...we, as listeners, are lost too. In some museums, this sound work is looped, creating a constant and comfortable lostness—everything in hyperfocus yet soft, like cashmere. For Dean, the work creates “a conceptual space where I can often reside.” We’re lost, dislocated from the familiar, embedded in an abyss.
We inhabit the blank spaces of the map.
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I’m already apprehensive about driving over a body of water when Vega grabs my elbow and whispers to me that we’re riding around in a killer's car, it’s nineteen hundred seventy seven, whole country is doing a fix, it’s doomsday, doomsday. The bridge is sturdy beneath my wheels, yet I wasn’t prepared to be behind the wheel of a runaway car…
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I am shocked by the news, though not surprised. So many people close to me have had cancer—my sister (breast) and my oldest friend (also prostate), my father (bladder). But it is a blow.
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I figure I’m making it all up. I’ve been a wreck since he died—my appetite is erratic, my gait agitated, my posture defeated. So, sure—my psyche is probably conjuring him. But I welcome the visions because they soothe me.
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This is the first time I shoot a gun, but not the first time I’ve held one. I wish I could tell you specifics. I can tell you what I remember.
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Because something is gone, that doesn’t mean that it goes away. We often clutch at stories, real or those we imagine, that can help give our lives meaning against randomness and disorder.
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You stood in our living room just after your first birthday as the television played aerial footage of prisoners in hazmat suits lowering caskets into mass graves. Mercifully, you’ll have no memory of it, but your early life unfolded as death felt just there, right outside the front door, delivered by a friend's fingertips, floating on a loved one’s breath.
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I am three days into a new life. In a new state in a new town at a new elevation where there are other things for single 30-year-olds to do than attend baby showers and bridal brunches. Three days into a new life and I am sitting on a beach waiting for a surf instructor, fantasizing about his abs and our potential.
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A week later and the horse is a hollow shipwreck, ribcage bared to the quartermoon. The jetsam of carrion eaters strewn amidst a palimpsest of tracks printed in the dirt.
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I, alongside him, folded every napkin in the same direction. Nudged straight the faded carpet samples that made every cement step down to the basement a different frugal pattern and color. I wished our house number—off by only one digit—was a clean 12345.
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White emerges when all wavelengths of light reflect off an object with equal intensity, much like how white noise distributes its amplitude across its entire frequency range. Examples abound: running water, the whir of a fan, the hum of a vacuum.
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In his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Robyn Hitchcock’s assembled a lovely, evocative, characteristically quirky portal back to that heady time.
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Enter: The Clown.
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Suddenly, the building’s main door banged open. Something heavy was being lugged up the stairs. Kevin slid behind me and dragged open the apartment door.
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I have letters after my name, but they are profane, so I do not use them. The saints in the catacombs would rise up and declare me anathema if I did. But the transcript says what it says.
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I never meant to raise my own children, not all the time, anyhow. Not like this. Some days I really miss John, but really what I miss is when people could seem like whole cities instead of swamps.
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What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone.
Read MoreWithout trying, D and B are helping me understand the truth about forever—that it works both ways and travels the earth in all directions, thwarting all human attempts to move forward by going backwards.
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Permanently installed in my mortal mind’s corner sits Mrs. Eddy, ram-rod straight on her wooden chair, dark hair pleated, expression severe, Victorian jacket battened down, white ruff protruding round neck and wrists.
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My mother lit her first cigarette on waking. My father smoked himself to sleep at night. They smoked as we carved pumpkins, sang Christmas carols around the piano, dipped eggs into bright dye. They smoked in our bedrooms while they read aloud to my brother and me. My mother, a skillful and innovative cook, especially for the time, smoked while making dinner every night, an ashtray balanced on the back end of the stove, lighting cigarette after cigarette on the gas burners under simmering pots.
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