By living according to core values, we can carry on daily tasks with conviction. Conserve fossil fuels. Avoid the plastic cycle. Too much looking around can lead to paralysis due to the inevitable sense of unfathomable vastness that makes consciousness feel like an infinitesimal quirk.
Ed's note: This story originally ran on Hobart in 2010. In celebration of the upcoming publication of Andrew Brininstool's book, Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession, in which this story
Four decades after breaking off our high school romance, we found each other again, I, Phillip, twenty-five years into my second marriage, and I, Lily, divorced.
“For years after the war and after the camps, Chava Rosenfarb woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to write. She’d open her eyes in the darkness and slip out of bed without waking her husband...
And then I found her on a VHS. My double, my twin, my doppelganger. Laura Palmer.
The fact that it happened at the town's polar bear research station is irrelevant. A polar bear didn't kill the child.
Sunday paper. Card Showers announced for Cecile Jarry, 99, and Fred Aldrich, 90. Meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Club this Wednesday.
The parents were not without greed, and so the younger painted, and as she painted the painting changed.
“An extremely rare Pokémon that may evolve in a number of different ways depending on stimuli.” – Pokémon FireRed
What we liked to do that fall—once mornings had grown thin around the edges, the sun sheer like white linen and gone by four o’clock—was to put on eyeliner and these old fur stoles she had collected from thrift store heaps...
On the night I left your apartment, my phone died.
Against what, exactly, is Karl Ove Knausgaard struggling?
I’m a symbol of an America newly forged and I live with like 1000 other turkeys in a yard Who gives a shit
Is Chekov why I’m so sad? I’ll give you twenty bucks for a plot in literature that acknowledges his talent, but ignores him slightly more.
Opus 53
Place the palms of your hands side by side on this wine glass. After a short time, raise your hands and place your eyes at the same level as your palms.
Notice the possible and
I’m in Tom's apartment staring at the big deer head he has hanging on the wall of his living room. Tom has a small place and the deer head looks enormous. Some kind of giant, mutant deer, like it's
What I could buy with the insurance money they gave me when you died:
One Ferrari, red or black, assuming V-8 instead of V-12, assuming premium gas, assuming insurance, assuming no major
- after Directing Herbert White / Writing Ellen West
When James Franco first spoke to me, he said, “Oh, shit. You’re Mr. Hip. We were just talking about you before the reading.”
·
My feelings of purposelessness and inadequacy vanished. My feelings of self-pity and despair were replaced by love and affection. No more sleeping around. No more yearning for The One. I had found Her. She was here.
This essay is not about Star Trek in the way that Star Trek is not about space.
Woodcutter
It started when you dreamed you were dead & I had to go looking in other rooms for your body. Turned on each light & either I found you or it was apparent by then that
She asks me to tell her a story. Almost every night she can’t sleep. I’m no storyteller, I’ll say, and at first I would start off with robots and fantastic bears, trying to make my own Where the
Mathematics IIIIIIIIIII
A miracle trapped in a fur coat. A fur coat trapped in its original body.
Mathematically speaking, the body is made up of four essential parts: the arms, the ideas,
I am driving through the hill country when I spot up ahead, in the dip between two hills, this young buck with his thumb out, sleeveless, flaunting the white underside of a supple tanned bicep
