The Lock

(We see an open briefcase with a wooden board inside it. We hear a tune whistled, “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” As the camera moves, we see, one after the other, locks of women’s hair attached to nails on the board. The locks are all colors and styles: black, brown, red, dyed green, dyed blue, pure white… Under each lock a woman’s name is written: “Sandy, Leona, Tiana, Erin, Amanda, Penelope.” We reach an empty space with a solitary nail, waiting for a lock. A man’s hand enters the frame and writes at the bottom with a Sharpie marker, underneath the place where the lock will go, “Greta.”)

I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

Jason talked with the interloper for twenty minutes before he started to have his doubts. Usually, it was relatively easy to spot an interloper. Armed with your psychological profile, they automatically agreed with you about everything and rattled off facts related to your interests that seemed too appropriate. It was like someone had snipped the most relevant fragments from an encyclopedia. The technique had nothing of the normal disjointedness of human interaction. The pieces were too eager to fit.

Blood and Time at the High Mass

The traditionalist Christs are always bloodier, the wounds more obviously dire. Plaster bodies scourged, thorn-crowned, nailed to a plaster pillar done up as a tree. The Word here becomes flesh with greater vehemence, inhabiting the veins, the capillaries, the plasma, the erythrocytes, the mitochondria. The savior’s eyes are lifted perhaps a little balefully toward heaven, […]

Smoke Signals: A New Technology of Control

HR smokes pot. Your mom smokes pot.

The Cracks in the Wall

All the surfaces were clean, and the faucets did not leak. There were no cracks in any of the walls or ceilings. There seemed to be no need for maintenance anywhere. The new LED system meant that light bulbs never needed to change. Summer and winter, the temperature adjusted itself quietly and without notice. No […]

A High Dose

“This is what happens when you have unsupervised internet access from the time you’re six years old.”

One without a Double

These objects left strange impressions on the soft, readily receptive tissue of his grey matter. In these privileged moments, he thought he glimpsed, in the midst of this seemingly total state of absurdity, traces of an order, a whole—a laughing pattern. It wasn’t any different from the hobby of a birdwatcher or of a child picking up shells at the shore and putting them to his ear and listening to his own blood.

The Socket

Cole passed on the six-foot-tall talking vegetables, the human-animal hybrids, and the fantastical beasts (centaurs, etc.). That seemed a bit much. 

The Man Machine

The question – and the quest – is to discover alternative ways of understanding and living in the body. Instead of seeing the body as a machine, we can consider it as a way of knowing and a way of relating. Instead of presenting itself as a mechanical contraption, subject to breakdown, the body might present itself as a portal, a way to make contact with Reality.

The Lock

Alex carried the briefcase over to the coffee table. His living room was dusty, very much a bachelor pad. Some empty bottles of Miller High Life were sitting on his coffee table. The laptop he used to watch Netflix and listen to a raunchy sports podcast was seated next to them.  Alex pushed the laptop […]