It's Okay, Robot

Retro

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:55:25 -0400

Like the slight sweetness of the vapor a movie theater popcorn machine produces only in the few seconds before heat forces the seeds inside out, which makes me list to one side and stare upward like I’m drunk in front of the stereo at a party, or the Andromeda flowers the air is made of at three or four in the morning in February though they can’t possibly have bloomed yet; the taste of your mouth wasn’t worth describing, and I know all the movie theaters and Andromeda trees and descriptions of things exist only as part of that mouth I went to again and again before I learned to read at home alone.

The Napkin Dispensers

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:14:14 -0500

Your not-too orderly hair under the overhead lights at a Tully’s Coffee made me feel an ache similar to getting out of the bath when I have a very high fever. It wasn’t just that reflected in a fake marble tabletop my own hair looked mythological by comparison, but that I suddenly knew it was finite but too massive to really imagine. As we pulled our paper napkins out of the dispenser I wished I could rip my head off and shoot a superior napkin dispenser out of my chest cavity.

louise-louise:hey baby YES

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:15:57 -0500

louise-louise:hey baby

YES

icarusairlines: “If I’m an ass, I should say so. If I don’t,...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:13:35 -0500

icarusairlines:

“If I’m an ass, I should say so. If I don’t, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.”

Real Terror

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:07:27 -0500

It’s okay that I’m filled with terror whenever I’m not buying shoes, because I saw a black-and-white picture of a man in a very old magazine, and the caption said he was filled with terror whenever he wasn’t buying shoes. I like to imagine he was a famous prostitute with the power to shrink until he was nearly invisible, but I’m glad it doesn’t say that in the caption, because if anything about him was certain except that he shared my terror, he would lose his ability to drag it away from a specificity that is even worse.

James Joyce & Breakups

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 08:00:06 -0500

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 you as human pantyhose, and then gone, climbing out the window while you slept to buy chips from a gas station. I was realizing that the only nonsense translatable into any language is I was there and then I was gone.

henrycharlesbukowski: Love of my life

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:28:08 -0500

henrycharlesbukowski: Love of my life

Imaginary

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:22:02 -0500

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 TV, I turn it off and continue researching renters’ insurance. I still don’t know what it is. This would all be fine if I wasn’t so old. I’ve been researching renters’ insurance for hundreds of years.

Sit Down on a Discarded Couch

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 11:44:09 -0500

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 can take control of your life. You don’t have to wake up every morning to the same totally comprehensible scenario, you can wake up to a scenario that’s comprehensible but impossible because that couch has been taken to the dump.

Ground Control

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:27:00 -0500

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 glass. A bee flew out of my collar and I thought of how they totally covered that station wagon, and then my head. It all blurs together now—the traffic islands, the dandelions, the swarms. Everything is bursting out of my chest, and some of it might be David Bowie, but certainly not all.

"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”)..."

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:29:53 -0500

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person — perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (via bookoasis)

The Only Light Source Should Be a Scented Candle the Size of a Trash Can

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:32:37 -0500

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 why I don’t care that you usually have no face, and when you do its only feature is a beard. Finally I replaced all the lights with an enormous scented candle that stank so badly of vanilla that all anyone could say was “My eyes are burning,” and no one could see me kiss you.

Personal Record

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 05:45:05 -0400

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 the Old French word “beegueule” (literally, open-mouthed) from which “beagle” is derived – was howling in the key of E-flat and pawing the air in a way which, had there been an invisible miniature piano beneath its paws, might have produced a melody not dissimilar to a free jazz composition of the early sixties or, more likely, a discordant jumble of sharps and flats which, had this been the case rather than being merely a fanciful possibility (which is what it was), would have put Louise’s teeth on edge in a way which the dog’s howling, in the absence of the more musical set of noises just touched upon, was already managing to do.

Drivers

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:58:35 -0400

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 remain huge and distant.

Everyday Hero

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:46:00 -0400

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 it’s so quiet, if you take a quarter out of your pocket it will have nothing on it but an image of my lost eyebrow hair.

seanhaiku: 8/26/11 -life is not aboutpopularity, ratherit’s about reblogs

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:42:25 -0400

seanhaiku:

8/26/11 -
life is not about
popularity, rather
it’s about reblogs

Hairy Mother Fuckers

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:34:52 -0400

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 articles on epithelial cells, and I lie in bed, maybe for years, wondering how you fall asleep so quickly, and feeling like the kind of state-funded sculpture made of people after they die, designed to appeal to everyone, the dead person standing on the bow of a boat or something, and then one day on a crowded beach I realize how easily you sleep is not the problem, but what keeps me awake, which is the absence of this woman lying on a towel, casually squeezing her own ass.

My Hands are Small

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 11:35:00 -0400

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 on, splattered on a sidewalk.

dreamsofadaysleeper: Evidence of a pilgrimage. (Photo: Kayla...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 11:27:56 -0400

dreamsofadaysleeper: Evidence of a pilgrimage. (Photo: Kayla Baird)

Short Story: Published

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 11:22:03 -0400

thisblogwillburn:

(Find it here, under Lucid Fiction.)