sweetheart redux

 "Halloween" (1978) I don’t generally like reading or writing little autobiographical musings about past relationships – these stories are usually so “So what?” to me, and are also usually written in the David Sedaris-style narrative that only David Sedaris should use.  However, I'm writing a piece like that right here, right now, because lately I’ve started going to a video store in South Pasadena, and it’s a place that I used to go to with an old friend I’ll call Max  -- it’s made me think fleetingly about the time I spent with him, which was the saddest phase of my social life.  Anyway, this is more of a Shaggy Dog story. Max and I hung out for a month or so after I was done with my short outpatient stint at a mental hospital, where I’d met him but almost always managed to avoid conversation.  He was the tedious type of emotionally fragile, like Norman Bates in Psycho, someone whose long stories you have to listen to because you don’t want your hos...

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, ...