sweetheart redux

my favorite of our old Olympia houses.  I like to see it through the eyes of Google Maps.  It's that little gray thing hiding behind trees with a billboard on its lawn. When I was 18 through 22, I lived in Olympia, Washington.  I’d moved there ostensibly to attend The Evergreen State College, but my true reason was the town itself, which was the starting place and still-center for the punk community I’d read so much about since my early teens.  I only applied to one other college, which was prestigious and at which I was accepted.  With  Evergreen State College, I bombarded them with several fine points and essays in my application, and received an early notice of acceptance as well as a full-tuition freshman year scholarship, which I won based on my work on the zines I’d written throughout Junior High and High school, and my extracurricular activity of being in a punk band that played in a few L.A. venues.  There are so many stories that ...

Here is a short story by Guinevere Durado, Matt Harrison, Kelli Williams, Melanie Hilliard, Joanna Thomas White, Geof Nowak and Mike Tucker.  Each of them wrote 3 sentences without having seen anything but the last 5 words of the writing that came before theirs.   The man’s hair grew long and sparse and yellow-white like the sinews of a rump-roast.  His flannel shirt could not quite button over the expanse of his torso, which bulged in a grotesque game of peek-a-boo for the occasional customer.  The man sat behind the liquor counter while his little finger excavated his fuzzy exposed navel as he watched old NasCar races late into the night.  While the night also races across the earth, chasing the day or being chased depending upon your preferred point of view, it sits for a moment with a woman at Denny's, as she breathes fog onto the cool glass and doodles in it with a finger. The finger doodle is a code.  Across the street, ...

This is my Grandpas's brief sketch of the details of his life, written when the rest of the family requested him to, a few years ago.  Luba I never met any of my grandparents. I think my dad's parents died in Europe.   My mother's family was upper middle class. Her father owned a small department store in the Black Sea port city of Odessa. Fleeing both radicals and anti-Semites in l902 they came  t o the US, where they settled in Meridian, Mississippi.   I think my   Uncle Ben and Aunt Molly were both born in Mississippi. There were four sisters (Molly, Mary, Celia, and my mother, Luba).There were three brothers (Mike, Charley, and Ben). Mike and Charley were in the Navy in World War I; Ben was just a boy. Sometime before World War I they moved up   North. My mother worked as a waitress and cashier in a restaurant whose name I never knew, but she says that the composer Victor Herbert was a steady customer, so it must have been in Manhat...