January 2012
3 posts
James Joyce & Breakups
I had a physics professor who talked about “Finnegan’s Wake,” and the difficulty of translating intentionally nonsensical passages into other languages. He was comparing language to DNA. I was identifying styles of domestic architecture, I was shrinking in the drier, I was behaving like a wave and a particle, I was regenerating limbs, I was reapplying lipstick, I was there, using...
Imaginary
I’m great at being an imaginary friend, but terrible at sexual torture. I can’t beat people with belts without hitting them in the balls, even if they’re women. I’m so insecure about it I have enrolled in Imaginary Friend Grad School. I stay up all night on adderall, turning invisible and putting ketchup in grownups’ coffee. If I see people being beaten with belts on...
December 2011
2 posts
Sit Down on a Discarded Couch
The reason you’re always married is your shirts are boring. If you buy some brightly colored shirts, your life will be like that movie about the couple who enjoy asphyxiating each other with plastic bags. They sit down Christmas Morning on a discarded couch to open a package of bags and the couch comes alive and screws both of them. I’m not saying you’ll have a religious experience, but you...
Ground Control
I used to watch each dandelion in the traffic island flower and go to seed, waiting to send the seeds sailing with a hard breath, or reduce them to flashes of yellow with a lighter. They say there’s a David Bowie inside each of us, just waiting to burst out, but how will I know? Even the swarms of bees seemed special the first time—afterwards I lay on my couch, feeling like a piece of warm, thick...
November 2011
2 posts
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still...”
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos (via bookoasis)
The Only Light Source Should Be a Scented Candle...
We sat in a cemetery drinking a mixture of wine and bleach, with the sun as a light source, until everyone called me goth. We injected novocain into people’s mouths in a sterile room, under fluorescent lights, until everyone called me a dentist. I wasn’t really either of those things, I just thought if I did what you did I would understand why I will take the bus a great distance to see you, and...
August 2011
4 posts
Personal Record
No more than three feet away from Louise (but certainly more than two feet away; perhaps thirty inches – or, in the system preferred by Zanzabar, Louise’s butler, of whom more later, seventy-six point two centimetres – although needless to say, it seemed less) a dog which seemed to be a cross between a terrier and some kind of beagle – its appearance certainly seemed to fit the original meaning of...
Drivers
I drank so much coffee one day, a white Honda went by and I thought the driver was wearing one of those plastic cones dogs wear after surgery. In the long moment before I realized the Honda was actually the shadow of a bus, I tried to imagine where the driver was going the way I tried to imagine what kissing is like when I was a child. Especially afterwards, I savored the certainty that things can...
Everyday Hero
I made it here today, though my injuries are grievous—my socks are both white but the shapes of the elastic parts reveal they are from different pairs; one of my eyebrow hairs has fallen out and I might never find it again. I made it here though, to this couch where people like the place where the side of an individual serving yogurt container meets the bottom sit in silence. I sit there until...
2 tags
seanhaiku:
8/26/11 - life is not about popularity, rather it’s about reblogs
July 2011
4 posts
Hairy Mother Fuckers
We drink purple cocktails with white foam on their surfaces that are nicer than what we normally drink, you in your shirt with stripes that match your sweater and me in my belt that matches my shoes, I tell you how I like to break into abandoned houses and you tell me how you like to chloroform people for fun, you tell me about being an administrative assistant and I tell you about reading PubMed...
My Hands are Small
I have pretty eyes, and the discipline to smash my face against a table until it bleeds. Neither of these things are apparent in the photo of us that made me realize my hands are small. This is probably because of the lighting, or because my computer makes the photo too pixelated. All that’s visible is my hand touching you helplessly and uselessly, like ketchup from a packet that’s been stepped...
Short Story: Published
thisblogwillburn:
(Find it here, under Lucid Fiction.)
June 2011
4 posts
Waking Up Each Day
I haven’t been having enough sex
I should probably do something about my hair
every morning, it’s still there
Low-Sodium Canned Soup
It would all be fine if she did something besides work at Starbucks—it could be anything really—if she volunteered at an aquarium, or collected tropical fish. I don’t mean to be judgmental, I’m just very invested in it all being fine, and it really isn’t. She and I will have a conversation, probably about Starbucks, that makes us both lonely. Other people who exist will feel lonely, and...
The Planned Meetings are So Important
I would do it, but I’m too slimy and hammered and airborne. I wrote down the date on my calendar, but I got distracted by aging and breathing. I’d come over now, but I’m too foamy and jagged and independently wealthy, and too busy drinking Dr. Pepper and being dismembered by trains. I know the planning meetings are important, but my schedule is completely full of reading...
May 2011
9 posts
Assisted Living
I can’t remember why Robert drew a dick he had seen that resembled a Christmas tree, though I clearly remember the ornaments he drew on it. “Identity” is memories, a growing collection of Christmas tree dick ornament memories without reason, which make something as reasonable as a “home” seem like a completely inappropriate container for old people.
“At fifteen, you had the radiance of early morning— at twenty, you will begin to...”
– This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald (via g-is-for-gaijin)
I Only Fly First Class
Two summers ago in a trash can in Brooklyn, I saw a pair of Ugg boots covered in blood. I remembered the University of Washington campus, the endless motion of 40,000 Ugg boots, the feeling that there had been a failed attempt to produce something like the assortment of objects recovered from a house fire, or a word that is funny simply because of the voice of the person who speaks it. I saw the...
This Blog Will Burn: Story Excerpt →
thisblogwillburn:
Hello, below I have posted the beginning of my newest story, “Falling Beach.” It’s not quite finished yet, needs more polishing. It’s a bit lengthy, coming in at 14,000 words, so I doubt we’ll see it in its entirety on this blog, maybe a real publisher will take it! I hope!
from Falling Beach:
Science
Science tells us that if we want to ride around like millionaires in a brand of car that doesn’t exist anymore, with our heads resting on the bare thighs of German supermodels, we need first to stop worrying about the speech impediments, meteorites, and Alzheimers disease that distract us from behaving like millionaires.
Science reminds us that we are just like viruses, shaped like prolate...
As Things Go
I’m intensely ashamed that I’m not developing a vaccine, but there’s no specific disease I want to prevent. I try at least to not create any new diseases, but the way things are going, I probably will. Don’t even get me started on the way things are going. This morning I learned that all living things die one day, and then I cut open a potato and there was a muffin inside...
Dedicated to Henry Charles Bukowski: Some People →
henrycharlesbukowski:
some people never go crazy. me, sometimes I’ll lie down behind the couch for 3 or 4 days. they’ll find me there. it’s Cherub, they’ll say, and they pour wine down my throat rub my chest sprinkle me with oils. then, I’ll rise with a roar, rant, rage - curse them and the universe as I send them…
This Blog Will Burn: Anaerobic State →
thisblogwillburn:
Mrs. May Truth at an advanced age discovered her genius. Surrealist poetry. Life was hamburger. Hot-dog thumbs on the space key, wiry veins spiraling hooped life from ancient receptors. Her dead husband’s Swatch ticking lost seconds. Half-wit neighborhood darling parks a new Denali in the…
Unleaded
I felt I was submerged in a thick sludge, trying to fit a normal-sized drawer into a toy dresser over and over again, but I observed I was texting someone about a short story I read. The text really meant, “Please don’t go away so I have no one to tell what book I’m reading.” I imagine what I would be like if I was smarter, and I would be texting someone that I’m looking out my real window and I...
April 2011
3 posts
seanhaiku:
4/18/11 - second year complete and my haikus still have yet to help me get laid
This Blog Will Burn: Cupcake →
thisblogwillburn:
They degraded overnight. Some drove cars with smashed-in fenders and hoods, others hobbled in predictable clothing, shedding away days until the finale. With each step flowed faster the poison in their blood, unfurling a smell like just-removed shoes that permeated the air with a fetid smoke.
Recovery
Lying in a hospital bed is the closest I ever come to being an artist. There is invasion and scrutiny by strangers, people are only interested in what I produce. People grow from pain but being a Patient is real art, right down to the competition;
It is time to be better at finding plump, blue, blood vessels than the phlebotomist or any other patient on this floor.
I am a conductor of monitor...
January 2011
3 posts
Sleep To Follow?
I hope I am served the wrong kind of pancake so I have an excuse to talk to the waiter about this dream I keep having in which strangers are aging rapidly while watching me pee.
The pancake will have to be very wrong in order for my bringing up the dream to be appropriate.
Fortunately the most wrong things that exist outside of dreams aren’t people getting shot or stabbed or even being...
0101201101
Don’t tell me I have a way with words or I’ll force them back in you the same way they came out.
Short. Political. Statement.
Sarah Palin is the living embodiment of the degeneracy of our society. Not merely ignorant, but unaware of her ignorance and not troubled to remedy it. Utterly cocksure and self-righteous, lacking any hint of humility or reflection. A novice in the political arts who sees no need for expertise or refinement, and regards them as faults in any event. A would-be oppressor who is quick to don the...
December 2010
1 post
I hate cultural appropriation, but I love punching myself. I try not to punch myself in a way that’s too cultural, just to be absolutely sure I’m not appropriating anything. If I punch myself in a way that’s too cultural, I feel like a marching band, and I have to remain a deaf, motionless lab technician until the feeling subsides. Once when I had PMS, I punched myself so hard I learned what...
August 2010
6 posts
High Class
I don’t like seeing The Persistence of Memory on your wall or desk calendars. From far away the warped face with the soft clock on its cheek looks like a decapitated horse with a saddle on it to me, and the reddish pocket watch reminds me of an old fashioned hot water bottle. It’s the sort of painting which makes me upset that I didn’t initially see what was painted, and then...
The Collector
As a collector of artificial media, it’s my job to deconstruct anything not in its original packaging. From the moment I laid eyes on you, I knew my sticky, syrup tainted fingers would clumsily smother your neon accessories with the tacky footprints of my unrefined, candied pleasures.
If you wanted to come in here, looking like and saying you’re a Barbie Doll, I don’t see how...
Bottom Dwelling
I drank behind a dumpster that said “restaurant grease only” on the side before going into a bar called Moe’s.
Actually the dumpster didn’t say anything on it, I just don’t want the story to be boring.
Actually, there was no bar called Moe’s, there was just another dumpster. But this one really did say “restaurant grease only.”
“Don’t use semicolons. They stand for absolutely nothing. They are transvestite...”
– Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to young writers
(via robotindisguise)
French Press
There really wasn’t anything left to say, she with her chewed and ragged nails, he with his cold, gritty coffee.
Through the window she saw a child with long, wavy blond hair outside yanking on a slender tendril off a birch tree. He has hair like the plastic ponies I played with when I was his age, she thought. Who lets the hair of their little boy get that long?
You haven’t listened...
September 2009
4 posts
09250901
My shoes make me look like I’m wearing dinner rolls on my feet. What that matters to ya is neither here or there, just thought I’d put it out there for y’all. You know, so’s ya would know something about the person telling this story. I think it always helps to know more about a person than what their dirty dogs look like in a cheap pair of sandals anyways. Regular shoes...
Okie dokie.
Time to make this a cache for pieces longer than the average attention span cares to follow. Current followers: be warned.
This could get verbose.
August 2009
13 posts
