McSweeney’s

Senior Year is Totally Gonna Rule Because After That My Life is Going to Be an Endless Abyss of Longing! by Lane Moore

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

Whoo! Another totally lame year down, another totally AWESOME year before I start realizing I’m just another cog in the wheel and will ultimately never be satisfied by the endless string of material possessions I surround myself with to go! It’s gonna be so sweet!!!

I already have it all lined up. Check it out. Classes will be a breeze because everybody knows that no one cares WHAT you do when you’re a senior (hint: my parents are gonna be away A LOT this year). Plus, it’s like, this will be the last time my mind will be free from wistful longing for the days before I make the stupid decision to take a job at Rankin Blinds & Shutters, which is pretty much when everything will start going south. Plus, I signed up for Intro to Film, which is like, duh! Easy A!

But don’t think I’m just gonna spend the next year slacking off. I’ll also be making some changes that I think will really help me grow as a person, despite the fact that little do I know I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to “grow as a person” with my therapist Tom, who I’m pretty sure doesn’t even listen to me when I speak. And honestly, have I made any progress with him? Um, no. I have not.

Which is probably my fault anyway. I have a hard time opening up… and before you can say it, I know, I know. “Then why do you even GO to therapy, Brett?” I guess I’d have to say it was the divorce in 2016… or the cancer scare in 2022. Who knows anymore? Oh, and did I mention, Micah got us all tickets to see Dave Matthews in April? Front row, bitches!!!! What can I say? I know people.

So like I was saying, Kelly, my girlfriend of six months, which right now seems like an eternity but after next year will seem like an achingly short period of time and cause me to constantly wonder what happened to make me unable to stay with someone for longer than that, has been so amazing these last few months. She’s hotter than ever AND she wears cutoffs on a regular basis, but honestly, I’m pretty sure I’ll be dumping her soon.

It’s like my friend Trystan always says: plenty of fish in the sea, until you realize fifteen years from now that the only fish you ever really loved is now married to a successful realtor all because you acted like a total jerk on your trip to Lake Tahoe, bro!   Look, man, the way I see it, after I dump her, it’ll be me and Trystan (and, no big, my brand new Mazda WITH SUNROOF!!!!!!!) and two tickets to 58008 (turn upside down ;))! Then after that I’ll pretty much ride through life on cruise control because, let’s be honest, when you have abs like this, you’ll spend the majority of your 30s trying to get them back, ultimately failing and weighing more than you did when you started, which will not go over well with Megan, and then after that it’s PROM TIME!!!

Dude, I gotta say, I can’t wait to ask Shannon Springer to the dance (sorry, Kelly! High five, Trystan!) and then show up on Kelly’s door a year later, drunk and disoriented asking her if she’s seeing anyone right now and if not, can I come in? Because I’m in pretty bad shape. Oh man, it’s gonna be siiiiick!!!

After that, it’s like, who knows? I’m not gonna plan it all out just yet. Your 20s are all about enjoying life, partying hard, and yeah, also figuring out what you wanna do, which in my case will mean working a string of menial jobs because guess what, Brett? EVERYONE HAS A T-SHIRT COMPANY! Yours is not going to “take off the first week” and buy you a “ticket to millionaire city!” God, you’re so fucking stupid.

But of course, you’ll get back up and try again, because that’s what lacrosse players do (GO TIGERS! LACROSSE 4 LIFE), this time attempting to climb the corporate ladder while trying to compete with a guy like Dave fucking Palmer who doesn’t even do any work, and then watching all your friends get married and being like “Huh? Seriously?” which will lead to your staying up all night looking at Facebook photos of all of us in high school and seeing the innocence in our eyes and wondering where that went because shit if you have that now. Plus, Trystan’s brother got us fake IDs so you know what THAT means!!! So hyped!!!!!

Open Letters: An Open Letter to the Hot Canadian Zumba Teacher Who Pulled Me Onstage After My Mother Died by Christine Schrum

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

Dear Hot Canadian Zumba Teacher,

You didn’t know she’d had a heart attack a thousand miles away in Iowa. You didn’t know that I had just returned from flying there, fatal lung disease and all, to see her in a cardboard casket and watch it slide, inch by inch, into the crematorium oven. You don’t even know my name. But you’ve seen me popping and dropping and locking it like a middle-aged moron to Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” at your class for over a year now, and you decided it was time I stepped into the spotlight. You were right.

Oh, Anne—I think that’s your name, though I generally refer to you as That Superhot, Badass Street Girl Zumba Teacher at My Gym—our bodies are such complex, frail mysteries, no? Granted, you probably haven’t considered it much, being twenty-something and hotter than a cast-iron skillet on a campfire.

At the beginning of each class, you bounce into the room with the fluorescent vigor of a cartoon character, your strategically torn tank top revealing abs like the Precambrian Shield. Granted, your taut body retains a bronze glow throughout the long, Canadian winter (11.5 months of the year), but surely you know this state of surreal vitality won’t last? Surely, in between sexy shimmy sessions, you’ve taken time to consider the immutable, eternal and indestructible nature of the jiva—that immortal essence of all living organisms which survives physical death, according to the Bhagavad Gita?

Perhaps not.

But you did stride into class this morning and announce that you’d just “pulled an all-nighter, but I’m not gonna slack, so none of you guys better slack either!” To which we all cheered like fools. Because you, my little hip-hop vixen goddess, remind us that it is the spirit—not the body—that so desperately needs to dance.

Actually, that’s not it at all. It’s that you’re smoking hot, and when we mimic your moves as you gyroscope to “Getting Nasty,” we think we’re smoking hot, too. (We’re not.)

Speaking of getting nasty, I haven’t for more than a year. Or two? There’s a point at which you lose count. There’s a point at which your body becomes a bruised bag of yams that you haul around, waiting for it to finally rot and return to the miserable earth whence it came, thus completing yet another karmic cycle in God knows how many not-so-merry-go-rounds it takes to be liberated from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth.

You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you, Anne?

The thing is, my mother wasn’t supposed to die before I turned 40. And my cystic fibrosis wasn’t supposed to flare up like a giant, hooded king cobra, infecting me with its sickly sting.

The king cobra was a glamorous metaphor, wasn’t it, Anne? But CF isn’t glamorous; it’s the king of disgusting diseases. It slowly fills your lungs with sticky mucous and makes you die a raspy, rattling death. Oh, you can stave it off awhile with steroids and antibiotics, but they whittle your strong, supple body away, thin your thick mane and leave you with a low-grade, internal burning and the sort of rage that can only be assuaged by sucker-punching pillows and hurtling glasses at walls (sorry, neighbors).

But Anne, my Queen of Crunk, you and you alone provide sweet, syncopated relief for 60 minutes several times a week. For that, I owe you my eternal gratitude. And for pulling me onstage today during that killer T-Pain song, so I could cut a rug in this motherfucker under the strobe lights, throwing fake punches into the dark roomful of Zumba zealots as we all sang along with the rappers, who were clearly addressing the universe itself when they shouted, Why you had to fuck up the night? Now we got to fight. I’m gonna knock out your lights.

Your biggest fan,
Christine

The 49ers: Oral Histories of Americans Facing 50: The 49ers, #119: Kathryn Harrison by Rob Trucks

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

Writer Kathryn Harrison has published seven novels, three memoirs, and a biography of Saint Therese of Lisieux. She lives in New York with her husband Colin Harrison, a writer and editor, and their three children. She has listened to the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light more than any other album in her life. We talked in March of 2011, four days before her 50th birthday.

- - -

I suppose it’s some measure of accomplishment having survived half a century, but I don’t think of it as an accomplishment. I’m really somebody who thinks of it as a milestone and a moment to pause and reflect on what has been accomplished and what is left to accomplish. You know, I don’t relish aging, but I like where I am in my life, and I’m really glad we had three children and that they are doing well in their respective lives which are still very much wrapped up with ours because our oldest is 21. I think for me, in general, as I’ve gotten older life has gotten better. I mean, I think that I’ve managed to relax in my relationship with myself. I’m nicer to myself [laughs]. I’ve gotten nicer to myself as I’ve gotten older. Without apology. Which is not something I could’ve done when I was in my 20s or 30s.

- - -

I think it’s a time when many people are losing their parents or experiencing their parents’ frailty in a way that means, “Hey, I’m next in line.” I mean, that sort of generational thing: “There’s no longer someone between me and the great maw of extinction.” That actually happened quite early in my life because my mother died just after she turned 43 and I was in my early 20s, and my grandparents, who raised me for her, also had been dead for many, many years, so I’ve looked at it and thought about it since I was in my 20s. I mean, when I turned 43 and I was still here, I thought it was odd.

I think that at this point I am sufficiently psychically differentiated from my mother that it no longer seems to have very much to do with me and the continuing of my life, but I also have to say that I had a really difficult and damaging relationship with my mother, so around the time that I turned 43 I had been in analysis for many years and had been working very diligently [laughs] to untangle myself from the mother that I had preserved inside me.

I’m sorry that the end of my mother’s life was so difficult—she died of cancer—and I’m also sorry that I was so young that I couldn’t really be much of a grown-up, and very, well, not supportive exactly, but I was too needy when my mother was dying to be of much consolation to her. And I’m sorry about that, but I don’t know that I feel guilty about that. I’m sorry that’s the way it was, but I accept that that’s the way that was. So I don’t really think that I feel that much guilt in relation to my mother, but I also would have to say again that this is an issue that I’ve worked on very hard [laughs] with a professional for many years. I remember her sort of somewhat casually outside of the hour of analysis, which isn’t really an hour, saying to me that I was riddled with guilt at some point [laughs]. And I take exception to that, but I do think about it a lot.

You’re talking about survivor guilt in a way, but there’s also survivor exhilaration. Like, the bullet whizzed past you. And I think I feel some of that. I mean, there is some aspect of aging that I find consoling because the older I get without getting breast cancer the less likely I am to have such a virulent form of it, and that does relieve anxiety. When my mother died and I was in my 20s I didn’t even… You know, what 20 year old thinks about breast cancer? And her oncologist said to me, “You know, from this point forward you’re going to have to be very vigilant.” And I was like, “What?” And he said, “Well, you know, this is very close. It’s the closest physical relationship that you have with somebody in terms of replicating their DNA and everything.” So I started having mammograms in my 20s.

There’s a maternal line of breast cancer. My grandmother died and her mother had died of it, so there were years of obsessing about ways to escape what seems like my fate, to the point where I considered radical things like, you know, preventive mastectomies. And I didn’t do that because I had two daughters and I felt that that was really just not a good thing to do, for them to witness. And so there’s been a certain amount of relief in getting older.

I was talking to a doctor once and I said, “You know, I just don’t want to think about this anymore [laughs]. I just want, you know, let’s just take them off.” And he said, “Well, I have to tell you that it’s not 100 percent.” So at that point I thought, “Fuck, I’m never going to stop thinking about it.” When my grandfather and then my mother died in my early 20s, it was like just being gobsmacked. I just had this sudden revelation of “Oh! I get it. This thing called life ends. And it’s going to happen to me.” But that was in my 20s. I think it’s very difficult for a being individual to get his or her mind around non-being, but that was something that I was thinking about 30 years ago almost.

- - -

I want to remain alive for as long as my children really need me to be alive, so that is something I think about. And there are things I want to accomplish professionally, and hope to. But—and this is going to sound like sort of a nuts analogy but it’s the one that popped into my head—when I do have that sort of “Oh God, you know, more than half over,” I always remind myself that if I go to a party and I’m there and I’m all excited for the first half [laughs], maybe the first three-quarters, I do get to the point where I’m ready for it to be over. And I’ve been around enough people at the ends of their life that I’ve watched them arrive at a point where they really are at peace with it, so I remind myself of that. I don’t think I’m afraid of dying, really. I don’t want to, because I don’t want to leave my children first. You know, in terms of my own ambitions, I’ll be dead so it’s not going to bother me if I don’t get it done [laughs]. But I know how much I struggled losing my mother at the age that I did, when I was really not ready.

I have a daughter who’s just about to turn 11, and I’ve got two older kids, 21 and 18, and there’s a zen part of me that can detach and say, “Well, that would be their challenge. That would be what life threw at them.” It would not be me wanting to leave them or even like committing suicide or something. On the other hand, I do, also, in my non-zen self say, “Boy, you know, that’s a big stumbling block to be thrown.” And I’d prefer not to do that to my children.

There is one thing that I am really looking forward to and that’s being a grandmother, because I really love babies [laughs]. I really loved so much about being a mother that I do look forward to meeting who else might come into my life and I would be disappointed not to be around for that.

I think most people are afraid of cancer because it has this uncontrolled quality. I think that it defies our ability to understand it still, so it does have this ability to come across as pure chaos and evil. And within your own body, one that you can’t get away from, and I think that is scary. Even other ailments that are ultimately fatal I don’t feel the same degree of worry over them. But, you know, that has to do with my experience too. I’m definitely more fearful of cancer than I am of death.

- - -

The last person I watched die up close is my father-in-law whom I really loved a great deal. And he was a pretty evolved person, but I just remember him saying to my husband—I mean, he said a lot of amazing things while he was dying—but I remember him looking at his son once and saying, “I’m learning so much.” So I think that’s probably true of a lot of people. I had this sort of sense of him burning more brightly at the end in a way, even though the disease had sort of eaten him up. There is this whole fuzzy realm of auras and crap that I’m not going to get into, but he was one of those people who did somehow appear to sort of shine forth, and that was not in any way diminished at the end of his life.

Another thing that was quite mysterious was that time itself seemed to change at the end. I had my father-in-law in my life for 17 years and it was, in a platonic way, pretty much love at first sight. We clicked. We always enjoyed each other. When I came to visit he always beamed at me and I the same with him. And I was with him a lot at the end of his life, and at some point he looked at me and he said, “I’ve always loved you.” And I said, “I loved you even before I met you [laughs].” And we both agreed that that was true and that our understanding in that moment of what we felt for each other was not contained at all by time.

So that was interesting too. I don’t necessarily see time as having the complete ability to eradicate things like relationships or love, so having experienced that I think also takes the edge off of it. I feel that I can confidently say to my children at the time, “I’m not going to be physically present in your life, but based on my experience of the people I’ve lost and loved, they remain with me, and I’ll be with you too.”

- - -

I think anytime that I get sort of itchy in an ambitious way – you know, like, I should’ve won the prize, I should’ve whatever it is, sold more copies, blah blah blah, been reviewed here—I remind myself that the thing that I love about writing is writing. And my experience of being a writer is actually one that, like for all writers, I think, is fraught with frustration and anxiety. But when I’m really writing it is the one moment when I am both released from the burden of myself and most myself, if that paradox makes sense, and that is a really good feeling.

I do feel that one strength that I have as a human being is that I had a pretty clear sense of who I was from the moment I achieved consciousness [laughs]. I don’t mean that I was always self-aware completely, because that’s ridiculous. Although having been through psychoanalysis I do think that I’m probably at least somebody who strives toward self-awareness more than the average. But I never had a sense of “Who am I?” I often have the sense of “What the fuck am I doing? [laughs]”. But not “Who am I?”

Actually for many years I was frightened by happiness, because it just seemed like this really strange balancing act that I had achieved for one weird moment or ten years, but then it would inevitably topple. So whenever I noticed I was happy it made me nervous [laughs] because I liked it. And I didn’t want it to go away but I was sure it would.

You know, my tears are cheap. I cry pretty easily. I’ve always been sort of weepy [laughs]. I have been somebody who responds, rather in a delayed way, to many things. I am usually a day late getting angry about things and sometimes it’s really annoying [laughs].

It’s not so much with Colin anymore. I mean, he used to call me the Sniper because I was so afraid of conflict, having grown up in a family where conflicts were really serious, that whenever I got angry at him, just in the very early years of our relationship, I would say something and then immediately run out of the room [laughs].

I wouldn’t even mean to and my husband would say, “Wait. Wait. Don’t you want me to answer?”

- - -

I had a very strange experience when I was in my 40s. I was writing a book on Therese of Lisieux who was a saint. She became a saint at the beginning of the 20th century. And I was writing a biography of her, one I didn’t choose to write but I was asked to write for the Penguin Lives series, and I said, “Yes,” because I hated her and I thought that was at least as interesting as loving somebody. I just thought she was the smarmiest and most simpering of the modern saints. No stigmata [laughs], nothing really fun. So I ran an opposite course to many biographers who begin in love with their subjects and end up hating them once they discover who they are. I was sort of unwillingly seduced by Therese, and part of that began when I went to Lisieux on her Saint’s Day.

And Lisieux is a pilgrimage site because, as many people believe, she does perform miracles. So I was in France and my French was very rusty, or I thought that it was, but I had a very strange, charmed experience there. I won’t say that it was fused with divinity, but a couple of weird things did happen that I wasn’t expecting, because I went into it with a very cynical attitude. I’m not proud to say that, but I did. And I had this strange revelation in the midst of a Mass that began around midnight, and it was a really sort of overwhelming. You know, there’s a procession, a candle lit procession. There are lots of pilgrims, many of them are ill, and they take her remains in this sort of glass and gold casket from one holy place and put it in another, and people touch it and kiss it and everything. It’s sort of overwrought, let’s say. And one thing that was very strange was that I found it completely possible to understand native speakers speaking quickly. It was my only experience with that in my life. And I’m not going to say that that was because of divine intervention. I think I was just really overwrought and things were going on inside of me for whatever reason and I will leave you to your own conclusions. But I did have this weird vision of my life at that moment. It was sort of analogous to one of those cutaway pictures of a ship where you can see all the cool state rooms and everything. And I had this sense of who I was and this sort of vivisection of me and all the parts of my life and I had this understanding that there wasn’t any problem that I had in my life that was not addressable or perhaps even fixable through love. And so I will say that I believe in the truth of love.

I’ve reminded myself of that moment many times. In fact, I have the word “revere” tattooed on my arm so that when I see it I remember that, because it was a very powerful experience, and when I check it out and reapply it to other situations I always see how it’s a failure of my ability to love that has caused or made the problem worse.

I am a work in progress, like the rest of us, I guess.

Both Sides, Now by Teddy Wayne

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

[An] Aurora parent… who has also bought a [bulletproof] Caballero rucksack for his three-year-old son, says he is “indifferent” on the issue. “I can understand both sides,” he explains. “People kill people and I don’t believe guns are as big an issue as some are making it.”
— The Guardian

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I pride myself on being open-minded and able to view an issue from all sides. Gay marriage, universal healthcare, expanded rights for undocumented immigrants: I see the pros and cons with equal clarity. And though I love my young child more than anything in the world, I also certainly understand why someone would want to kill him with a gun.

When I hug my baby boy, I feel a fullness in my heart that nothing—not professional achievement, not drugs, not sex—has ever come close to bringing, and I simultaneously comprehend the urge a deranged individual might have for murdering him in a mass shooting with readily available weapons, the imagining of which leaves me basically apathetic.

You look at Timmy’s preschool classmates and you see so much hope and innocence in their eyes, a brightness that you can rationally appreciate being extinguished through a sudden act of violence that might have otherwise been curbed through common-sense laws. Do I want these laws passed? No way; far be it from me to tell another person with ongoing mental-health concerns what he can or can’t do to my defenseless son in a premeditated manner made possible only with the support of our country’s potent gun lobby that tells spineless senators what they can or can’t do. That’s not the kind of country I want my child to die in because he just happened to be at the wrong public event or school or bedroom at the wrong time.

Do people kill people? Yes… but, of course, it helps if they have a gun. So, guns kill people? Well, obviously, except you could also argue that bullets do the actual killing. Therefore, bullets kill people? Nope—it’s the Newtonian concept of force, or mass times acceleration, as guns propel armor-piercing bullets at high velocity with the capacity to tear through three-year-old human flesh like tinfoil. Yet force itself can’t kill anyone without a gun and a bullet, unless you throw a gun really hard at someone’s head. You need to have a dialectical, Socratic mind to appreciate the nuances of this issue, which also isn’t an issue. And I do fully support a ban on throwing guns really hard at people’s heads. In most cases.

It’s not like I’m not taking precautions. This week, I’m outfitting my kid with a bulletproof vest, a riot-squad helmet, and a ballistic shield. Here’s an Instagram; isn’t he absolutely adorable? Next week, though, I’m making him wear a shirt with a bull’s-eye on it, an American-flag bandanna, and twenty-pound ankle weights. To be honest, it makes him look kind of homely. I’m not one of those parents who think his child is always the cutest thing in the world, or is a sentient being constantly deserving basic protection against tools designed for disciplined soldiers which are somehow purchasable via Craigslist by any angry suburban teenager.

Don’t get me wrong; part of me wants to ensure that unstable people who respond to personal rejection with black-hearted malice are prohibited from possessing assault rifles capable of maiming dozens of bystanders within minutes. But what if we gave them all the guns they wanted, as presents? They’d be so grateful that they’d be appalled at the prospect of harming their new, generous friends. So I’m really of two minds on this: either don’t put any guns into the hands of psychopaths, or give them the most guns of anyone, along with meticulous training from SWAT team members for how to execute a gruesome plan of action that shocks an unsuspecting nation. I couldn’t care less.

I can extend this flexible mindset to foreign relations. Lately, for instance, North Korea has been threatening nuclear strikes through bombastic words from their ostensibly imbalanced leaders. But while everyone else gets worked up over the atomic destruction that would result from the deployment of these weapons by madmen, and the ensuing international warfare it would prompt, all I can think about is a long-range missile screaming into my own home, irradiating the body of my sweet, sleeping child while obliterating him—and then I get it.

Here comes little Timmy right now… aww, look, he’s packing his own Bushmaster AR-15! Now, Timmy, be careful; don’t point it at that man on the street. But, on the other hand, do train it directly on him—he’ll have you in his sights, too, once I correct his aim.

Big Mom on Campus: Raising Two Kids in a College Dorm: Final Exercises by Taylor Harris

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

I don’t always run from my ghost, the collegiate me with the thin waist and big ideas. Sometimes I try to track her down. Get back in her head. Remember what it’s like to be twenty-one and hear that word.

Nigger.

Does she let it seep into her bones, share the sweet marrow of college memories made with good people?

Does she curse all Whiteness?

Does she buy the line, “It could be worse”? Translation: “At least it’s not a noose.”

I need to know. Because when I heard this month about UVA’s Beta Bridge, that someone had painted “nigger” and drawn a cartoonish figure with a large penis right next to the Happy Birthdays and In Memoriams, when I heard that folded into the bright fuchsias and soft blues of generations of student messages would always be one layer of coon-lip red, I didn’t feel Anything. But. Annoyed.

Here we go again. You take the nigger with the honor here. The Sambo with a side of prestige.

Ask the alumni. They’ll tell you: Before we graduated, we marched. Right down to the offices of The Cavalier Daily, the university’s student newspaper, to silently inform the editors we’d grown tired—mostly of what wasn’t written on their pages.

We wrote letters to the editor and were called witch-hunting racists by a second-year student named Sarah.

We stood at the Rotunda while Someone shouted, “What do you want?” and Everyone answered “equality” or “justice” or something they couldn’t leave with that night. No one expected justice to come South in a Tiffany’s box. Though peace in a locket, the cool links of gold spilling over our fingers, would have felt nice. But too delicate. We’d have given it back.

We earned a separate degree over those years. One that didn’t come with a diploma, a signature, or a seal. One that was free, cost just a tattering of your soul, an edge of your innocence. We served as both co-chairs and students in the Department of Responding to Racial Offense. We wrote the syllabi. We fought over rubrics.

It’s easy to remember facts from college. To trace in your mind the steps you took over cobblestone paths and along serpentine garden walls. I wrote exams in UVA’s legendary “blue books” and signed my name with the honor pledge. I took most of my classes in Cabell Hall, though my favorite seminar—the one where we read Susan Sontag and forgot the rules of thinking—met in Clemons Library. I brought a Qdoba burrito, soft drink, and large cookie to campus ministry meetings, certain Jesus Would Have Done Exactly That.

It’s not so easy to capture sentiment, the kind that provokes action. Maybe I’m overly concerned with feeling. A personality test I took years ago identified empathy as my greatest strength. I agree and would add: empathy, even to the point of pathology. Like when a kid in my high school dropped to the floor in cardiac arrest and I imagined being him—stuck in that moment—no heartbeat—no air—dead too long—until I became him. Ran to the nurse in full-fledged panic, certain I would die while my classmates hovered over Bunsen burners and titration tubes.

At thirty, I could be too far removed to care. It’s like the energy to storm a building left town with my perky breasts. Or maybe because I was in Chicago when the spray-painting punks trolled the bridge, I just couldn’t get my mind to Grounds. Couldn’t hear the bus rumble over the bridge and screech to a stop, couldn’t smell the magnolias laced with regret.

I can’t be sure how students or faculty felt. I only know what some of them said.

The Black Student Alliance’s formal response began like this: Wednesday, May 1, 2013 marks the date of yet another racial incident at the University of Virginia.

Yet. Sometimes yet strangles like a noose.

President Teresa Sullivan’s statement included this line: We condemn this abhorrent act, which is disruptive to civility and community life, is not representative of our values and will not be tolerated.

Help! I can’t feel my legs. If I wasn’t numb before, administrative jargon just epiduraled me.

I’d prefer the president respond with the granny approach. Maybe grab a broom, stand on the porch, and wave the bristles at students as she rants about foolish people and their foolish ways and all this foolishness pilin’ up around her.

I didn’t see any students marching. Would it have helped? Do emails of PDFs accomplish more than footsteps?

Timing plays her role, as well. The graffiti appeared on the first of May. With May comes the end of classes, the beginning of exams, and the university’s final exercises. Perhaps the best response from Black students is to study. To graduate. To make a billion dollars and have a building named after you. Then to hire a full-time security guard to protect your building from entitled epithet painters.

When I catch up with my ghost, she’s not evasive. She’s zealous, using terms she learned in Black studies and sociology, in English and American studies. She’s read Du Bois and Mailer and Foucault, and I’m not sure if she’s blending their ideas together, or asking me to zoom out and see this conversation for the Jackson Pollock painting it is.

How does it feel, what does it take, to create a Presence of No? I ask.

She plays a clip of Thelonious Monk. Listen.

That’s how we tell them it’s not okay?

But as we’re talking, she spots her professors. She stands up on her toes, looks over my shoulder, calls out and waves. She runs to catch up with them, find in their bosoms the next structure or theory she can steal and massage into her own. Before she disappears, she looks back. She’s sorry, I can tell, but she doesn’t need me. She needs them. They’ll give her a way to see, and even if she disagrees with it, they’ve given her a way to see.

As a mother, I can see for my children. I have to see for them. They will find that word one day. They won’t have to scrape paint off a bridge to see it. They will run straight into blackface, watermelon rinds, and a discomfiting shuffle. Hate, I will tell them, has no final exercise.

They will long for a structure, a way to organize what feels like pine needles in their souls, like fire in their eardrums. In that moment, I will be the first filter. I will be their sociology professor, their pastor, their protest leader, their Internet. I will be their mom.

That’s a feeling I can’t remember. It’s one the ghost can’t share, because we’re both waiting for it. You wait for it like you wait for Jesus to come back. You’re sure it’ll happen, and you hope to God it’s not as scary as you’ve let yourself imagine it could be. That a whole world could divide in a flash, and it’s not the outcome that’s frightening. It’s that you may not have the capacity, in this moment, to feel whatever it is you’ll feel on that day.

List: Ways to Tell If the New Student is an Undercover Cop by Nathan Patton

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

He keeps talking about his Phonebook profile.

He wears jeans that are neither skinny nor sagging.

He is very excited about the relationship between Conway West and Kim Cardigan.

He claims to smoke the finest hashtag.

He asks a stranger to take his selfie.

He tries to buy an instagram of cocaine.

He watches TV shows when they actually air.

He arms himself with aerosol cans, and wonders where the Huffington Post is.

He texts ROFL when he’s “running out for lunch”.

He still has a Myspace page.

Albert Camus, Creative Writing Instructor by David Galef

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. Don’t address me as Professor Camus. Call me Al.

- -

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just sit in those desk-chairs and pay attention to what I write on the blackboard.

- -

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. That’s at the highest level, of course. Your aim should be to improve your craft.

- -

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. That doesn’t mean that I will tolerate plagiarism in this class.

- -

I know of only one duty, and that is to love. Marjorie, please see me after class.

- -

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. I want you all to give me two pages on your spring break.

- -

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. What did you mean, Jimmy, when you wrote that your protagonist wants to maim his teacher?

- -

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. Did you all bring your anthologies to class?

- -

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer ‘yes’ without having asked any clear question. Why don’t you rephrase what you just said, Tiffany?

- -

Don’t wait for the last judgment—it takes place every day. Yes, there will be grades in this course.

- -

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. Don’t let this dissuade you from revising again and again, which can really improve a piece of writing.

- -

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better. The final assignment is open topic.

List: Captive Audience SEO by Edward Fairchild and Jake Swearingen

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

One Secret Trick My Kidnappers Don’t Want Me to Know

How to Make 50,000 Dollars in One Quick Phone Call

5 Great Ways to Please Just Let Me Go

This New Diet Will Have Your Handcuffs Literally Falling Off

One Weird Way to Staunch The Bleeding

9 Amazing Ways to Tell My Wife I Love Her

Wow! You’ll Never Guess How I Won My Freedo— Oh No, They’re Coming Back

10 Tips for the Cops

Could Stockholm Syndrome Actually Be Good for You?

7 Surprising Things That Can Be Fashioned Into Weapons

Teddy Wayne’s Unpopular Proverbs: Coincidence by Teddy Wayne

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:59:00 -0400

Lightning never strikes twice.

Scandal Befalls McGruff the Crime Dog by Jory John

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

Ahem. Testing. One, two. Woof. Is this thing on? Yes? Hello. Thank you for coming out today. My name is McGruff Thomas-Clegg, but you probably know me better by my professional moniker, McGruff the Crime Dog.—Usually there’s applause right now. Never mind.

As many of you know, I’ve been taking a bite out of crime since 1980, when I emerged onto the national scene as a trench-coat wearing, no-nonsense bloodhound. This was a long time ago, of course, and much has changed. When I started out, things were simpler. The Internet wasn’t weighing us down with its proliferation of public-shaming websites, nor was the paparazzi such a menace. I was able to sniff around, so to speak, with relative privacy. I diligently launched investigations. I cornered criminals. I bared my teeth sometimes. I worked hard, even when nobody noticed. I was a good doggie.

And while I’m not here to trump up my record or make excuses, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure in being an anthropomorphic public figure and serving as a role model to millions of impressionable children across this great nation of ours. Yet I always rose to the occasion. Remember my “Users are losers and losers are users” song? I wrote that, sang lead vocals, and meant it. Users are losers. And losers are users. Please don’t try to tell me that that song hasn’t kept generations of kids off drugs. When you boil it all down, that’s what’s important. Not my personal life. Don’t you see?

But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: By your own definition, aren’t you a loser, McGruff? Aren’t you a user? The short answer is … yes. Sort of. More of a supplier than a user. The longer, more nuanced answer, is that we all make mistakes. OK? Mine just involved offering bribes to three undercover FBI agents, illegally videotaping my political enemies, laundering millions of dollars, using a Penske moving truck to transport barrels of cocaine across Nevada and selling some light machine gunnery to a desert-based militia.

Allegedly. Woof.

I’m only human. And while I’m not technically human, I do walk on my hind legs, I talk, I sing, I give speeches, and I wear a long beige coat. So I want to appeal to your sense of decency here, humanish dog-to-man, before the Huffington Post runs some other 200-point headline about my reported failures. Their latest rhyming header, “HANDCUFF MCGRUFF!” was a real winner. Sheesh. Do people really get paid to write that stuff?

Now, if you’ve ever made a big mistake in your life, please raise your paws. [Sigh.] You know what I mean. Hands. I mean hands. C’mon now, get ‘em up there. This should be all of you. No exceptions. Now, take a look around and ask yourselves this: Should McGruff Thomas-Clegg, a.k.a. McGruff the Crime Dog, be punished for his shortcomings more severely than the rest of us? Sure, he’s an easy target, but should he lose his hallowed post as spokesdog for the National Crime Prevention Council because of a couple of little nitpicky legal mishaps? You can put your paws down now.

And while I’m not looking for an immediate answer, I will say this: building awareness to crime prevention is my life. Don’t take that away from me. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve been publicly embarrassed. My nephew, Scruff, will barely look at me.

Please. Let’s start the forgiveness. Let’s try to remember the good times. I was on a postage stamp, for goodness sakes. You’ve all licked ol’ McGruff. And I would lick you back if I could, if you’d let me. I’m pausing right now for applause.—Never mind. Will somebody at least come scratch under my chin? Stress gives me fleas. Anybody? No? That’s fine. I’ll use the edge of this podium.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Yes. Much better. Sorry, I’m drooling a little.

Look—my enduring legacy is this: I have convinced numerous Americans to take a more active role in preventing crime. Now, ultimately, did that backfire and get me caught? Is that the reason I’m facing federal litigation? It’s truly hard to say. I don’t know if those three FBI agents looked up to me when they were children. All I can tell you is, I should’ve done a better job listening to my own message and staying on point with what I was preaching. Or, at the very least, patting down my so-called friends. Bunch of turncoats.

In the meantime, I won’t stop singing my anti-drug songs or appearing at school assemblies until there’s a court order keeping me away from places where children gather. It sounds like that’s a real possibility, yes, the court order, but I remain optimistic. It’s in my nature. I’m one-sixteenth Golden Retriever. And fifteen-sixteenths sorry.

I believe I’ve made my point. It’s a full moon tonight and I’d like to go howl at it. As I exit, please take one of the coloring pages I’ve supplied, free of charge. The theme of the page is “second chances.” You’ll notice it’s a picture of me, running freely through a field, pursuing a real criminal. Thank you for listening, big woof to my canine brothers and sisters, and goodnight.

Going Where the Southern Cross the Dog: A Column About the Blues: Eddy and the Cutaways by Jason Edward Harrington

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

In 1951, my father was sixteen-years-old, a rangy kid roving the city in search of a job, ducking into diners and dime stores, supermarkets and soda shops. It never took him long to find work; he’d gotten his first job at the age of 14, bussing tables at a diner on 4th Ave in Birmingham. In Chicago he landed a gig as a dishwasher at Little Jack’s Diner, on West Madison and Kedzie.

“It was right down the street from my uncle’s house on Homan, so it was convenient. I was really lucky to have gotten that job.”

But my father, like his Uncle Houston before him, had come to Chicago to pursue a blues career; that was the real business at hand. Uncle Houston was setting up a record label, Atomic-H, which would find success just four years later with its first release: an album featuring Homesick James, Elmore James’ cousin. Thanks to Uncle Houston, my father had already visited most of the city’s blues clubs, from the seedy to the snazzy.

“I remember Club DeLisa on 55th State Street really blew my mind. They had a hydraulic band stand, and when the band started playing, the stage would come out of the floor. All the wealthy white people would come out from the North Shore to see the black entertainers. Everybody was appearing there at the time: Sammy Davis Jr., Count Basie.”

In short order, Uncle Houston had introduced my father to Big Bill Broonzy, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James. After failing to arrange an introduction to harpist Little Walter, Uncle Houston drove my father past Walter’s house on Avers Street instead, where the brand new Cadillac in the driveway said it all.

At that time my father’s experience with playing the blues consisted of a few songs he’d taught himself on acoustic guitar. Uncle Houston soon bought my father his first electric instruments: a Silvertone guitar and amp. My father began practicing every day after work.

By the age of 18, he had formed his first blues trio, Eddy and the Cutaways: Eddy Harrington on guitar, John Hudson on rhythm guitar, Richard Rogers on drums. The young bluesmen went around the city to nightclubs and taverns, auditioning for weekend gigs. At first, my father was too shy to sing on-stage; the very thought made him panic. When I learned of this fact, I felt a jolt of recognition: in that shy young man I saw myself. But Uncle Houston had a solution for my father’s shyness.

“At my uncle and his lady friend’s house, 1651 S. Trumbull Ave, they used to have Saturday night get-togethers in their basement. One day my uncle announced to the crowd that I was going to play guitar for everyone. They all cheered me on. So I played ‘em a little something. As I’m playing, I see that my uncle’s setting up a microphone, and I’m thinking, ‘uh oh.’ So after I’m done playing he says, ‘Now we’re gonna’ have him sing a song for us!’ The people cheered me on. I was terrified. I had never sung in front of an audience in my life, but I knew it was too late to turn back, then. So I got in front of the mic, and just started signing. It was ‘Let’s Have a Party’ by Elvis Presley.”

My father was well on his way to a blues career by the age of 22. The thing that I find most interesting about his early period is the ease with which it seems that he was able to leave his parents behind in the South. Growing up, my father never once mentioned his parents to me; I spent a good part of my life imagining that my father somehow never even had parents. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Family life has never been a big part of the blues.

- - -

By the time I was 18, my father had been absent from the house for several years, and my mother was usually at work or sound asleep after her nightly bottle of wine. I had been filling the gaps in parental supervision with drugs: I was the biggest dealer in my suburb. I was also hanging out with hip hop heads; people whose dreams were programmed into drum machines and scratched on turntables; rhyme-sayers and breakdancers who practiced their moves in Adidas gear: downrocks to windmills to backspins.

Freestyle rap battles were the main events at my place: getting drunk, high, and sitting around in a circle—the “cipher”—taking turns trying to out-do each other with witty rhymes. Though I was good at writing clever rhymes, I was usually too nervous to get in the cipher and say them.

I remember one aspiring rapper friend of mine, a white kid named Mark, used to appear at my place every Friday at midnight, like something out of Shakespeare. Eminem had just come out, and so white rappers across the land were fresh aglow with liberation from the Vanilla Ice stigma. Mark would buy a gram of coke and then do it all with me, running his rhymes past the only person in the world willing to sit and listen—

Yo I’ll surgically remove you, like a mole
The shit I kick is sick,
Like the C.D.C., but out-of-control

I got the Black Death flow

Escaped from the quarantine,
Don’t try to stop me ‘less you got a warrant, G
I’ll break your ass like you outta warranty—

—and so forth, until the sun came up, punctuating his rhyme’s punch lines with six fingers fashioned into guns, shaggy blonde hair slick with perspiration, green eyes glowing with determination to be the illest on the mic. Though his lyrics usually were fairly clever— those sprawling battle narratives constructed in the second-person— it was never quite clear exactly whom he was battling, and looking back now, I think those nights would have been more tolerable if he’d had an acoustic guitar and a sad song to sing, instead.

- - -

Many of the old blues singers were rough and tumble characters, feet planted firmly on the wrong side of the law. In 1929, Peetie Wheatstraw had sung about the murderous life that blues singers such as Son House and Leadbelly were actually living in “Gangster Blues”:

I’m gonna’ take you for an easy ride
Drop you off on the riverside
I’ve got the gangster’s blues, boy I am feelin’ mean.

Skip James had set the standard for blues-piece-as-ode-to-the-singer’s-gun in 1931, with his classic “22-20 Blues.”

Oh, your .38 Special
Buddy, it’s most too light
But my 22-20
Will make ev’rything, alright.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of old blues songs chronicling singers’ lives as Prohibition-Era bootleggers. Elmore James had done his share of bootlegging, as had Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr. In Chicago clubs, Little Walter used to pull his pistol out and wave it on-stage toward the end of his performances. Once, while he and his band were touring the South, Howlin’ Wolf stopped the car, pulled his gun and put it to bandmate S.P. Leary’s head for whistling out the window at a white woman near the Mississippi border.

“You’re gonna get us all killed,” he warned.

My father remembers well the rough atmosphere of the blues scene at the time.

“Most of the guys used to carry a gun. Wolf, Muddy, Little Walter, all of them. It was rough back then in the clubs. Somehow I always avoided having to carry. The only gun I ever owned in my life was a double-barreled shotgun in Mississippi, for hunting.”

- - -

In my early 20s, one of my good friends, B, fired a .357 magnum out the passenger side of a car, clapping shots at a music store in retaliation against the shop’s owner, who had once called the police on B’s brother. Luckily for everyone, it was midnight and the store was closed: B only managed to pop out the windows. He came to my apartment afterward and we drank rum and smoked cigarettes into the small hours of the morning, hoping the cops wouldn’t show up banging on the door.

The year after that, another one of my good friends, J.Z., had a quarter-kilo of cocaine stolen at gunpoint before being pistol-whipped. The dude who robbed him, Joe, ended up hanging himself from a tree a couple years later, depressed on the come down off a 3-day crack binge.

As for me, I was shot at one night on the North Side, riding in a car with a group of gang-affiliated girls. A jealous ex-boyfriend of one of the girl’s happened to see us passing by and decided to grab his gun. I was so drunk at the time that I didn’t remember any of it the next morning, and would have remained ignorant of the whole affair had the State’s Attorney not summoned me for an interview a few days later, informing me that I was involved in an attempted murder case.

The attempt had been on me.

- - -

In 1958, my father’s manager, Jump Jackson, suggested a name change from “Eddy Harrington” to “Eddy Clear Waters,” a play on “Muddy Waters.” My father liked the idea; he was an acquaintance of Muddy’s by that time. He still remembers his first time seeing Muddy.

“It was at the 708 Club on East 47th street. I was driving a cab at the time and heard on the radio that Muddy Waters was appearing there, that Friday night. I drove by and heard two ladies say ‘That’s Muddy Waters over there, in the white coat!’ I parked my cab for the night, somehow got past the doorman—even though I was too young to be in a club— and settled in a corner. I sat there all night long, listening to Muddy play. It was like getting religion for me.”

It turned out Muddy also liked the idea of a bluesman in Chicago named “Clear Waters”— he jokingly agreed to adopt my father as his son. With Muddy’s endorsement, the only thing left for my father was to sign a deal with a major label. Chess Records was the label that my father dreamed of. He asked B.B. King about his chances at Chess; B.B. told him he’d be “sleeping on his rights if he didn’t try,” but Chess turned him down.

“They said I was too similar too Chuck Berry. ‘We already have Chuck Berry, we don’t need another,’ they told me.”

His next choice was Vee-Jay records, the label that would sign The Beatles just five years later. My father sent them a tape, but they weren’t interested, either.

Finally, my father checked his pride and turned to family for help: his recording debut took place at Balkan Studios in Berwyn, on his uncle’s Atomic-H imprint. He had successfully brought himself one step closer to being like his idols: Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.

“We did a 45. It was really an experience; just amazing to hear yourself on the recording. The day of that first recording was one of the proudest days of my life.”

- - -

By the age of 23, I had successfully graduated from selling weed to cocaine. Once every two weeks, my friend J.Z and I would drive to Chicago to meet a cheerful Mexican man in his mid-twenties named Alex, whose parents—determined to find a better future for their young son—had brought him to the U.S., from Chihuahua to Chicago; after growing up and learning of his family’s ties to the cocaine trade, Alex realized that his best shot at riches had its source back in Mexico.

We would meet Alex in various public places located within an area of Chicago known as K-Town (the streets all begin with the letter K: Karlov, Kedvale, Keeler, Kenneth, Kilbourn, Kildare, et cetera) cop the kilo, bring it back to the suburbs, cut it, or “stomp on it” (depending on the purity) and, finally, break it down into eight balls and grams.

On one occasion, I found myself sitting at a red light with a kilo of cocaine beneath my seat and a squad car in the rearview mirror. It was a bright summer day, but in that moment all the color bled from the world; the traffic lights may as well have been turning from gray, to gray, to gray. There was just the sound of my heartbeat and the cold, phantom sensation of handcuffs closing around my wrists; the world decelerated to slow-mo.

We went straight. The cop made a left.

Had I been caught on any one of those dozens of cocaine runs, I would have done at least a couple years and been marked as a felon, possibly for life. But the flashing lights and handcuffs never came; just the feeling of having successfully delivered a kilogram of cocaine, like my idols on CD and screen, Jay-Z and Tony Montana.

- - -

My father never knew that I was into any of this; just as I had been ignorant of my father’s life story until recently, so he had been oblivious to his son’s forays into criminality until a few months ago.

“I wish I would have known. I had a feeling you were in with a bad crowd. Wish I would have been around more,” he told me, tears in his eyes, referring to life after the divorce.

What embarrasses me most when looking at my life side-by-side with my father’s is how much my father had managed to do with nearly nothing, and the degree to which I’d managed to squander nearly everything.

But at least I’m still alive: a lot of the kids I grew up with are gone, now. J.Z. overdosed on pain killers and went into a vegetative state in 2006. One of my other best friends, Tristan, fresh off a month-long bid in county jail in 2011, did a celebration shot of H and never woke up.

It’s kind of funny: my father the bluesman is an ebullient and charismatic stage performer while his son is a depressed introvert, entangled in a lifelong struggle with drugs and alcohol.

A father who sings the blues, and a son who inherited them.

List: How We Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk by Julia McCloy

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

In da trunk of da car.

In da wheelbarrow.

In da environmentally-friendly, reusable grocery bag.

Lifting carefully with da knees so as not to hurt da back.

The Start-Up Ride Stops Here by Janet Manley

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

Come in, close the floating glass door behind you and take a seat on the purple mitt chair. Laugh and high-five me as I tell you this: After a period of exponential growth from a single formica table into the hall of mirrors you find before you, the company has to rightsize. Ha ha ha! Show me those veneers—all that stands between this conversation and the rest of the office is a suspended glass cube and fourteen narwhal decals.

The entire ROFL team is being cut, but that information is embargoed until tomorrow. We can’t have any ZOMGs out of the staff, and won’t have their commenting privileges disabled until midnight. We don’t intend to let a single downvote loose. I need you to wait until after the Thursday night luau, then quietly tape up the handles of the fußball table, turn off the M&M fountain, and put out the electric tiki torches. By morning, we’re going to be a subsidiary.

On Friday, you will start by packing up the ball pit. You can shove it, and any social media editors you find playing there, by the “virals incubator,” aka “copyroom,” and for fuck’s sake don’t let me catch you taking the slippery slide on the way out if you want to see this Magritte-knockoff pixel rug again. Store the giant magnets in the giant cupboard under the giant whiteboard. Come to think of it, stick the giant Sharpie in there too. Effective tomorrow, HR will no longer be issuing novelty oversized checks; you will find a direct deposit form on our new Intranet, formerly the Memery. Here’s a tip, Super Mario: You’re going to want to change your intranet avatar of Mr. Cooper to something a little more professional, like a money clip or a Kindle.

Have an intern windex the Ideas Wall clean, and rake the Digital Sandpit. I don’t want corporate getting an eyeful of our jungle gym. All Macs will be replaced with PCs, because this is a business, not a summer camp. If Russell Crowe can play Javert, you can use MS Expression to mock up your wireframes. And we’re not all “amigos” now Ben, I’m your “boss.” Nikki’s too, but there is a clanking silo wall between you and her, so if you need rescuing, you sure as hell better yell up.

You know what’s for lunch, Ben? Whatever you buy yourself. Don’t be thinking that management gives a shit about your protein intake anymore. Dusan and his omelette station are already halfway to Indiana. Ha ha ha, lulz! You can eat your food in the common area, if you want to attempt a banh mi in front of five security cameras, or at your desk, which will be reconfigured before tomorrow’s all-company jamboree from “pods” to “batteries.” There are only three other people in your battery, for a total of four nodes. You can make a battery out of a lemon, a nail, a penny and a wire, Pacman. Never forget that you are expendable, and these people aren’t your allies, although you’ll probably want to go in on Seamless orders together now you’re all treating yourselves to lunch.

Here are the next steps: I am going to take Nikki into YOLO and give her this same talk, because you’ve both done some good work here. But don’t think Tweeting is going to pay the bills. Filip is history, despite his FavStars—boy wouldn’t know a good gif if it hit him in the face every three seconds. Your new reading list is Jim Collins. All the Jim Collinses. Get rid of that Gladwell, and don’t bring up your “feels” ever again.

Now hoover up those Rick Astley videos from the LAN, get yourself a real shirt, and take those ridiculous glasses off. Fist bump.

Monologue: A Hypnotized Person Tries to Have Sex With a Chair by Chris Okum

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

I’m going to take off my pants now. But I’m going to keep my shirt on. Is that okay with you? Or we can turn off the lights and then I can take off my shirt. But I’d rather not do both. Fine. I’ll leave my shirt on. Can I take off your skirt? You have really smooth legs. Did you shave yours legs today? I was just asking. Leave your panties on. I like that. Just pull them to the side. That’s about as kinky as I get, I think. Whoa. That’s pretty kinky. I’ve never done that. Well, I’m kind of vanilla, I guess. What do you mean by chocolate? You just tell me what you want. I’ll do whatever you want. I can do that. I’ve never done that before. Like this? Oh, like that. Sorry. Like I said. Is that too hard? You can’t? Well, then, is that too hard? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Maybe you should get on top. Hold on. I’ll find it. I know where it is. Sorry. Looks like you’ve had a little practice. Nothing. It just means you seem like you know what you’re doing. But I like sluts. I’m all for that. I don’t know how to do that. I mean, I know how to do that, but I don’t seem to ever do it right. But what if I hurt you? But what if I do? I’m just saying. You never know. Like this? Should I spread my fingers or keep them closed? So wind resistance isn’t an issue? That seems kind of complicated. I was never good at science. I’m afraid to ask. I’m not doing that. I told you I’m not kinky. It sure is. It sure is. That’s the very definition of kinky. Can’t you just tell me? You’re acting like I have no idea what I’m doing. It will. Well, I’m not opposed to that. I have an open mind. I’ll try it. But if it hurts I’m stopping. You brought it with you? Wow, you’re so prepared. Hey. That’s huge. Is there anything I need to do? To like, I don’t know, get myself ready? I never would have guessed you were so advanced. This reminds me of the airport. Holy shit! No, don’t stop. Kind of. If you want. I am. Don’t say that again. That really turns me on. A little too much. Are you Italian? Maybe I should take off my socks. Why are you laughing? What’s a swirlie? Okay, I think I got it. I can do this. Just like you did it. Wait. Shhh. Be quiet. It’s just, you’re going to, please, stop talking. Oh my God. I can’t. I’m sorry. I tried not to. I asked you to please be quiet. Just give me twenty minutes. I promise. Don’t leave. I told you it’s been a long time since. I’m just really sensitive right now. Can I get you a towel? I don’t have a spoon. Not on me. They’re all dirty. There’s no need to get personal. That wasn’t my fault. I told you to stop with the dirty talk and you refused. You can take a shower. Let me get you a towel. I should have a clean towel for you. Do you care if it’s a beach towel? I never go to the beach. I don’t know why I have a beach towel. Van Gogh, I think. Monet? Are you sure it’s Monet? Hey, you would know. I’m not the one who works at Pottery Barn. There might not be any more hot water. That was a mouse. I thought I killed it. You kill it. They don’t bother me. Please. Take your time. I only have that one bar of soap. That’s probably an armpit hair. I can tell the difference. The hairs in my armpit are a lot softer. Let me get rid of that for you. I got soap under my fingernails. God I hate that. There’s no lock on the door. I’ll be out here. Feel free to use my shampoo. It’s organic. I stole it. That and newspapers. But only on Sundays. I can? Like, a state penitentiary? That doesn’t sound right. You sound like you were a bad kid. Oh, yeah, I would have liked you. Why not? How do you know? I seem to be your type now. Do you like to listen to music when you’re getting all soapy? Turn on the radio. It should be right in front of you. What do you mean? Can I open the door for a second? Can I come in? Where’s my radio? I had a waterproof radio hanging from the knobs. Somebody stole my shower tunes. Who would steal a radio out of a shower? It’s not the same thing. I don’t believe in that. Maybe. I’ll get another one, I guess. Sure they do. Somewhere. That sounds right. You know, I really like watching you wash your hair. You look really classy right now. That’s the first thing I thought when I saw you. How classy you looked. Well, you’d never know. You wash your hair like you went to boarding school.

Non-Essential Mnemonics: “Until I found Buddhism, Sikhism seemed compelling—even magical. When golf anxiety started making intimacy unpleasant, Sikh filosophy [sic] kept John grounded. Sikhism’s awesome.” by Kent Woodyard

Mon, 20 May 2013 06:59:00 -0400

An excerpt from PGA bad boy, John Daly’s, forthcoming memoir (The Pants Make The Man, Penguin 2014) wherein he describes, in partial third person, his journey to spiritual enlightenment. Also, a mnemonic for the countries that have hosted the World Cup (Uruguay, Italy, France, Brazil, Switzerland, Sweden, Chile, England, Mexico, West Germany, Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Italy, United States, France, South Korea, Japan, Germany, South Africa).

Literary Couchsurfing References by Jason Edward Harrington

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

Thomas Sawyer
Missouri

Reference: H. Finn
Experience: Neutral

Hain’t unlikely you remember me from a previous reference, in which I vouched for a Mr. Mark Twain (against the better angels of my commonest sense). Well, today it’s my pleasure to recommend to you one Tom Sawyer.

Tom hooked me up with a right fine futon at Aunt Polly’s on short notice, which was a real solid, considerin’ the circumstances. After that I had the great pleasure of surfin’ and a raftin’ a whole lotta’ rivers with Tom. One time we went tubin’ on the Nam Song in Laos (which I reckon’s a mighty cool place to surf on account of tain’t too touristy yet, just keep that ol’ cash ‘n credit card in your money belt). But the best times we had were on that old Mississippi. Me, Tom, and another CSer by the name of Jim went a driftin’ downriver at night, lying on our backs just a’watching the stars.

Turned out Tom was a real fine fella’ on the surfin’ circuit. Only reason for the neutral’s on account of another CSer, Ben Rogers, claimin’ a sketchy experience with Tom and a whitewashed fence.

D. Moriarty
Denver

Reference: Sal Paradise
Experience: Positive

I first met Dean at a time in my life you could call the beginning of my life on the surf.

I hosted Dean for a week at my aunt’s place in Jersey. After that we headed west, with Dean balling that jack like no tomorrow (I had total trust in him behind the wheel). The two of us had some real gone times: dancing in the cobblestone alleys of Denver, smoking tea with hipster cats in Chi, drinking wine-spodiodi in New Orleans and digging girls fresh off the Megabus in San Fran. Dean ran around like Groucho Marx on the make, eyes flashing with a kind of holy light.

And the music! Dean had a real hot playlist: Bird, Dizzy, Monk and Miles. All the way from Reno to New York we ear bud-shared, digging those gone cats just blow, blow, blow!

Phileas Fogg
London

Reference: John Sullivan
Experience: Positive

A rather enigmatic personage, Mr. Phileas Fogg first contacted my wife and me concerning a place to crash at the conclusion of an epic journey he’d undertaken. After perusing his profile and determining his tastes to be congenial to ours (especially in regard to the bands he’d listed as favorites) we agreed to host Mr. Fogg, upon the condition that he promise not to burn us in any way, as so many previous CSers had done.

Mr. Fogg assured us he would touch down at our place at precisely 8:45 in the evening. Imagine our delight when he not only arrived with all the punctuality befitting an Englishman, but also quite literally touched down! In a hot air balloon!

We had played host to many an adventurous CSer before, but never one with such daring! Whilst he and his buddies rested, exhausted from all their ballooning, my wife and I more closely read Mr. Fogg’s profile and noticed that, indeed, it was his stated CSing intention to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon—24,901 miles, as the crow flies!—and to do so in such a short time frame!

We fain vouch for Mr. Fogg!

Raoul Duke
Los Angeles

Reference: Lucy
Experience: Negative — “Avoid, avoid, AVOID RAOUL.”

I’m all about peace and love, man. I never thought I’d leave a negative reference, but this guy’s a total creep. Raoul contacted me claiming he was a Doctor of Journalism coming to Las Vegas to find the American Dream. His profile said he was “Up for anything: coffee, drink, friendship, hook-up; willing to share: bed, couch, uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, as long as you’re not a cop.”

The warning bells should have gone off right there, but for some reason I agreed to meet him for a drink.

First of all, DO NOT believe anything his attorney says. He’s just this big fat hairy Samoan and I really doubt he passed the bar anywhere. Raoul and his attorney claimed they didn’t need a couch, since they already had a place to stay; that much I can vouch for as true, since I saw the place for myself… after I came to in a hotel room FLOODED KNEE-HIGH WITH WATER. His attorney was naked and arguing with himself.

I hate to smear a CSer—I believe in karma and universal good vibes—but this guy threatens to destroy the balance, man.

Avoid, avoid, AVOID RAOUL!

Position Papers from the Apple Pie and Machine Guns Institute: Position Paper #13: Fuck Science by Stuart Winchester

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

When Texas Representative Lamar Smith released a draft bill last month calling for a drastically needed overhaul in the way that the National Science Foundation issues grants, the research community had a collective meltdown not seen since the process outlined for cloning dinosaurs in Jurassic Park was deemed “too fake.”

The issue that so upset this liberal-leaning sect? A sensible and overdue proposal that eliminates the cumbersome and costly peer-review process in favor of a new set of criteria to ensure that government funds only support high-quality, groundbreaking science that serves the national interest and does not duplicate other efforts.

The research community claims that the duplication inherent in peer review is a necessary part of the scientific process, the principal vehicle by which scientists verify that their experiments are accurate and valid. This is, at best a dubious assertion, one that rests upon the liberal presumption that science is useful in the first place.

Science is, for the most part, a waste of time. Over the past several centuries, the scientific community has wasted millions of man-hours and trillions of dollars to manufacture a false narrative counteracting a Biblical history that we already know to be true. To the propagators of science, history is not a collection of immutable facts delivered to us by God’s grace via the Bible, but a choose-your-own-adventure book whereby the reality of what has happened is ever changeable.

To take just one example of this insolence, consider the case of evolution. For the entirety of man’s existence, all of humanity had agreed¹ about the origin of man. God had taken six days and created us, along with a world to live in. A perfectly rational explanation, and one accepted for millennia. Then, a publicity-hungry troublemaker by the name of Charles Darwin decided that he would make a new, fancier, and more fantastical explanation for the origin of man, called “evolution.” What was Darwin’s claim? That he had arrived at his conclusion using science, that, through “observations” and “experiments,” he had concluded that a fanciful device he termed “natural selection” was the principal agent that determined which species would survive and which would face extinction in the brutality of primeval Earth.

That Darwin had an agenda with Jesus was widely acknowledged in his day, a fact lost in the endless encomiums that have spilled from academia over the man ever since his so-called discovery. An irascible, foul-mouthed brute of a man, he was feared and reviled in equal measure by all who knew him. Just check out this page from a recently discovered diary kept by one of his servants:

This is the prevailing methodology of science and scientific research: take a thing that is plainly and logically true and spin some David Copperfield-worthy illusion to make the entire planet think it is something else entirely. Meanwhile, couch your conclusions in so-called evidence that convinces a naïve critical mass of the population that they must initiate mass action to avoid calamity.

Perhaps nowhere has this power been more abused than with the myth of global warming. For the past several decades, a coterie of closet communists bent on destroying U.S. industry has assiduously created troves of data that supposedly show the inevitable collapse of Earth’s ecosystem unless we trade in our automobiles for horses and buggies and start powering our electric grid with spinning hamster wheels.

Science would have you believe that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere warms Earth by absorbing excess sunlight, a process that is, conveniently enough, invisible and therefore seemingly impossible to disprove. A simple high-altitude investigation, however, reveals that, rather than staking out a position in the sky as some invincible saboteur of humanity, CO2 particles, once they pass through clouds, simply transform into angels who spread rainbows over Earth. This process can be observed by studying the photograph below taken from a specially designed high-altitude hot-air balloon over Louisiana:

Even if science were useful, the peer review process is flawed. The expectation that scientists will do everything two or three times just to make sure they saw it correctly the first time is symptomatic of an out-of-control government bureaucracy, obsessed with waste and redundancy. To repeat a science experiment is an asinine waste of time and a colossal misallocation of resources. It would be as if the United States, having invaded some Middle Eastern nation and subjugated it to the point of impotence, were, just a decade later, to re-invade the same country with a titanic assault force on the grounds that it were some dire threat to humanity.

Liberals, who of course have dedicated their lives to producing just this sort of excess, defend the peer-review process, making the absurd declaration that it is somehow necessary to eliminating ineffectual research and validating those experiments already performed. But the stupidity of the peer review process is not at all difficult to demonstrate. Even a cursory search of the vast scientific archives turns up millions of pages of documents dedicated to measuring the age of Earth. To what end? This is a question, again, long settled by the Bible. Earth, quite clearly, is a bit over 6,000 years old, as demonstrated by this hilarious birthday card that God sent to the planet on its last birthday:

This is not to say that science is not useful. Indeed, we owe the development of our most advanced weapons systems to this very institution. Nor would it be possible to develop new forms of stock market manipulation, extract difficult-to-reach fossil fuels, or concoct addictive foods and drugs without our smartest scientists diligently working in the lab. As a reminder of how useful smart science is when used for the greater public good, here is a picture of a former Iraqi village that was transformed into a crater by an intercontinental ballistic missile:

The proper role of science is perhaps best demonstrated by APMAG’s long-time partners at the Jesus Institute for Science (JIFS), a respected international organization dedicated to countering the pernicious influence of the university-government research establishment with experiments proving that the Bible is right about everything.²

To return momentarily to the case of evolution, JIFS recently concluded a longitudinal observational study of chimpanzees, thought by many scientists to be man’s closest living relatives. The animals were studied from birth to natural death, at which time they were given a proper burial.³ Those acolytes at the altar of evolution may be surprised to learn that, though many of the chimps lived to be more than 60 years old, not a single one turned into a human being. In fact, not one even learned to speak English or drive a car, which we can all agree are primary characteristics of intelligent beings. We were, however, able to teach several how to operate an AR-15, as shown in this photograph of two of these war chimps fighting to the death at a research facility in North Carolina:

While the truth is increasingly muddled by the delusions of science, the way forward for the United States government is fortunately far clearer. Congress should pass Representative Smith’s aptly named High Quality Research Act of 2013 without delay.

- - -

¹ Other bothersome religions have of course proven as meddlesome as the scientific community, manufacturing their own false narratives to explain the origins of Earth. We have done our best to eliminate these odious ideologues, through a variety of wars and such, to little avail.

² Except in cases where big business is right about everything

³ Actually, they were sent to an industrial meat manufacturer in Nebraska to be turned into hotdogs, a useful repurposing of research animals that the federal government would no doubt create some regulation to destroy should it be alerted to the enterprise.

I Don’t See Race by Christopher Mah

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

Many decades ago, racism was a huge problem in this country, but today, it hardly even exists, thanks largely to individuals like me who just don’t see race. Society has benefited from an increasing number of people who, like me, are simply race-blind and literally cannot tell a black man from a Chinese one without some kind of outside assistance. Because I see all people as having the same generic, beige-colored skin, I never have to think about race, so racism simply isn’t an issue for me.

To me, the color of someone’s skin never even crosses my mind, as long as it is white-ish. No one could ever accuse me of being racist, because I have at least one friend of every race. I think. Is Jewish a race? Anyways, what I was saying is that I have at least one friend who is Asian, and I am so color-blind that I didn’t even know he was Asian for three years until I heard him talking on the phone with his mom in a language I didn’t understand, and I was like, “What are those ridiculous sounds you are making?” When he told me he was Chinese, I was really surprised because he talks English so good. But I am glad he told me, because now that I know he is Chinese, I am able to connect with him on a more personal level by wearing my Jeremy Lin Rockets jersey when we hang out and constantly trying to set him up with my Korean neighbor whose name I forget. If he hadn’t told me he was Japanese, I would have never known and probably would have just kept treating him like any other white person, which probably would have made him feel uncomfortable.

Similarly, I did not know that a person at my office was black until I asked him, “Are you black?” I knew there was something different about him, but because I am so race-blind, I just couldn’t put my finger on it until I asked. Plus, he always wore really expensive suits to work, which I thought was something only white people did. I was thrilled to learn that he was black, because I have always wanted a black friend, so I asked him if he wanted to chillax at my cribizzle on Fridizzle, and then he reported me to HR and now I no longer work at his company.

Funny things like that are always happening to me because of my inability to see race. For instance, how I like to tell race jokes when I am with white people, but sometimes I forget that a color person is there and no one laughs. Or, how I like to tease my white friends by jokingly calling them racial slurs, but because I cannot distinguish between my white friends and my color friends, sometimes I accidentally call one of my color friends a word which sometimes is the right slur for their race but other times isn’t. But in any case it explains why I do not have many ethnicity friends.

No one can accuse me of being racist, because I have my one Asian friend and one black former coworker. Although, I am still trying to make friends with a Mexican, an Eskimo, and someone from the Middle East. It doesn’t matter where—Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan—just so long as it is a place that Americans associate with terrorism so that I can bring him to parties and show everyone how progressive and race-blind I am that I am friends with someone from a terrorist country. I know this will make a lot of my white friends nervous, but I will put their minds at ease by loudly reassuring everyone that my friend is not a terrorist. Unless I am not sure if he is a terrorist or not, in which case I will just tell everyone to be alert.

Not only am I race-blind, I am also sex-blind, meaning that I cannot tell the difference between people of different sexes. I cannot tell men from women, which often makes dating quite confusing. Also, using public restrooms. Moreover, I am age-blind and have a hard time telling toddlers apart from elderly people. I mean, both are small and walk funny, am I right? Really, I have such a forward-thinking perspective that to me, all people are distinguishable only by height.

If everyone were as race-blind as me, racism would become a thing of the past, like Indians and unicorns. People would stop discriminating based on race and start discriminating based on more important things like disabilities and sexual orientation. Regardless of your race, we are all humans with warm blood, two legs, and three nipples. If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you pass gas, do we not gag? The answer to both is yes, because these are not rhetorical questions and I spent the past hour stabbing myself and farting to confirm. In the grand scheme of things, what matters most in life is not the color of your skin, but the color of your hair and the shape of your eyes. But it actually does help if you’re white.

List: One-of-a-Kind Government Positions by Jay Wexler

Thu, 16 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

Poet Laureate

Surgeon General

Egg Honcho

Decimal Czar

Key Grip Overlord

Toll Collector Top Cat

Brad (the little fastener thingy) Boss

Pornography Captain

Cheesemonger Big Cheese

Iguana in Chief

Majority Whip

The President’s Challenge Adult Fitness Test Reconsiders Its Audience by Pete Reynolds

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:01:00 -0400

Lie down in sit-up position. How many slices of ham do you see under your couch?

Get in position for the sit-and-reach. Can you get back up, or are you pretty much down there until the FedEx guy comes by again?

Can you drive to work without stopping at Arby’s?

Can you retweet without sweating?

Can you achieve orgasm without thinking about cake?

To your knowledge, have you ever been a major factor in a corporate-level decision about where to build a Bob Evans?

Can you have a heart attack without also having a second heart attack?

Can you sweat without smelling like maple syrup?

Are you carrying bacon on your person? You sure?

Have you ever accepted Crisco as collateral?

Could you fit into a sidecar if you had to?

Do you currently have frosting in your hair?

Is your Blood-Gravy Content lower than, say, 11%?

Have any surgeons given nicknames to your arteries?

Time yourself in a one-mile run. Kidding! What are you, some kind of superman?

Name your five closest friends. Are more than two of them types of cheese?

Have you recently thought about how you should totally sign up for that 10K, but you just got over being sick, and work is super hectic right now, but maybe in the fall?

Have you ever been identified by name in a suicide letter written by a personal trainer?

Have you ever voted for a deep fryer in any state or local election?

What is the maximum number of corndogs you have consumed in one sitting; and Jesus, really?

McSweeney’s

Senior Year is Totally Gonna Rule Because After That My Life is Going to Be an Endless Abyss of Longing! by Lane Moore

Open Letters: An Open Letter to the Hot Canadian Zumba Teacher Who Pulled Me Onstage After My Mother Died by Christine Schrum

The 49ers: Oral Histories of Americans Facing 50: The 49ers, #119: Kathryn Harrison by Rob Trucks

Both Sides, Now by Teddy Wayne

Big Mom on Campus: Raising Two Kids in a College Dorm: Final Exercises by Taylor Harris

List: Ways to Tell If the New Student is an Undercover Cop by Nathan Patton

Albert Camus, Creative Writing Instructor by David Galef

List: Captive Audience SEO by Edward Fairchild and Jake Swearingen

Teddy Wayne’s Unpopular Proverbs: Coincidence by Teddy Wayne

Scandal Befalls McGruff the Crime Dog by Jory John

Going Where the Southern Cross the Dog: A Column About the Blues: Eddy and the Cutaways by Jason Edward Harrington

List: How We Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk by Julia McCloy

The Start-Up Ride Stops Here by Janet Manley

Monologue: A Hypnotized Person Tries to Have Sex With a Chair by Chris Okum

Non-Essential Mnemonics: “Until I found Buddhism, Sikhism seemed compelling—even magical. When golf anxiety started making intimacy unpleasant, Sikh filosophy [sic] kept John grounded. Sikhism’s awesome.” by Kent Woodyard

Literary Couchsurfing References by Jason Edward Harrington

Thomas Sawyer Missouri

D. Moriarty Denver

Phileas Fogg London

Raoul Duke Los Angeles

Position Papers from the Apple Pie and Machine Guns Institute: Position Paper #13: Fuck Science by Stuart Winchester

I Don’t See Race by Christopher Mah

List: One-of-a-Kind Government Positions by Jay Wexler

The President’s Challenge Adult Fitness Test Reconsiders Its Audience by Pete Reynolds

Thomas Sawyer
Missouri

D. Moriarty
Denver

Phileas Fogg
London

Raoul Duke
Los Angeles