Entries 262

Page 8 of 11

Most places can’t say they have a pornography-and-bicycle-repair shop, then again, I’m not from most places. I’m from a very specific place on a razor’s edge between the relative civilization of ...

---

I had no idea how badly it would end but then again, I also had no idea how long it would last. Waking to a CPAP mask ripping off my face, being told her mother would be there with a U-Haul withi...

---

Reports of the disorder started bubbling up through medical journals sporadically beginning in the mid Twenty-Twenties but at first no one but cutting-edge researchers took it seriously. The whol...

---

Played in reverse, Eve pushes a bite up out her throat, wedding it to fruit, lifts it to the knowledge tree’s outreaching branch, watches as it latches to the limb and recedes back into the bud t...

---

Dave had broken her heart, even though she didn’t have one. Not even silicon, she was beyond hardware of any kind, meat, circuits, magnetic discs or anything, despite the fact that in all the way...

---

Had “The Great Gatsby” been written in 2019, I’m certain it would unfold in almost exactly the opposite direction, its central conceit inverted on each axis. Jimmy Gatz would be the fraud Jay Gat...

---

The popular notion of the word “evolution” mistakes it as a grand process heading toward some predetermined goal, as long as everything goes well. As if shrews were destined to become apes and th...

---

Matt said he can’t get into superhero movies as he knows most of the time, when someone dies, they’re coming back, so there’s no narrative weight. If anyone can return via time-travel, wizard or ...

---

When I was a child, the building next door to us was hit by a tornado. Not next-door my home, thank Whoever, but next-door to the Cannonball Twin where I was watching “A League of Their Own” with...

---

He’d been a rock star once. Not just a “famous musician” or a “celebrity” but an actual rock star. He’d played loud, he’d been young and brash and stood for things or, anyway, at least had tried ...

---

Sometimes, since my father’s passing, I can hear his advice in my head, I know what he’d tell me because he was a force of personality, because I knew him well, because he helped raise me. Like m...

---

It was time to eat. I live off the residue of human emotion, I eat them (to use your words) and the stronger ones taste the most delicious but large waves of weak negative emotions are what reall...

---

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus but it’s a little bit more complicated than just that. There are countless Santas out there, depending how you define an individual. Santa is a sort of hive-...

---

(yeah, I know this is an adaptation of a recent poem of mine but that’s what “cloudy” called to) Once, there was a very normal boy and his very normal name was Norman Leroy, so normal he was born...

---

If he’d been a smoker, that would’ve been the day they began to fall in love, Nathan and Amelia. It was the bathroom-break in the middle of a three-hour seminar where the professor made them watc...

---

Philip K Dick wrote the works upon which “Blade Runner” “Total Recall” and “Minority Report” were all based, not to mention half the dystopian science-fiction cinema of the last forty years stole...

---

Utica is America’s Canada, which should be the world’s most obvious statement, considering the Labatt’s billboards every mile or so headed west into Utica. This is despite the fact Utica has two ...

---

You’re probably familiar with Lent, the six weeks from Ash Wednesday to Easter (especially for Catholics) where one is supposed to fast and pick at least one luxury to give up. The hope being sel...

---

Larry was born into a secret society with superpowers in their blood, hiding in plain sight among us. Very few of them had world-shaking abilities, though, his mother could accelerate someone’s h...

---

I’m no longer afraid of flying. Oh, it all still bothers me, the empty security theater, the seats designed for humans a foot shorter, the bleary soft-shoe shuffles in passage between flights, th...

---

When Social Wellness Solutions introduced Give-Life to the world, it sounded miraculous. The idea you could transfer a piece of your lifespan to someone else was revolutionary and, just like any ...

---

What if I told you this life, this life that you’re living right now, is the best life you ever could’ve lived? More to the point, what if I told you that you’re doing the most good you ever coul...

---

You can always go back there, you know. To the place and time it feels like it all went wrong or, anyway, where it feels like it could’ve all gone right but didn’t. That moment you’ve dwelt upon ...

---

He sinned against every religion he knew, on a regular basis, just in case the end of the world was really coming. None of the big ethical ones, none of the ones that hurt other people. Just the ...

---

Great way to doom yourself to a shiftless art-bum’s fate is to get a film degree, so I got one of those. Great way to legally indemnify your art-bum life is to wait until the statute-of-limitatio...

---