just "International Talk Like a Pirate Day," man. 

When I asked you to consider what you were doing, it was as your friend. I was looking out for your best interest. You were wrong to call it "mutiny" and maroon me on this desert island.

So, Terrance—or "Bloodbeard," if you're still calling yourself that—I'm going to keep putting these letters in bottles. I don't know if you or anyone will find them. I don't expect they will. But I'll keep writing, and throwing them into the sea, and hoping—because I want you to know that whatever's happened between us, it's not too late to make things right. Please sail back, and let's talk this through, not like pirates. Please.

Your mate, 
Brian

Epiphanini 

 Epiphanini. Noun. A mini-epiphany. E.g., "Leave the gun. Take the epiphanini."

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

This So-Called Universe 

Every now and then, I read an article about how our lives, the world we live in, the sum total of our experiences and feelings and thoughts, everything we consider real, are actually a complicated computer simulation, and it's not just likely that this is so, but it's actually likely that it must be so.

This sounds about right to me.

There are several arguments advanced in favor of this view of things, though I don't remember any of them too well. One is statistical. As soon as it's possible for a computer to simulate a universe (and, according to Moore's law, it will be possible, very soon), then there can be a lot of simulated universes. Before long, even the simulated universes will develop the computing power to simulate a universe, and over time, the number of possible simulated universes approaches infinity; whereas no matter how much time passes, there will still be only one real universe — so the odds that you are in a simulated one are almost infinitely higher than the odds that you are in a real one.

Another argument I remember is that when you zoom in very closely to an object, say, using an electron microscope, the object pixelates, the same way an image would on a computer screen. It's as if reality doesn't have enough memory to be able to render the object any more exactly: reality runs out of RAM. I don't have an electron microscope to verify this, but I suppose the difference between the word "pixel" and the word "atom" is really semantic.

A third argument relies on quantum mechanics, so I understand it even less than the other two. In quantum mechanics, a particle that might exist in this place or in that place actually exists in all of those places, as a probability, and doesn't exist in any of those places until you actually go looking for it. 

[The way I've described it here, it sounds a bit like the process of looking for my keys, which have an equal chance of existing in the kitchen, the bedroom, the pocket of my satchel, the lock of the back door, inside the pantry, inside the fridge, inside the mailbox, the bottom of the laundry machine: maybe the whole of quantum theory can be understood by the platitude, "Where were they when you saw them last?"]

Generally, human experience doesn't behave like quantum mechanics: objects exist in a single, persistent location, not simultaneously as a probability in many locations. The behaviors that are measured by quantum physicists don't match with our perception of reality. But they do match with the "reality" of videogames, where the hero approaches the door to a dungeon and might find any number of things on the other side, and even the computer doesn't know what's really there (because nothing is really there) till the hero throws open the door.

These arguments, and others like them, assert that we are currently living inside a computer simulation — and there is nothing about this premise that troubles me in the slightest. If it's true, it doesn't actually change anything. We've always gone about our lives under the assumption they're governed by certain rules, and we have generations of scientists and theologians working to better understand those rules. If we learn that these rules are part of a computer model and therefore are arbitrary, or if we learn that our universe is one of many and not unique, well, these aren't particularly surprising or disappointing revelations.

On the contrary. If we all live at the heart of a simulation, and we can prove it, then finally we have an unambiguous and non-arbitrary reason to believe in those rules, to rally around our shared function and shared governance. In discovering our world isn't true, we will finally have found a reason to believe in God, our Creator. 

That's the real assertion of this premise: that if we live inside a simulation, then the theists have been right all along.

Bigfoot Inc. 

We packed our things into the truck and drove off in search of Bigfoot. 

The trip was a complete surprise. A few days earlier, Dad didn't believe in Bigfoot. In fact, a few days earlier, Dad didn't even have a truck. He dropped me off at school in his old VW and picked me up in a new 4x4. "New" in the Dad sense, not "new"in the "new" sense. 

The truck didn't have a new car smell. It had sort of an old Cheetos smell. 

I'm still not sure Dad believes in Bigfoot. But once he bought the truck, he really wanted to believe. And now he was financially invested. 

I guess it all started because of Mom's cookie business. 

Ever since my parents split up, Dad's been really competitive with Mom. It's understandable, since she was always calling him a loser. I mean, that's understandable, too, because he kind of is a loser. When this Bigfoot craze hit town, Dad did what he always does, which was laugh about it and make fun of the people who believed, and then fall asleep in front of the TV. But Mom, well, Mom's got a pretty good sense of humor about things. So when the town started to get a little Bigfoot crazy, she figured, why not have some fun with it? She started making footprint-shaped cookies and selling them to the local cafe. Then homemade fudge she called "Bigfoot Patties" and which the cafe started selling as "Bigpoops." Soon, she had a whole brand going: Bigfoot birthday cakes, gingerbread men shaped like Sasquatches with two red cinnamon eyes, that sort of thing.  Each day, she'd bake a plastic bigfoot into one of her cupcakes, and the cafe held a contest, a free latte to the person who could "find Sasquatch." She got me to start silk-screening t-shirts in the basement, and she even talked Grandma into hand-stitching Bigfoot sock puppets, and they were so popular at the cafe that some of the other shops in town started selling them, too. Mom was a hit. Mom was Bigfoot Inc. 

And it drove Dad nuts. One day, on his way home from work, he stopped by the cafe to get a cupcake, and he got so angry that he chewed the whole thing down in three big bites and almost choked on the plastic toy bigfoot. Dad won the "Find Sasquatch" contest that day, and it just made him feel like more of a loser. 

"That night," he told me later, "I looked into my heart and I understood what I had to do: I had to capitalize." He looked me in the eye to make his point: "This, son, is the American Dream." 

He bought the truck the next day and told me we were going for a camping trip, and to travel light, because we were going to be backpacking. He didn't tell me his real purpose in setting out into the mountains was to find Bigfoot — find Bigfoot, catch Bigfoot, return with Bigfoot, and become bigger than Bigfoot. 

His real purpose, I figured, in setting out into the mountains was to prove a point to Mom.

His real purpose, I figured out later, was to impress me, his only son, so I might finally see him as something other than a loser. 

And you can guess how well that turned out. 

The Tired End of the Party 

It was late, and the party was getting down to its last dregs. The food had run out hours ago, the keg was spitting foam, and the people still sober enough to walk were circling one another like underfed hyenas, mangy and weak but emboldened by urgency, desperate not to go home empty and alone.

This is how Death found her: drunk and lonely at the tired end of a party where she'd had too few friends and nothing in particular to celebrate. Death flattered her and listened to her and smiled, and persuaded her to have one more drink, for the road, and then come home with him, which is exactly what she did, and didn't even need much persuading.

Belly of the Whale 

(This story will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Fractured West.)

The Sacred Book of Salmon 

This entry is not currently available.

Steamer 

My granddad lives with us now. We knew each other when I was younger, too, I guess. I don't remember it, but he does: he tells stories about when I was a baby, like a time he was changing my diaper and I peed on his face, or another time when he took me for a walk in my stroller, and got distracted by something, probably a girl, and my stroller got away from him, rolled down the street and through four lanes of traffic, before coming to rest right in the middle of a gaggle of nuns. "If any of you ladies ever has a change of heart about this convent business, you give me a call," Granddad told them with a wink, just like he winks whenever he tells the story to me.

"Where was this?" I ask him.

He shrugs. "Here, in town," even though there's nowhere in town with four lanes of traffic, even though there is no convent here in town.

"I can't remember," he says when I press him for details. That's his usual answer, and I believe him, because he can't remember much. Some days, he can't remember my name, and he cycles through all the other names from his life: the name of his son, my father; the names of each of his other sons; then the name of his wife, even though I'm a boy and he obviously knows it, claiming as he does to have changed my diaper. 

Some days, he doesn't speak much at all, just stares out the window, watching the squirrels squabble with the crows. "Donny," he calls to me, though I've never met a Donny. "Can you get me a whiskey?"

I return from the kitchen with a glass of apple juice, and he stares at the glass and then at me with the same sad disappointment. Maybe he suspects I'm putting one over on him, but can't remember for sure what drink he'd requested; or maybe he's sad that he's aged into the kind of man who drinks apple juice on the rocks, instead of bourbon. But he takes the glass without question or complaint. 

On the days he's clearer-headed, he'll tour me sometimes through the memories he does have. The ones he keeps clearest are all from when he was younger, and in the war, and these memories are so rich and terrifying, it's no wonder his head ran out of room for recording new ones. "We fell asleep each night in a jungle full of eyes. The enemy soldiers were fearsome and cruel but they were the least of our worries. One morning I woke up to find our lieutenant half-eaten by a python. Swallowed him head first and had worked his way, so far, up to his waist."

"How'd you know it was the lieutenant, then?"

Granddad eyes me to see if I'm sassing him. "His boots. The lieutenant was the only one in our squad who's boots weren't rotting off him."

Then, to prove his point, he shuffles into his closet and has me help him drag out the old steamer trunk inside. He throws the combination lock -- on some points, his memory is failsafe -- and pulls from the trunk a pair of vintage combat boots. "There," he says, tossing them to my feet. "There was no saving the lieutenant that day. But damned if I was going to let the snake eat his boots, too."

Granddad's stories don't always check out. I'm not even sure there are pythons in the South Pacific. 

"If they fit you, you can keep them. They were always too small for me."

The trunk is filled with memorabilia, mostly from the war -- flags and uniforms, badges and medals, maps, piles of old letters. That stuff is all fascinating, I guess. But all I ever want to see from the trunk are the piles of old handguns, disassembled rifles, hunting knives, rusty bayonets, a hollowed-out hand grenade -- a secret arsenal that Grandad keeps hidden inside his closet, governed by three simple rules:

1. My dad can never know anything about it;
2. The trunk and its contents are strictly off-limits to me except under the supervision of Granddad himself; and,
3. The entire trunk and all its contents will be mine whenever my granddad dies.

So far, I've learned the first two parts of the combination lock, and I think, today, I finally got a clean look at the third.

"The boots are a perfect fit," I say, already getting used to the way they look on my feet.

"Well then," he says, giving me a salute and then a wink, the same wink he gave to those nuns, or said he did, all those years ago.

The Changeling 

(This story will appear in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in October 2013.)

The Interview 

This entry is not currently available.

Searching for Littlefoot 

No one ever goes in search of Littlefoot, whose tracks blend in, so he’s left alone, an undiscovered mystery. 

Our love is like a nuclear bomb 

“Our love is like a nuclear bomb”
Which is supposed to sound sexy
But really means charred flesh and melted eyes and then slow painful dying
While the other side holds a victory parade. 

Opportunity Not Knocking 

Opportunity is not knocking at my door. Opportunity is staring at me from across the street, sipping iced tea on his porch on this hot summer day, not really inclined to go much of anywhere, and I'm doing the same thing from my porch — sipping a lemonade and waiting for Opportunity to make the first move.

If we got together, we could split an Arnold Palmer.

But no.

Opportunity is right over there, across the way and just out of reach. I'm staring straight at him, but he won't look up from what he's reading. I clear my throat to see if I can catch his attention. If he notices, he pretends not to. If he's pretending, he's good at faking.

He's on one side of the street and I'm on the other and never the twain shall meet.

Each day I write him a postcard, "Wish you were here," and hand it to my postman; and each day, I watch as the postman works his way down and then back up the block, toward Opportunity's house. The mailbox there is overflowing with envelopes and other junk. Opportunity nods at the mailman as he comes and goes, but doesn't budge from his seat. What is he reading that's so interesting to him?

"What are you reading that's so interesting to you?" I ask him.

"What?" he says.

I shout again. "What are you reading that's so interesting?"

He shakes his head. "I can't hear you from across the street. Why don't you just come over here?"

The traffic looks dangerous and I still have half a glass of lemonade. "Nah, I'll catch you later," I say, and head back inside. 

The Atheist of Dekalb Street 

(This story appears in wigleaf in March 2013.)

The Bigfoot Sighting of Emory Crane 

Before everything, before we were run out of town, before the rockslide and the heavy rains, before the forest fire, before the guns and the chainsaws, before the little girl went missing and before she was found, Emory Crane was up in the woods and he saw a bigfoot, or said he did. 

No one believed him, not least of all because he was Emory Crane.

Emory Crane's credibility problem preceded his bigfoot sighting by fifty-two years, which was one year shy of the duration of his entire life, owing to the time that his parents packed him into a baby basket and set him on the riverbank while fly-fishing salmon. When they looked up, their boy was gone, washing downstream across rocky rapids and waterfalls and finally coming to rest by the town's old sawmill, where little Emory was plucked out of the water by a young couple snuck off for a few moments' privacy. 

His parents told him this tale so often that he felt inordinate pressure, even as a boy, to live up to his Moses-like auspices. He grew up wanting nothing more than to lead his people to the Promised Land, but struggled to understand which people were his, exactly, and which land was the promised one: who and where to? 

Till the day of his bigfoot sighting, Emory Crane had shown no particular wit or talent for prophecy, though not for lack of trying: after years of poor luck at the lottery and some fairly extensive dabbling in the Tarot, Emory had settled himself into a job monitoring a weather station in the woods and then making reports to the local news, a modest sort of prophecy for which he proved to have some diligence, at least, if not accuracy. People forgave him: no weatherman seemed to have clear insight into the future, and why should Emory Crane be judged any differently than the rest of them, the circumstances of his baby basket beginnings notwithstanding?

In practice, the weather station required very little monitoring. It collected measurements and reported them back through the network to the weather service, just one set of data points on a vast grid of teeming information. The science of weather, be it what it is, tells us that looking at small things, closely, can't compare to looking at broad things, systematically: patterns are more important than points, and computers much more capable of processing the patterns than people ever were. No weatherman was needed, strictly, at the weather station. Maintaining the place meant mostly applying occasional oil and resetting the cable modem.

Still, Emory Crane liked jotting down the data into a hand-written journal, and comparing it, year on year, to the weather of days gone by. He liked almanacs. He liked watching the twirl of the anemometer. He liked the varieties of clouds. 

On this day, the sun shone through the wispy cirrostratus nebulosus such that Emory Crane predicted a medium-to-high chance of rain before evening, and it turned out he was right; but having stared so long toward the hazy sun, he couldn't quite make out the details of the tall, too tall, humanoid creature that stood in the clearing between the weather station and the edge of trees, stood, stock still, staring right back at Emory Crane and then suddenly dashing off to disappear into the forest.

"I know what I saw," he maintained later at the bar, though how could he? He was seven kinds of crazy and had been staring at the sun all afternoon, and there was no way he could have known what he saw. So everyone laughed and drank and turned it into the town joke, for a while, and would have forgotten it soon enough, except for what happened after that....

Amish Missed Connections 

You were changing a wagon wheel. I was wearing a hat. You smiled.

* * *

At the barn raising, you borrowed my hammer and took my heart.

* * *

I was the girl reading the Bible at the community center. I cut our conversation short out of shyness. I’d love to discuss the book some more.

* * *

Your cow had prolapsed and retained her afterbirth. I expelled the placenta. Let's schedule a follow-up.

* * *

Do you still think of our rumspringa, like I do?

Lemons, pt. 3 

“ When God gives you lemons, make a Tom Collins.

Life Seen Through the Pinhole Projector 

That Brad Watson story I read last night was so good, I should probably stop writing forever.

When I feel hopelessly poor by comparison, it’s not because of Watson’s (admittedly) rich writing. It’s because of his rich living. It’s because of his rich insight into human kindnesses and cruelties. I read this story ("Are You Mr. Lonelee?") and I think, This is why people should read and write stories: for glimpses into some of the unaired depths of human nature, and all its tangled complexity.

If I measure myself against this goal, my worst writerly fear is realized: I am only clever.

Watson talks about this exact sort of thinking: "Most of the time, you’ll fail—or think you fail—to write a story as great as you set out to write." His advice, in that moment: "Read a great story, to see it can be done, and try again."

This has been the gist of my days lately: reading stories, hoping they’ll inspire me with awe. Often, the closest I get is envy. Envy, I half-understand, mucks up the process. Envy is an enemy of inspiration. Envy imagines life as some aspirational hierarchy and me climbing up it—and this has nothing at all to do with the feeling I get when reading a great story, a feeling which, for me, is pure wonderment: the shock at seeing the veil pulled back, some truth of life revealed—the richness of humanity, almost blinding, and glimpsed momentarily though these pinhole projectors called "stories;" and for solace, I crawl back into another quote, this from André Breton:

"Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything."

The Bigfoot Hunter 

This entry is not currently available.

I Am Not Philip Roth 

Philip Roth sat down at the writing desk that had been in his possession for forty-eight years, a gift given him by Saul Bellow after Saul had separated from his wife and decided to give away her things. So, Maggie’s desk, and that’s how Roth had always considered it, then and now. The wood was smooth from so much use over the years, and the same thing might have been said about Roth, Roth thought to himself, as he took in the quality of his decidedly old-man skin: it looked as though it had been soaked in milk and then baked into a custard. Not like skin at all. Certainly not like his.

We never imagine, when we’re young, that age will come to us exactly like it comes to simple persons.

Earlier in the week, his desk chair had lost a wheel and teetered over while he’d sat in it. He and the chair both crashed down into the floor, making a sound awfully like felled timber. The chair had broken an arm, and when Roth sat up on the floor, he said aloud, “Better him than me.”

Now this chair, which had been his loyal steed for many years and many books, was piled into a corner of the living room. He couldn’t bring himself to take it out to the curb, emotionally or physically: the old beast weighed at least fifty pounds and would be near impossible for him to navigate around the spiral of his staircase.
Till he could find an appropriate replacement, he was sitting on an actual pile of stacked American Pastorals, a case of which he still had left over from an over-ambitious book tour. He sat gingerly: the pile was, like the book itself, at least as precarious as his old desk chair.

Philip Roth looked at his computer screen’s blinking cursor and considered, today, what to write. He was seventy-nine years old, and the page before him was just as empty as it had always been, though over the years, the character of its emptiness had changed: his quest for revelation and self-discovery had shifted toward a crusade for refinement and, perhaps, self-aggrandizement. The ideas stacked upon themselves much like the books stacked under his butt: each new one was a palimpsest written on top of the old ones, the subject of which was now, and had long been, what it is to be Philip Roth. The biggest burden of all.

When you’re too old to believe you can change the world, why write at all?

When you’re too old to believe you can change the world, you write because you believe you can change yourself.

He reached his precious fingers toward his keyboard and began, the way he began every day, typing, “I am not Philip Roth.” 

Smokejumper 

There’s a fire now up in the mountains and I’m thinking of volunteering to fight it. I have no training in the fighting of fires, and my presence among the actual firefighters would cause, I’m sure, more harm than good — would slow down their efforts, would put me or, worse, them, in mortal danger. But still I want to do this. I want to drive down to the ranger station tomorrow, with my hatchet and my spade and my best hiking boots and a rain coat, and volunteer to help. “Where’s the fire?” I’ll ask — though the answer is obvious, because there’s a pillar of smoke filling the horizon, and where there’s smoke there’s fire. “How can I help?” I’ll ask. “Do you have experience fighting forest fires?” the rangers will inquire. “I once tried to write a movie about smokejumpers” is my only answer. This way the rangers know who they’re dealing with: not a firefighter, true, but a serious person, at least — a person who writes movies, a person who knows the word “smokejumper” and knows that the word is relevant to the current situation. I won’t tell them that I abruptly stopped working on the script early in my research phase when I heard that Kristin Scott Thomas was starring in an as-yet-unreleased movie about smokejumpers. Kristin Scott Thomas is a fine actress, but she was also one of the dancers in the Prince movie Under the Cherry Moon, and thus she is obviously too short to be taken seriously as a smokejumper; and if this is an indication of the respect that Hollywood intends to pay the subject of smokejumping, then my time is better spent elsewhere. Though I later learned that Kristin Scott Thomas was not starring in this movie after all, but rather it was an actress named Brooke Burns, who was in forty-six episodes of Baywatch and also Titanic II, and in this movie she was playing a character named Kristin Scott, who wanted to become a smokejumper, like I do. Though I don’t have any skills in firefighting, I believe the real smokejumpers would appreciate my company on the mountain, on account of my extensive knowledge of movie trivia, for instance. Smokejumpers do death-defying work, and I’m sure they’d appreciate a little levity. I could also go on beer runs or water runs or whatever kinds of runs they need. I drive stick, it’s one of my “special skills,” and that’s bound to come in handy up on the mountain. So I figure I’ll set my alarm tomorrow and head to the ranger station and convince them to let me help. But I oversleep, and I figure anyway the ranger station is probably closed, because there is a fire, after all, and all hands are on deck, fighting it. It’s a serious business up there.  

Loose Change 

The boy stands in the living room, straddling a suitcase, wearing dusty sneakers, pants too short, and a worn hoodie.

In the next room, his father is running his hands through his still-unwashed hair and talking into his phone.

Well I can't, he says. No. What were you thinking? Fair, you want to talk about fair? After everything? No, that's —. No. He's not welcome here.

The man is talking too loudly. He thinks of the boy in the next room. Max? Can you hear me?

The boy shifts on his feet and clears his throat. He doesn't know what to answer.

Max, you're —. Make yourself comfortable. Have a seat.

The boy sits down on his suitcase.

I need to sort out some logistics with your mother.

Back into the phone, the man says her name, Maddie, but the line is dead. She's already hung up. She doesn't answer his return calls.

The boy sits now at the kitchen table. It's formica with the edge peeling up, and a stain shaped like a butterfly. There are loose coins scattered across it, pennies and nickels mostly, some Canadian, and they're hard to pick up because of the smoothness of the table and because of the metal lip that runs along its edge.

Why did your mom send you away? the man asks.

The boy doesn't speak. He hasn't spoken since he arrived. The boy has been asking himself the same question, of course, and he has some guesses at answers, but none he wants to share with the man.

You hungry? the man asks him. You want eggs? You want pasta?

This is where you live? the boy finally says.

Yeah, for now.

It's different than I pictured it.

How'd you picture it?

Bigger, I guess.

The man cracks an egg into a cold frying pan and puts it on the stove. The boy starts unlacing his boot but can't get the knot out. The lace broke while he was on the bus, and he tied it in a good tangle to keep it from slipping off, but now it's stuck on his foot till he can manage to unsnarl it.

I can help you with that, the dad offers.

No, I've got it, the boy says. But he hasn't got it. He bites his fingernails and now they're too short to grab onto the tied-tight knot. He picks away at it and then instead tugs at the boot to try and free his foot.

You're just making it worse, the dad says, watching on.

But now the egg is burning, and the dad says Oh shit oh fuck to no one in particular. He should have used oil and he should have used lower heat but he's so distracted by the boy. He reaches for the frying pan with his bare hand and burns himself a bit but moves the pan to one of the cold burners on the stove. He flaps his hand to cool it off while with the other hand he starts scraping at the lost egg with his fork. I've made a mess of it, he says to the boy.

That's OK, the boy says. He reaches into his suitcase and pulls out a peanut butter sandwich, mashed up inside a plastic bag.

Give me your foot, the dad says. He uses the tines of the fork to pick open the knot, and then tugs off the boot.

Your feet. The man wrinkles his nose. Stink.

Can I sleep a while? the boy asks.

Sure, the man says. Take the couch. No. I have to go to work. Why don't you take my bed, for now.

OK.

You'll be here when I get back?

The boy shrugs. There's nowhere else to go. 

Bike Race 

This morning, Lance Armstrong challenged my three-year-old son to a tricycle race around the block, and beat him, and was a real asshole about it, and now my boy keeps asking me, “Daddy, daddy, what is human growth hormone?”

Blue Moon 

She'd been sad and it was hard to say why, and she couldn't or wouldn't snap out of it. Her birthday was coming. "How are you?" I'd ask. "I'm OK" she'd say.

I booked us a trip to the ocean. Get away from it all. Set our eyes on new sights. Etc. We drove an hour on the freeway with the windows rolled down, because her air conditioner wasn't working, and the wind crashed in the whole time, so we didn't speak a word. Sometimes we'd hold hands on the stick shift. Then, toward the end of the trip, we came down over the mountains and into the sea air, and everything cooled off and slowed down, and I thought to myself, "It worked," because it felt like we really had escaped.

At the campground, a park ranger told us to pick our favorite spot. We drove a slow loop, past a pack of shirtless predator boys, and found a quiet shrubby spot at the end. "Fifty five," we reported back to the ranger. "It's her birthday," I added.

We set up our tent and built a fire while the sun set, and we each found ourselves a big rock and dragged it across the beach to use as a seat, and watched the moon rise over the ocean. It was almost as bright as daytime.

The waves crashed into the shore and lulled us, not into sleep but into calm, at least. We didn't speak, but just listened to the waves, over and over: "Shhhh. Shhhh."

Then she stood up and dashed into the ocean, plunging in up to her waist, clenching her body against the cold with each incoming swell.

"How are you?" I called out.

"I'm OK."

That night, we fell asleep quickly, without touching, each of us breathing into our own corner of the tent.

When I woke, I was alone. There was a pile of her clothes laid along her bedding, laid down like a long skin that had been shed off her, plush and wrinkled, strewn and warm, empty.

"Where are you?" I shouted as I walked down the beach. The gulls, picking through the rocks, scattered at my voice.

Down the road, the pack of boys were breaking down their camp.

Back at camp, I toed the crumbling charcoal logs left over from last night's fire. They were still warm. The moon still sat low on the morning horizon, and the tide was pulling out, leaving a wake of shells and seaweed.

"I'm here," she said, walking up from behind me, wrapping me in her arms. "I'm OK."

I’m pretty sure I’ll never write a story ever again 

I’m pretty sure I’ll never write a story ever again. I’m too old, too tired, my heart’s too empty, my head’s too full, my pens are too dry, my paper is too thin, too thick, too yellow, too cluttered, my imagination too calcified, there are too many distractions, too many concerns on my time, too much on my mind, too many bills to pay, too many errands to run, too many emails to answer, my head hurts, my eyes hurt, I didn’t get enough sleep, I need to floss my teeth, I need to vacuum the floor, I’m hungry, I’m out of ideas, I’ll never write a story again.

I get like this sometimes.

OK, to be honest, I get like this a lot. I get like some version of this just about every day. Right now, for instance: I have no idea what sentence to type after this one. The rest of the page is just gaping white, and frankly it’s kind of terrifying to imagine filling it, and I think I might just go eat breakfast instead.

So, for me and I guess for many people, this is normal: I am absolutely convinced that I will never write again, and then I do, and that assuages me for a little while, but it does nothing to ease my fear the next time I get that same feeling.

Starting tomorrow, I’m pledged to write thirty stories in the next thirty days, even though today I’m pretty certainly convinced I’ll never write another story again. Thank god for deadlines, right? Today I’m trying to stack the odds in my favor: I have a few new pens and a fresh pack of legal pads, and I’m excited to tear through the shrink wrap like it’s a little Christmas. (This helps me, too, sometimes: rituals, gifts to myself, reminders that this whole endeavor, pledging to write and then writing, is a gift to myself, etc.)

But here’s something else — and this isn’t a story, exactly, but more like a little anecdote. Not too long ago, I was in a mood very much like this one: a mood of being completely out, totally empty. I do what I often do in moments of doubt, which is, I run: my girlfriend and I threw some gear in a car and took a more or less unplanned trip to Sequoia National Park. We camped there for a few days of mountain air and lots of quiet, a DIY writing retreat. She worked diligently and productively each day, while I used the peace and quiet to fixate on the idea that I would never write a story again, getting angrier and more frustrated with myself. Then, a funny thing happened: I got bored. I stopped hating myself for not writing; I even stopped trying to write. I went for long walks in these mountains, around these ancient trees, surrounded by things that were much bigger, older, and more important than I was or would ever be; and this was humbling, first in a sort of bad way, and then in a really invigorating way: it felt good, I realized, to be a small part of such a big thing. (Life?)

After exhausting myself in the woods, I came back to camp. I was too tired to chop wood or do camp things, so I read a book. I read a book, and I loved it, loved so much about it — all its wild ideas and turns of phrases, all of its energy and generosity; I loved the people in this book, who were vivid and clear and fun and exacerbating and strange; and the book, just like the trees and the mountains, humbled me, and made me feel like a small part of a much larger tradition, and it felt to me much better this way — to be a small part of a big thing, rather than a big part of a small thing — and, having realized this: I started to write.

The Kingdom of Frogs 

During the last week of her mother's life, we sat on the back porch listening to the frogs while they lurked and murmured around our lawn sprinklers. They sang while the sun set, and she and I sat in our matching Adirondack chairs, sipping beer and holding hands and listening.

"It's almost time," she said to me. 

"I know."

"It's for the best," she said, probably to herself. "Or it will be soon."

They weren't bullfrogs. They were small, skinny things, all legs and eyes. They were louder than their little bodies should have allowed, but in a pleasant way, a warm rumble that was comforting, at least to some people, at least sometimes.

While we sat, one of them hopped onto her foot, and stayed, staring up at her with its brown lidless eyes. She didn't flick it off, or even move, and the two of us watched the little frog, waiting like for some nod, some sign, to tell us that all of this—this horrible time during which her mother was no longer her mother but just a broken sick thing, turning to rubbish—that it was over, and she would move on, as we all do, in death, to join the frog, and the kingdom of frogs, a truly better place.

Libertarian 

libertarian. Noun. A person who doesn't understand that their road to success was paved in large part by others. See also, narcissist.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Hipsterior 

hipsterior. Noun. A butt so flat it fits in skinny jeans.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

The Garden 

(This story appears in the December 2012 issue of Niteblade, and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.)

And Everyone's Wearing the Same Suit 

Workaholism is just escapism in a badly-fitted suit.

Guidance Counseling 

In high school, he'd flummoxed his guidance counsellor, Mrs. Marsh, who told him: "Theo, I don't know what to do with you. You're too talented."

"I'm too talented," Theo agreed wholeheartedly.

"Normally, I tell students to play to their strengths, but between you and me, we both know that what I really mean is, they don't have a lot of choices. Frankly, most of the students who come through my office are screwups."

"I'm no screwup," Theo nodded.

"You're getting offered so many prestigious academic and athletic scholarships. You realize one of these schools offered you a full ride to be on their football team, and they don't even have a football team? The easiest scholarship ever."

"But not one that would offer me chances to improve or to learn from my mistakes, if I ever make one."

"That's the spirit. Meanwhile, you've already been accepted to that accelerated MBA program, the first ever high school junior. I didn't even know you were applying to an MBA program."

"No, ma'am, neither did I. They just sent me the acceptance letter in the mail one afternoon."

"I didn't know they were allowed to do that. So, Theo, that leaves us in a weird place. Generally, I sit down with students and help them understand what their options are. Really that means I help them understand what their options aren't. Like, just before you came in—do you know that girl Sally Melbourne?"

"That scoliosis is really unfortunate, isn't it, Mrs. Marsh?"

"Did you know Sally Melbourne told me she wants to be a Broadway performer? Would you believe? She stuttered through our whole interview: 'I w-w-want to b-b-be an a— a—actress!' Do you understand how easy my job is most days, Theo?"

"I thought hers was an interesting interpretation of Our Town."

"In your case, son, I'm not going to try and tell you the things you can't do, because frankly, I can't think of any. So instead I'm going to ask you to think about this before we meet again: what do you want to do?"

"Thanks, Mrs. Marsh. I really do appreciate your time. I better run off to lacrosse practice now."

"Let's meet again next week, Theo. Close the door on your way out."

This Side of the Moon 

This entry is not currently available.

Renewal 

(This story will appear in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine in October 2013.)

Goldilocks and the Three Boys 

(This story appears in the spring 2013 issue of Grey Sparrow Journal.)

Headlines from Surrealist Newspaper 

Little girl, burrowing to China, arrives.

Woman raises house full of spiders.

Astronauts in space so long, Earth forgets about them.

Volcano appears overnight in small town.

Sad woman's face disfigured into permanent smile; everyone assumes she's happy.

Housewife buries herself alive for peace and quiet.

Lifeguard saves child from nightmare about drowning.

Man, looking for lost love, finds it in his attic.

Philanderer's secret 

“When I say 'I love you,' I'm not lying to any of you.

Eternal Recurrence 

The other day we were hiking at Eaton Canyon, where the desert trees have hunkered down for a long dry season, and I was thinking about eternal recurrence. I know that's a ridiculous thing to say, except I also think all of us probably think about eternal recurrence to some degree or another when we go hiking in nature, and that's why we go hiking in nature, partly—to escape for a little bit from the measly perspective offered by our once-only lifespan and to help us feel connected to the bigger things.

We walked over a streambed of parched rocks where, a month ago, there'd been water almost up to our knee; and this was enough to get me thinking: where does the water go? And where does it go, after that? And then again where? (My line of questions is as sophisticated as any two-year-old's, though only on my best days.)

If every drop of water on this earth stays on this earth, then it's like we live inside a fishbowl, and this water is the same water my parents drank as children, and their parents; it's the same water that swallowed the Titanic, that flooded Johnstown; the same water walked by Jesus, parted by Moses; the same water carried into the caves of Lascaux and mixed with pigments to make the oldest art we know; the same water where dinosaurs swam, where the heat from the Sun sparked the very first life on Earth, during the fiery heat before Earth had earth.

Later, the dog bounds up ahead to run with another dog, instant happy friends; and then we pass through a small clearing where a burned-out stump of tree tells the quiet history of a years-ago fire. There's a monarch butterfly, which we're told come, every last one of them, all the way from that single spot in Mexico—but this one arrives at us today tireless with cheerful flickering wings, flapping and unflappable.

The trail is footprints on top of footprints on top of footprints. One set leaves a pattern in the dirt shaped like a heart, and we follow this trail of hearts, one after the other. We look at every person on the trail: are you the heart-maker? And would you know it if you were? Because who among us knows the shape of their own footprints?

At the end of the trail, there's a waterfall, spilling from some overhead rocks, and before that, from who-knows-where. The water hits the ground and patters in a dance, and the people who collect underneath do the same. Then the water roils downstream and disappears, we don't know where.

But it will be back, this water. It always is.

When we return to the parking lot, a policeman stops us to ask if we've seen anything, and we're not sure how to answer: we've seen so many things. But while we were hiking, a man parked his car and then used it as the place from which to leave this earth. He shot himself in it and he died.

No, Officer. We didn't see a thing.

When the water spills away, where does it go? And will we recognize it again, when it comes back to us? Will it recognize itself? 

Unpacking Home 

Since moving to Pasadena, I've been in a sort of haze. Maybe since the weather's been mostly cloudy so have I. Maybe the dust, taken to flight from dragging and arranging so much furniture, has been mucking up my brain. Maybe I'm exhausted from all the packing: wrapping up one's memories, boxing them, carrying them and hoping they won't break, and then trying to arrange them into a new place, where they don't yet belong. Trying to find new places for old things takes a toll.

Maybe it's all the latent hope, the potential energy of the bare white walls, the empty cabinets, the unfurnished floors, all the imagining of all the possible future lives that I'll live here.

At what point does the new place become home? Is it gradual, as it's seasoned with our experiences? Or does it happen because we invoke that magic word, "Home," like an incantation, a spell of slow teleportation and wishes-come-true?

Still lots more to unpack....

Reckoning 

The first quarter of the year has gone by and I haven't spent much attention on my blog. If you're a reader (thank you), please don't be alarmed: I've spent my attention on a lot of things—hopefully interesting things.¹ Since the blog has always been a forum for me to experiment and play and puzzle out the ways in which I'm colliding with the world, I want to reassure you (and myself): I'm still experimenting, and playing, and puzzling. I've been busy, creative, and curious: exactly the way I want always to be.

I think of this blog as a sort of scrapbook where I can experiment with ways of reckoning with my confusions about the world. Sometimes, when I'm not writing, it's because I'm too overwhelmed with those confusions: they feel beyond my reckoning. But other times (like now), it's simply that those reckonings have found other outlets. And thank god, because, as much as I love writing this blog, ... it's just a blog; and it's nice sometimes to think that the sum of my life's work will include more than a pile of pixels on a screen.

I think often about something that novelist Zadie Smith said in an interview for The Literateur:

"It’s not a genre: 'experimental fiction'." The kind of experimental writer I care about is not the kind who sits down intending to write ‘experimentally’ so he can be part of some hipster crowd. DFW wrote the only way he knew how to, which was irreducibly strange. There are as many fraudulent ‘experimental’ writers as there are fraudulent ‘literary writers’. DFW was not a fraud. Kafka wasn’t intending ‘experiment’ as a kind of brand, nor was Beckett. Nor was Djuna Barnes. They were intending to be truthful to their own conceptions of the world, and it happened that their truths were rigorous, painful and difficult.

It's the same, I think, with life more generally: it's not a genre, "experimental living." We do what we can to carve out days that feel true and honest to our understanding of things. We continue to challenge our assumptions and try to steer toward experiences that will help us grow, without wounding us. And sometimes, often, we write about it.

---

1. Specifically, I've been hard at work writing two teleplays, revising a screenplay, designing two classes for the upcomg spring and fall, and helping to create two new web properties that I think will make the crowded Internet a little bit of a better place. Good times.²

2. Truth be told, I haven't made much headway on revising that screenplay.

Aesop Wasn't a Drinker 

Slowest and steadiest avoids the race. You can find him at the bar.

 

Sleeper, Awake 

Last night, I dreamt that I lay in bed, disappointed that I wasn't asleep, dreaming.

Greek Tragicomedy 

Aeschylus was offered the screenwriting job because producers misread Agamemnon as Armageddon, and his fear of their inevitable discovery kept him from doing his best work during the rewrite of the Transformers sequel.

Midlife Crisis 

“Midlife crisis for a writer is when he's tempted to give up his style for a younger, faster, prettier style, because the one with whom he's built a lifelong relationship now makes him feel tired, unaccomplished, and old.

The Kitchen 

My apartment is like other apartments: it has a bed; a table; a sofa; shelves for books; a few houseplants; one door in and out, seldom used; and a kitchen.

The kitchen is an odd limb, jutting out from the rest of the studio at an angle, not at all roomy and not quite cramped. It's a size to which I've grown accustomed, packed exactingly: this stack of pots fit here, this stack of plates here, this shelf for oils, this shelf for spices.

The kitchen rivals the bed as the most used part of the apartment, and most loved; and if, as they say, scent is the best conveyor of memory, then the kitchen is where the most memories are made.

People walking through the door turn immediately toward the kitchen. "Mmmm, what are you cooking?"

There's something on the stove right now, a cast iron pot with years of accumulated seasoning soaked into its skin that infuses every new food it touches. The pot gurgles and burbles with curry powder and coconut milk, so the neighbors get envious and confused: "What country am I in?"

Cooking for other people is better than cooking for yourself. When I eat something I've cooked, there are no surprises, only the possibility of disappointment. But when I pass a bowl to someone else, I get to watch their face flicker with delight as they turn the corner from one flavor to the next.

The joy of sharing food is at least equal to the joy of eating it.

My kitchen, like most of my apartment, doesn't have room for a second person: there's no way to make space for them and also move around in the ways to which I've grown accustomed: chopping this, blanching that, tossing in a dash of spice, flurry with garnish. So I ladle out my soup into small containers and put it in the freezer, where it will lose some high points of flavor but will sustain me, in a slightly better than the merest possible way, for weeks to come.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventure 

This entry is not currently available.

January 1 

 January 1 is a heckuva day for spring cleaning.