Category: Writing (Page 23 of 50)
The Year of Looking Up Friends on Our iPhones Only to Wonder Who We Actually Met
Chloe read the Magna Carta backward. I’m sure of it, whether you are or not. Please tell me we are not the last people on earth. Please tell me if I open the door I will find the mail in the box, maybe a couple bills we can pay on our meager salaries. There was a guy named Peter one of us knew from somewhere, not a support group, no, I never went to that one that met down the street from the place where somebody my parents used to know lived. People started dying long before we started living.
Freddy is not worth talking about.
Oh. Raquel is another story. Well, there was this one instance, and I only heard this from Cam, who happened to be with her at the party and eventually got her home completely without taking advantage of the situation whatsoever (considering Cam this is almost unbelievable and I don’t even need to include any euphemisms for you to know what sort of activity he refrained from that I find unbelievable yet enlightening because, perhaps, humanity has some baseline goodness left and since Cam was probably five to six rum and Cokes heavier than when he started the night that this story takes place on makes it all the more improbable yet uplifting/encouraging/inspiring). Anyway, Cam tells me stuff went down and Raquel happens to be lucky in that there is nothing worth remembering (in a good or bad sense) from the night because she definitely remembered zero of what transpired in perhaps the best possible way of not remembering zilch. Continue reading
Horticulture
after Ed Ochester
Because Judy had given me for Christmas
a lumpen pot she’d pinched & baked
right in her kitchen, I tried my first
African Violet just after New Year’s.
The cat nosed its four furry leaves,
so I braced a two-by-six where fan belts
had hung when the place was a gas station. Continue reading
She holds in her skull
the quilted memory of a pain
fused with a metal plate.
Some nights she can feel the sky
hard as steel building to a muscled
roar. She is always fourteen.
In her the lightning waits Continue reading
The date, June 24, 1967, had been circled and starred on our house calendar for months – the last day of junior high school and my first train ride. Last Christmas, my best friend Denise, moved from Los Angeles to Tucson for her father’s job, and I missed her terribly. We met on the first day in seventh grade English when she asked me to join her club. She was the only member so far; I made two, and soon we were inseparable.
Mutt and Jeff, the boys teased us; it was easy to see why. Denise was 4’9” to my 5’8” but it was only when I saw our image together in a picture window that I could see how ridiculous we looked, me usually bent almost in half to hear what she was saying. In spite of my excruciating self-consciousness about my size, we found each other like two girls shipwrecked, sharing a scrap of board to survive the wild sea of the families we were born into by accident. Continue reading
Magic Lantern
An Essay by Joshua Weinstein
“It is impossible,” T.S. Eliot famously wrote in the voice of Prufrock, “to say just what I mean.” Prufrock finds many ways to express despair—he also wishes he had been a pair of ragged claws, reflects on being snickered at by the eternal Footman, predicts that mermaids will ignore him—and it was Eliot’s genius to craft a poem of breathtaking beauty from the point of view of a guy feeling sorry for himself. I don’t think Prufrock’s angst at not finding the right words should be taken as a philosophical statement about the human condition. But that apparently was what the philosopher Wittgenstein intended when he wrote, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”
When I ran into Wittgenstein’s dictum in college, I thought it was silly, an example of using academic-speak to make something trivial sound profound. I still do. We can’t talk about what we can’t talk about. Nu? Then there’s the paradox of talking about what we can’t talk about in order to say we can’t talk about it—quite the tangle. Besides, speech and silence hardly exhaust the range of options. What about music? Art? Primal scream? Beethoven’s rage may have been beyond the reach of words, but he found a way to express it. Continue reading
The urologist’s nurse shot me a quizzical look. That should have been my first clue. I guess I looked too happy.
“You know what you’re here for, right?”
“For a baseline on my bladder?”
Months earlier, I’d been shocked by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. On my initial visits to the neurologist, cold dread had gripped my insides, squeezing the breath out of me in the waiting room as I moved chairs aside for patients in wheelchairs. I told myself to smile and make eye contact with them. Was I looking at my future self?
With time, I’d adjusted, and that day, I was feeling more upbeat than terrified. Bladder problems are common with MS, and since mine had misbehaved in the past, the neurologist had ordered this exam. I felt strong, though, and eager to receive a glowing report. I’d always excelled on tests. If confidence and determination could influence performance, my bladder might pass. Continue reading
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