…though honestly, just doing it cause I LOVE this blog, and there are literally 5 – 100 things on there every day that make me just say WOW and it’s an exercise in elegant restraint not to repost most of it. most of the blogs I read are 90% mediocre but basically everything on this one is beautiful, thought provoking, hot, epic or shriek-inducing, much like its author, who’s an old friend and a total catch. check it out.

Thanks, Craig Gleason. Now I will never be able to buy a goddamn snickers without hearing those weird Bad Romance noises all in my brains. Though gotta say, the resemblance is INSANE.

via notcot

Jezebel devoted a fuckload of time into giving an intelligent analysis (okay, punctuated occasionally by “germans and primary colors are scary”) of this Patrick Mohr show, but I mostly just wanna say: shit is pretty much Lady Gaga with a chromosomal disorder, also known as our future as a goddamn  society.

Um, YES. Fuck me for going to book college.

via swissmiss

I am lazy and it didn’t work out, but it does explain why I’ve made the perhaps ridiculous choice to reblog the following from from brainland, who initially reblogged it from bornexaggerator.

I’ve compiled a nicely-bulleted list of aliases belonging to a one Russell Tyrone Jones (1968 – 2004) beloved member of the Wu-Tang Clan and unhinged genius behind screwball classic, Return to the 36 Chambers.  Variations in spelling are marked with (/).  This took forever.

• Ason Jones
• Ason Unique (/Asun Unique)
• The Bebop Specialist
• Big Baby Jesus
• Big Box o’ Chili
• The BZA
• Dirk Hardpec
• Dirt Dog (/Dirt Dawg)
• Dirt McGirt (/Dirk McGirk)
• The Drunken Master Styles
• Freeloading Rusty
• Hasaan
• Ill Irving the Murderer
• Joe Bananas
• The Man of All Rainbows
• O.D.B. (/ODB)
• Ol’ Dirt Schultz
• Ol’ Dirty Bastard
• Old Dirty Chinese Restaurant
• Osiris (/Osirus)
• Osiris the Father
• Peanut the Kidnapper
• Prince Delight
• The Professor
• Rain Man
• RJ Tha Mad Specialist
• Russell Jones
• The Specialist
• Super Bastard
• Sweet Baby Jesus
• Unique Ason

…except I bolded my own favorites. Peanut the Kidnapper needs to revolutionize the world of saturday morning cartoons, like, yesterday.

damaged buildings in berlin patched with legos, via pretty much my new favorite blog, weburbanist. for the record, it takes epic amounts of will power not to make lego furniture all over my apartment, but alas! I am an adult.

If I ever stop jacking internet from the Santa Fe state capitol and get some of my own, I’m entertaining the following options:

1. KetherMyDownstairsNeighborYourNameIsReallyWeird

2. CreepyKokopelliLadyAcrossTheStreetPleaseMoveAwayIHateTheSmellOfSage

3. StopItWith ThatChainsawIFearForMyLife

4. ActuallyStopEverythingYouDo

via swissmiss

–except for the end, where Guy Pearce showed up with a post-apocalyptic-tooth-rot grill and saved the damn day. I’m sorry, but despite the sheer volume of totally legit movies he’s done, the man should always, always be in good lighting, or holding a jeweled sword, or in some other context that properly augments his cheekbones.

Also, let me know if you need a new desktop and I’ll hook it up. You’re welcome.

OH NO IT’S MY LIFE.

The password is “character” if you want to take it. Anyone who gets that insane one with the drawing of Breugel’s Apocalypse or whatever micro-drawn into the capital A preeeeetty much gets a free pass to make out with me because you’re clearly a superior lifeform. Or Glen Danzig. Either way: into it!

This post about hobo chalk warning symbols. Especially mystified that a picture of a chicken means “telephone,” a triangle with arms means “man with gun” and  lambda means “you will be beaten” (and again, my useless ancient greek knowledge uselessly confuses my day to day life). But, like, mystified in the best hobo-related way.

via the yoozh, notcot.

Jeff Luker:

Lizy Darko:

Gling-glo:

Amalia Sieber:

Sam Coldy:

Arbitrary self psychoanalysis: I really, really miss summer.

Weirdly, this is only one of, like, six math/physics related breakfast foods I can think of off the top of my head. Hilarious nerd brunch, stat.

via the rack and the ram:

“Chic publishing company Assouline has recently launched a trio of candles which smell like books. Bibliothèque, Wood, and Leather candles are priced at a opressing $45.”

Other things I should not spend $45 on:

1. Four-point-five bacon guac cheeseburgers at Bobcat bite

2. Zero-point-two pairs of William Rast jeans that make my ass look about as delicious as…well, 4.5 bacon guac cheeseburgers.

3. Actual books, namely: the Twilight Saga (uh), Ulysses (has anyone ever ACTUALLY read Ulysses?!) Skinny Bitch in the Kitch (vegans make me feel terrible about myself but goddamn do they make good rice pudding.)

4. Anything. My car is a mangled scrap of gross Toyota mess and my life will not feel better if it smells like a goddamn octavo edition of the Septuagint.

In case you’re not persuaded: How much of a stud was Gustave Dore?!!

The thing is, I REALLY don’t like thinking about whatever evil genius auteur runs the internet. Reading this is like finding out why God lets war happen and babies get cancer and T-Pain make millions and millions of dollars. We’re just not meant to know.

1. I burnt a cigarette hole in my only pair of stockings and my real-person-who-deserves-her-salary-and-doesn’t-burn-cigarette-holes-in-her-clothing disguise is RUINED.

2. I made the most incredible, intricate antlers for halloween and can’t figure out how to make goddamn rabbit ears to go with them. Awesome jackalope costume: TERMINATED. Awful Mean Girls-esque Bambi costume: ACTIVATED.

3. This.

4. I don’t remember who drew the vomiting panda picture and will probably be sued.

So if you haven’t gleaned it from the fact that I have a damn blog devoted to things I think about with no particular unifying theme, I have an office job. Sometimes I give my “employees” (eighteen year olds with lip piercings and accents) menial tasks; sometimes I participate in clothes swaps with fourteen middle aged women;  sometimes, I play Farmville.

For the uninitiated (I won’t say unaccquainted because this is some cult-level shit,) Farmville is a flash game on facebook (related: FFFFFF) wherein you harvest imaginary soy beans for imaginary coins to spend on imaginary sheep and/or tractors. If you save up enough coins, you can buy a pagoda or a little Italian villa. You can also pay fucking actual money for your farm accoutrements, but I’m not quite at that level yet.

I am, however, at the level of checking on my goddamn digital raspberries hourly in case I forgot when they were suppose to “ripen.” That little guy there, with the mullet? He has been black, female, fu-manchued, and vaguely resemblant of Lady Gaga a la that hella awkward French Vogue shoot when she dressed up like a weeping clown, all in the past three days. I get uncomfortable if I let my land lie fallow. I get weirdly stoked when people fertilize my watermelons.

The thing is, I have a real life. Like today, I discovered the most excellent office-clone-cum-stoner lunch of all time: sage box American Spirits and banana pudding, with real fucking bananas and whipped cream and little swirls of graham cracker dust and oh god it was delicious. Until I remembered that my rice paddies were withering, as we speak, on the internet and suddenly, my banana pudding tasted like shit and everything was awful. Then somneone sent me an elephant topiary, and everything was okay again. Except not on the inside.

First: Rob Tarbell.

I mostly love it because of good associations with my weird profusion of circus performer friends, but also the medium is listed as smoke on paper, and we all know how I feel about unconventional substances on paper. Her’es a hint: I’m for it.

 Swoon.

More reasons to build a time machine.

via…somewhere on facebook.

BBC Says: “France has arrested a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) for suspected links with al-Qaeda, officials have said.”

ToSmithereens Translates: TERRORISTS ARE GOING TO  HIJACK THE HADRON COLLIDER AND MAKE A GIANT BLACK HOLE THAT WILL SWALLOW TIME. …Unless James Bond and a contingent of foxy lesbian Soviettes with grappling hooks, y’know, do a thing.

via BBC

I’m probably the only pseudo-yuppie twenty-something hyphen-ated person I know who doesn’t like coffee, but this is too rorschachish not to love.

via notcot

(obviously the lobster, and obviously I would keep her in the pot at whatever pathetic, dog-allowing halloween party I end up at.)

I need friends.

As the kids say: brills.

via 99sense.

Laser-cut steel lace tables, votives, everything. Dear people of Denmark: keep making things I want. I will be able to spend $5000 on a candle holder eventually.

via apartment therapy

At least a few of these inventions look legitimately useful. I mean, at least more so than ground effects and George Foreman grills and Beyonce’s robot hand in the single ladies video. Babies are awesome window decor! I would love to smoke 14 cigarettes at the same time! I hate living in the future!

..and spend my days cackling maniacally whilst playing a pipe organ in Abba-style fashions.

(but more importantly: is that a statue of a man stabbing a sheepdog?!!)

Can ingesting nothing but cigarette smoke and mini snickers cause permanent brain damage?

Signs point to oh God I can’t see the color green anymore.

I’ve read Twilight. It sucks. My friend Eric is reading Twilight. He think it sucks too, but he’s making a hilarious blog about it. Eric’s sense initiative>mine.

I’m about 40,000 years late watching…well, any anime that isn’t Dragon Ball Z, so I’ll leave all the lauding of badass arm slicing/trippy giant boar devouring/general…Japaneseness to the rest of the internet. Instead, I will just say: choosing Claire Danes to dub over the voice of the wolf girl was probably the stupidest decision ever made.

 Thank you, casting director, for making me correlate Ashitaka with illiterate Jared Leto in a full denim outfit playing that goddamn song “Red.” THANKS.

I was definitely the only person I know whose favorite part of the Olympic ceremony last year was the army of drummers dropping mad scary communist beats will grinning in little tunics. I’m about as politcally apathetic as they make em, but on an aesthetic level at least, I totally vote totalitarian death government. I like synchronicity, and hilarious military rituals, and I think drums are cooler when they light up. If that makes me wrong, America, I don’t want to be right.

So needless to say, I’m STOKED for China’s National Day celebration, especially after this slideshow. Click on it. Do it. The best picture is definitely the one up there, but if ballet dancing in sweet outfits with guns isn’t your thing (really, you shouldn’t be reading this blog if it isn’t) try this sentence on for size:

They have been schooled in shouting phrases in perfect unison: “Serve the people!” and “Hello, senior leader!” They are also expected not to blink for 40 seconds at a time. Mental-health professionals have been called in to help those whose performance is not up to snuff. As of Sept. 12, 1,300 soldiers had received counseling, Xinhua reported.

China: like Disneyland, only way more terrifying, and you might need Visine afterwards. So basically, not unlike smoking weed and going to watch Tim Burton movies in eighth grade.

How I feel about Adam Parker Smith’s cluster of umbrellas with some lightbublbs behind them:)

Kerrrwaughhh!!

(that’s a good thing.)

Had a good conversation about the short story The Grub last night. Today I’m thinking about Mexico city and sexy horror movies and assasins. In short: sigh.

well fuck that noise!

(*Note: Before I do a shit ton of these (and since this an emotion I have frequently, I will almost definitely do a shit ton of these) I should probably mention that I almost definitely subconsciously stole this concept from brainland. I’m too lazy to check, but in any case, her blog is way better than mine, and if you’re into trashing Virginia Woolf, Uncle Joey’s scatalogical fetishes, and Quad City DJ’s (literally, those are the last three posts I can remember, I’m not paraphrasing) do it up.)

OKAY so, Readymade. I would describe it for the uninitiated, but basically if you looked at the banner photo, you’ve been initiated: it’s a decorating magazine for hipster yuppies that does profiles on web combic artists who list Onitsuka Tigers,  four ply vellum and Bay area Mexican restaurants on their “wish list” (bold added to emphasize horribleness of these things in combination.) Basically, I pick it up when I’m waiting in line at Whole Foods (shutupshutupshutup) and immediately start to have really gross domestic thoughts. I.E:

“You know what, dressforms and vintage archery arrows are the next wave of functional decor!”

“This home tour of a Greenwich cobbler’s mid-century loft is so amazing. I wish I had a boyfriend in a sweatervest to pickle raspberries with.”

“I should totally make a side table out of salvaged denim wrapped around industrial cans!”

Not lying: shit makes me think in italics with exclamation point and maybe occasional glockenspiels phrases. And I ALWAYS buy it, and I think about it when I’m at goodwill buying a horrible rotating brass coatrack with delusions of eventually decoupaging it, and I go to bed at night and cry and cry and cry….

“Oh double name of God befucked! Sacred bugger-God!”

-new favorite thing to yell when I inflict minor acciental injury on myself, courtesy of a shitty internet translation of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir.

 PS is it just me or did he sort of look like a lesbian suffragist/WOW nerd with delusions of grandeur/okay, really, he is just way less dudely than I expected?

…is it no longer socially acceptable to have awesome fourteen-foot-high Antonioni hair?

So I watched American History X last night, and yeah, not a great movie, not into the dramatic orchestra swells over shitty teenage acting with cameos by the fat guy from Varsity Blues, but I guess heartbreaking tales of racism and/or urbantragedy were, like, IT in the late 90′s and it had its moments.

However?

Skinhead-Ed-Norton was sort of…disarmingly hot. Only in the body, goatee totally excluded, but still. As a vaguely-Jewish American female with delusions of 21st century enlightment (I went to Montessori school as a child!), this made last night…okay, if there were an adjective to describe the sensation of being midway between orgasm, knuckle-biting and donating all my money to UNICEF, it would be that.

Happy Yom Kippur, everybody.

So my taste in art, like my taste in most things, is heinously predictable.

I like light, and common things placed in hilariously improbable locations, or people doing hilariously improbable things in common locations.

So in lieu of any actual skill for art criticism, gotta say that Rune Guneriussen did right by me taking some awesome slow-shutter pictures of table lamps in the wilderness.

I also like nostalgia:

And I can totally remember staging a scene eerily similar to this in boarding school for the express purpose of, uh, smoking cigarettes in the middle of a lake on a pile of chairs. We did not photograph it and that is why neither I nor my friends from high school are absurdly wealthy with cool dutch names.

Boo.

(via rackreader. check it out, 1/2 of the posts are written by a buddy!)

…$50 worth of loteria cards on ebay.

There are already two industrial sized bottles of glue and some really ugly furniture in my apartment.

In case you were wondering whether or not I was a white girl with too much time on my hands, uh, now you know!

Julia Child’s recipe for French Onion soup (Mastering the Art of French Cooking): totally off the chain + gave me an excuse to buy Hennessey for the garnish + gave me an excuse to sip said yak (gnac?) for the 2 straight hours I spent sauteeing last night.

Work is HILARIOUS today.

I can’t deal with the models on the website and the accesories in this picture are heinous, but despite all appearances: Anna Sui for Target kind of rules, and the obese midwestern in me LOVES being able to buy dresses and fourteen pounds of halloween candy in one fell swoop.

So Jimmy Brooks was pretty much my favorite character on the (ridiculous) (Canadian) (no really, I know it’s ridiculous) favorite teen drama of my youth Degrassi. Dude had it rough; he got shot in the back by a drug dealer AND his eighth grade girlfriend dosed some E and cheated on him. Then he played some wheelchair basketball and dated the goth chick or whatever, but really, I liked Job-style Jimmy. He really captured the struggles of an affluent (north) American youth.

WELL.

Jimmy has apparently grown up:

…into the pop star who’s singlehandedly responsible for making me picture a vagina whistling the howdy doody theme song or some shit on my way to work.

So in summary:

1. The Noggin channel is ruined forever now

2. I think about musical genitalia on a daily basis

3. I have no reason to live.

1. I graduated from college.

2. I started writing things that are more than 20 sentences long.

3. I started sending them to magazines and magazines started publishing them.

4. I got a real-person job and an apartment and a dog and a couch that I sat down on and read a book for the last…oh, say, 2 months.

5. I cancelled the internet in said apartment, because it’s not terribly conducive to sitting on couches reading.

But the thing is: I still find myself writing things that are suited to literally nothing but a blog post ALL THE TIME! And I have a LOT of time to waste on the internet at work! And I DO things now besides write creepy little snippets about earthquakes and sexual perversity!

So I think I’m going to bring these shenanigans back. Sometimes it will be fiction, and sometimes it will be me offering meek opinions about horror movies or showing you a pictures of something I’ve baked. I see a lot of horror movies and I bake a lot of things. Really, at the very least it won’t be infrequent.

So, to commence: The photo at the top is of a dust storm in Sydney (credit to Tom Hide) and I think it’s ungodly spectacular. The best books I read this summer were The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, The People of Paper by Salvador Plasencia and Notes from the Underground by my old buddy Fydor. I went to Zambia for a while and it was great. Dried strawberries and white chocolate go really, really well together in cookies.

Hello!

It had been an awful summer. The arroyo burned down off of one stray cigar stub and I was in love with a Finnish-American bartender I’d never talked to solely for the way he looked in sweaters. I don’t like drinking by myself, but my apartment didn’t have air conditioning and Corazon felt like a meat locker, which is to say, amazing. I ordered whiskey strained over ice and watched him despondently from behind a pillar covered in those tacky papel picados none of the locals can stand. Sometimes I’d put on headphones and watch the angles his wrists made when he poured shots. The pillar framed him perfectly and I could pretend I was watching him on some secret monitor, the perfect, most stupendous TV show of all time. Usually I listened to the Smiths when I did this. It had been an awful summer.

So I guess it wasn’t really a stretch when I kidnapped him and put him in a cage in my apartment. The guys at Home Depot looked at me weird when I bought the net but that was the only unpleasant part of it. You can order ether online. Soldering irons, too.

He didn’t even scream when he woke up, which was probably a survival tactic but I’ll let myself think it’s because I look fantastic in pearls.

So, I’m Karen, I said.

Gustave. He’d made up the name—it was really Michael—but it fit him.

Like Flaubert? 

Whatever, he said.

The plan at first was to treat him like shit, make him think he had to seduce me to get out. I had it all planned in my head. I’d tape saran wrap over his mouth and shoot him in the face with a hose, wake him up every eight and a half minutes for hours by blasting Devo until he started to hallucinate.

But I couldn’t do it. He liked Devo, and besides, he didn’t act at all like I’d expected. He never begged or called me a bitch or tried to get my throat in his hands, even when I got so close to the bars he totally could have done it. When I fed him—mostly macaroni and cheese and cut-up hot dogs, comforting but not gourmet—he said thank you and ate, right in front of me, no questions about poison or hidden razorblades or anything.

After about a week I had to go back to work. I made him a shirt. I’d never made anything before but it felt right, stitching seams into flannel in my bathroom, knowing how surprised he’d be. I also put a pack of cigarettes and a cyanide capsule in the breast pocket, but that really was an afterthought. He took it between both hands, wincing but only a little. I cracked the window to let the breeze in; it was still ungodly hot.

When I got home, he was asleep in the corner, the shirt balled up under his head like a pillow and a button between his teeth. I sat cross-legged by the door and waited for him to wake up. I imagined how he’d do it—one eyelash at a time, his breath and his heart both speeding faster until his muscles caught on. It would be spectacular and slow, like watching a dwarf star vomit up the last of its light over the universe. I wanted it to take years.

He didn’t wake up, of course. And of course, I cried, fucking buckets. I thought it would be easier this way but it wasn’t; his body would be so heavy, his hair would still smell like his hair.

And then he shifted—one shoulder blade, just an inch, so his face lolled toward the ceiling. He said it in his sleep but he said it—Please, and then, never let me out.

When it starts to hurt too much, I pretend that I was a swashbuckling murderer in Tahiti in a past life, or maybe a poisonous dart frog that murdered a particularly beautiful toucan.

I think about the puppies I drowned in a sack in Czechkoslovakia in the winter of 1691, and how much I would have dug having my own cobbler and a troika.  I imagine that I was one of those really sexy 18th century serial killers in London, that I drank dainty appertifs and spat witticisms at dudes in ascots who would never know my secrets. I must have kidnapped sheer legions of women in lace pinafores, and they must have all loved me tragically and been damned for it, too.

I must have done something bloody and lascivious, something demanding centuries of penance. Really, I hope I was an evil motherfucker. I must have sneered and worn an eyepatch–I better have worn an eyepatch–to have deserved you.

Sorry it’s been awhile. More importantly: Art by Lizzy Stewart.

He would not hear a half-measure of cold X’s on a staff.
He would see the grave markers
of every ounce of hemoglobin I ever lost to a paper cut
or left behind on a curb
as a warning  to Michigan tricyclists. He would imagine
the tragedy of carnelians leaked
onto a kitchen knife, and the croquettes I lost them for
and the two mouths that ate
and ate until the sting ebbed and the mouths were
otherwise engaged.

He would not hear the sound of a slowing machine.
He would mourn
every cell I ever dislodged, every helix of mine unwinding
on a door jamb,
every crystal of plasma he’d like to someday find
and gather in his hands
and hold.

He would not hear the drip of a stalactite
in the solid darkness.
He would not press his hand to the pulse and wait,
as I do, for the orchestra to stir.
(ps so, uh, go easy, I haven’t written a poem since I was seventeen)

(pps art by Max Wanger)

I know you said you were busy on saturday night, and that seven unanswered calls probably means that you will be busy on most Saturdays for the rest of time. But give it a hundred thousand years or so. Fuck, if Lemarck was right, a generation or four will do it.

Give me time to cull my species. I will fuck that girl you experimented with in college, yes, but only to make sure that whatever great-great-grand progeny of yours finds mine will see the tensed bow of her upper lip and want to kiss it. And this will happen: I will make sure those motherfuckers are equipped to handle any hypothetical zombie-apocalypse or plague, that they will make it to the twilight of the 70th century with a pen in their back pockets ready to get your number.

I mean, for the love of God, I read this morning that DNA is 90% utter bullshit, that only, like, two of our chromosomes say what we are and the rest are just play-dough waiting to be molded into some crazy-awesome superdinosaur. I am not taking any chances here, babe. I will base jump and walk on coals until my skin thickens into a rind; I’ve already developed a regiment of drowning myself in the utility sink, and my kid will be born with the gills to prove it. I will grow tusks for you. I will be the stuffed koala on your bedside table and the puppy-eyed unicorn in your first grade scrapbook and any other Catherine the Great shit you’re into. The dialtone has lasted an eon already; I am ready for more.

Art by Gabriel Orozco.

Let’s not talk about the time I fell off of that cliff and died, the wheels on my Schwinn spinning too long through the dirt after my blood had stopped spinning in my brain. Let’s talk about the dirt: about canyon mud and crawlers, about clay.

It doesn’t even matter that it was the last thing I saw. When the tunnel of my vision finally collapsed into a point, I never thought once that I had spent my last moment gazing into the mouth of an anthill, that the earth was laced with this humming, shifting life and I’d murdered their whole civilization when I landed. I was thinking about hospital Jello in shallow plastic cups, my mother’s hand peeling a pale bandage off of my eyes. Okay: I was thinking about my HMO.

And I need to make reparations. I need to talk about drenched asters and yucca stalks thorn-deep in thumbprints of rain. I know now that you cannot classify that precise coolness, the color wheel-defying crimson of the earth an iota away. You have to speak and speak until the arroyo articulates itself around you: in crumbled topaz and bone, ancient cigarette ash and settled smoke. Yes, I saw my life flash before my eyes, but since then, this soil has hollowed out my skull and made it flower, rooted my sight exactly here.

Art by Guy Bourdain.

There are only about 80,000 gods to worship in this world, but Wanda had to pick the Aztec goddess of love and excrement. She tells me over a fried zucchini appetizer at Chili’s, somber-voiced and holding my hand like she’s confessing that she has a secret family in Utah. “Baby, I ditched the girls when we docked in El Cuyo,” she says. “I did not need a cruise. I needed a vision quest.”

I fronted her about half a month’s salary for this particular crisis of faith, but I hold my tongue on it for now. I am silent, too, for the three months that she insists on wearing everywhere an amulet of Tlazolteol that she picked up from a one-eyed six year old at the Tenochtitlan ruins. She’d dropped ketchup on it, and it bore more than a passing resemblance to Paula Abdul, but I say nothing; it’s her one religious ritual and I “will not take that” from her. She says that this is more serious than cathecism and Kwanzaa and Sekkot combined. When Tlazoteotl crouches before her on her fire broomstick and demands her one lifetime confession, she wants to be ready to have her sins eaten.

I don’t even laugh at her. At my 10 year reunion, she talks about the 14th day of the jaguar and tells my prom date that she has devoted herself to the patron goddess of shit and venereal disease. When “class secretary Jenny Nelson, now Mrs. Dr. Jenny Price” asks if we’re considering marriage, she says that we’re planning “an intimate ceremony beside the roaring vistas of Chalchiuhtlicue’s holy ocean.” When former three-time double letterman Jim Fernandez takes the bait and asks her que pasa, I can see her blink under her false eyelashes from across the room.

It is only after she leaves me–3 am in a sleet storm, the tires on her Omni pureeing the asphalt–that I even begin to get it. I watch them drag the lake, see the fender ascend from the muck like the nose of a breaching whale. I lie in bed and feel the dam of my own silence break and  pour over me until I can hear it, liquid, in my lungs.  I sleep, and it is only when I wake that I realize my jaw is sore for holding her memory clenched between my molars. She had told me once that love was a digestive process; now, I am too stunned even to swallow.

Art by Cherri Wood.

The only merit badge I earned before I got kicked out of the girl scouts was the “senses” badge. As if we deserved a prize for being cuter than those little scouts without functioning noses or ears or eyes, for being able to tell which part of our tongues tasted the bitter in balsamic vinaigrette or which nickel had been stuck in the freezer or under the hot tap before we touched it. I could not tie my bunny ears or invert a teddy bear’s skin to push in the stuffing, but I was, without a doubt, a card-carrying sentient being.

So I took it seriously. I put my ear to the floorboards to hear the rattle of electrons inside their respective atoms; I squinted, hard, into the off-blue center of the sun, just to feel that instant of fire before I glanced away. And I remembered everything, years after I turned in my cookie sale sheets empty (turns out sub-atomic sensation takes up your time). When I die, I know that I will taste the blood in my mouth and thrill at the widening light over my retinas; when we kiss, I will hear your wisdom teeth descending into the velvet dark of your mouth; and I will smell it, that after-rain tinge that stains every molecule of air after you’ve gone, or after I’ve forgotten you.

I don’t know who did the art, it’s just a totally sweet picture of octopi.

Look, I know about the woman who married the Berlin wall. I’ve watched the documentaries; I know there are absolute legions of people in love with Chevrolets and ice makers, little girls, even, who press their cheeks against the wet stone undersides of bridges and breathe.

I am here to say that you’ve got it all wrong. If the search warrant had come through, they would not have found any scale models of the Eiffel tower on the mantle, and they certainly would have unearthed nothing among the bedsheets. I mean, I refuse to spend over $15 on furniture; I have issues even peeing in public, much less what you’ve all been saying.

These are things you need to understand.

Because I wanted to be remembered by all of you as your 1997 and 98 prom queen, 3 time letterwoman and Academic Bowl champion. I did not want my address to go this way, though, of course, that reporter has since made this impossible.

You need to understand; no one has given me a room-long glance in years. You know the way all your voices raised a major third when you realized you were talking to me, real-life-disney-princess me? That does not happen anymore. The carnival was abandoned; it was night; no one could have been hurt. I just wanted to see if I could make something that tall and steel and solid shiver: I stood naked and I waited for the car to climb, for the thousand lights to explode awake, for gravity to send me something, anything.

Art by Mattias Adolfsson

We used to fuck in inclement weather. You liked testing out what you’d learned in high school ecology; that it’s ten degrees warmer under three feet of Michigan snowdrift, that you can hear a hailstorm on the surface of the Superior if you can hold your breath under water long enough. I am just a giant pervert, less inclined towards inconvenience. We pitched tents on a mountainside during a monsoon and the rain on the tarps sounded like hundreds of thousands of pulses, like we were part of one stupendous orgy with everything in nature.

Most sane people go on cross-country bike trips for the bragging rights, or at least the scenery. I wanted to have you on top of a fault line, and when the seismograph complied I was sure, for the first time, that I belonged in this universe. I wanted to scream early Beach Boys songs in avalanche-prone valleys and breathe over the first embers of a wild fire and build us that perfect, blue-eaved house you’ve always talked about, at the mouth of a weak dam and a mile below sea-level. I wanted you to  let the bed frame float off into the street, to hold me against the doorway while the water rose.

The restraining orders were not necessary. It was not about danger and I did not want you dead. I am old now, (never let them tell you that 100 years old is not divisible by 21) and I spend my days toddling over Maryland ice like an infant. The streets are solid winter, and there are no railings. I am just waiting for my feet to go out from under me.

Art is, again, by Mikel Best-Name-Ever Uribetxeberria

It wasn’t so much that he wouldn’t eat it—this beautiful dinner, everything braised and skewered and punctuated with unnecessary herbs, the kind of dinner you feel guilty just being in the same room with, much less stabbing open with Bill’s filigree-handled cutlery. It was that he watched them eat it. (It was that he placed himself in a crushed velvet armchair in the corner of the room, and wove his fingers into a tight knot, and grinned at everyone for the whole two hours, demanding their critique.

“Do you think it was, like, a sex thing?” Joe asked her in the car.

And of course she said that it was, and they speculated about the contents of that guest bedroom he wouldn’t let Joe’s aunt stay in when the Marriott ran out of room for the wedding guests. And he thought how good they were together, how they were the kind of couple who waiters smirked at because their conversations were the sort you’d like to eavesdrop on. He even leaned across the center console and stuck his tongue into her ear, as a gesture of thanks.

She didn’t say anything, but all the while she knew: if he’d been able to probe further, past the shell of her skull, to taste the thought that was blooming just then, an inch deeper in her brain, Joe would have understood Bill. That night, her dreams would be all taste: a spike of Sangiovese as sudden and red as a wound, the absent pearl at the base of an oyster’s small corpse.

Art by Mikel Uribetxeberria, who, incidentally, has the best name in history.

I do not want to write about women meeting each other on dark streets.

But I have been watching fat people climb mountains on television for three hours, and this is what I have. There is no bottom of me to write from tonight; there is no Blood Meridian or Beloved down there, though I am currently plotting my revenge against the universe for this. I do not want to write about an obese woman chewing pizza and crying; I do not want to write about this exact couch I’ve been sitting on all day, or that other couch in that library that I sat on earlier today, walled in by books I was not reading.

I do not want to write about the in between.

Because I have done the run-away-to-Spain thing, and I have done the sleep-with-a-bunch-of-dudes thing, and I have otherwise arranged my life like a fantastic doll house around me. I am sick of aesthetics; I am sick of courting vertigo, of LSD and ashrams and lying awake, thinking of the dark.

I do not want to write about her rounding the corner, us both with our keys between our knuckles, but that is what has been given me. She was afraid, and I was afraid, and I was the poet on the street that night.

Art by Marc Fischer.

I’m serious. On your feet.

Really, just because I have never and will never land a touchdown in my underweight-philosophy-major life does not mean that you should not be wearing, like, 10 giant foam fingers and heckling my enemies right now. You should be goddamn head banging to this; you should read it twenty times and then scream along at the page with every word, adding air-guitar riffs when I really kick your ass.

You don’t even do this for Faulkner.

You don’t even do this for James the-twelve-inch-literary-cock Joyce.

You do this for Shakespeare, and I am stupendously jealous, because I want someone to love me enough to be dress up in pantyhose and pretend to be sixteenth century transsexual. I want someone to love me enough to wait for seven hours in the ass cold to hear me say half a word on a loudspeaker six miles of Washington away. I want someone to love me enough to do backflips off of towers of identically-dressed women and fall to the ground in convulsions and take off their clothes in public.

I do this for you, and I want you to love me enough to do stand up.

Art by Patrick Leger

There were no three bearded women in the wilderness, or ides of march circled red on my calendar, or really, any general harbingers of doom. The whole thing was pretty awkwardly staged, my life. Someone should have assumed some directorial responsiblity.

Cause see, I left you in April, and since then, I have not been hounded by ghosts. In the stage left and right of my 20/20 periphery, I cannot see children in gossamer stirring; I will not exit, pursued by a man in a rented bear suit who took four sips of Goldschlager before stepping out beneath the lights and roaring.

I call you drunk at four in the morning, begging for a hex. I tell you, I’m sorry, but the apholstery on the bar stool next to mine was orange vinyl and I could not stand that.

This would be easier if your parents had given you some asshole name like Oberon or Donalbain. This would be easier if when you answered, you did not humor me. Next time, yell blackout. That is generally what I do, anyway.

Art by Ben Grace.

Sometimes, I like to think about Immanuel Kant going to the doctor’s office, of the sweat in tiny stars along his giant forehead as the doctor presses a stethoscope to the pale swell of his chest. My fantasies about Pascal are slightly sexier; he is usually eating an enormous grapefruit in his underwear, usually around four in the morning while his valet is still asleep. David Hume is obviously walking next to a lake, but I mostly imagine the moment when he stops thinking about The Treatise on Human Nature and realizes he has to piss. In my head, he has very delicate hands, and hooks two fingers around his belt buckle and thinks on it hard.

I don’t allow myself to think about Kierkegaard much, because when I do he’s usually naked and that’s just so damn obvious. When I think about Montaigne, I just get ridiculous: I imagine the two of us under his fleur-de-lis patterned canopy bed, daring each other to hold our breath until we black out. When I come to, he is peering at me over his cape, black velvet stretched across his nose like a geisha fan. What did you see? He whispers. I saw a lot of colors, and Macchu Picchu I think.

Art is by Darren Hostetter. Also, this one is old but what you do you expect from me? I’m writing a senior thesis and there is so much awesome Japanese candy in my kitchen that just needs to be eaten. Think of these as my greatest hits album, except no one cares enough yet for me to have a greatest hits album. Yet.

There is an explanation for all of this.

I know that you said there was a no-pets policy, and yeah, I should have assumed that meant a no-howler-monkey policy too. I know that it was not okay to construct a ten foot waterfall in the basement; I have a little common sense, thank you very much.

But she has been sick for months now, and even when I draw maps of the planet on her head when she’s asleep, I cannot make her laugh. The smile sticks in her throat and her eyes water and bulge, the whites yellowed and spangled with new veins. I had to take drastic measures.

There was a lake in Cozumel that she loved when she was five, and I still remember the asterix of her body when she jumped off the falls, the water a flat, green sheet of paper she just had to interrupt. There were pictures to aid in the reproduction, too, but mostly I am an amazing big-sister queen with the panoramic memory to end all panoramic memories. You do not know how damn hard it was to ship in all that sand, much less convince my Mexican janitors to lend me their kids for the day, but I did it. It was enough to turn on that jungle sounds loop and push her into the water, say Hannah, here you are.

Art by Li Wei, who uses no photo manipulation and who I am basically wholly obsessed with.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like being a werewolf, but its close. There are mornings when I wake up and find my teeth too long in my mouth and my sheets smeared brown with a midnight nosebleed. I prowl and snap and massacre whole freezers full of hot pockets in literal seconds. I do not give a fuck. Werewolves do not give a fuck.

And then suddenly, I do. Suddenly, a mirror sneaks into my periphery and for one fantastic second I see myself like a specimen under glass and I think, That girl is the finest fucking motherfucker in the fucking world. Even before I know its me, I want to be her, and then subsequently clone her at least twelve times so I can look at her from all possible angles always. I would start wars for her if I were burly and Greek and a dude; I would throw rare orchids at her feet so they never touched the floor of my horrible apartment.

Then I realize it is me, and I notice some things. The board-flat nose that classical painters tend to freak out over but I’ve never really liked; the ketchup stains all over whatever white thing I am an inevitably wearing because I can’t keep more than 20% of my food in my mouth when I eat; the fat parts; the bone-stabbing-out parts; the teeth that are already turning canine, yellowing.

There is no good way to talk about being a beautiful woman because no women are beautiful. We are beasts until the chandelier light baptizes us; then, we are simply hunted.

Art by Patrick Leger.