Weighs more than a butchering hog
When it’s not lonely or yearning, the act of waiting for someone can be exquisite. I guess this would be called ‘anticipation’, but that doesn’t quite nail it.
It’s a feeling of suspended animation but with the addition of consciousness. Like freezing the entire world but leaving your eyeballs free to toggle like a Kit-Cat clock. That is exactly how it feels.
I have a short story in this adorable little book, along with Miranda July and others. Take a look!
I write about xanthan gum—in pudding, fake blood, and at Wylie Dufresne— at More Intelligent Life.
At 3 AM I went to pour my dead Triops down the drain. The water leeched out but the Triops became lodged in the grille of its tank. Jiggling did not release the corpse, so I put the whole tank in a trash bag, knotted it, and put that inside a paper bag. It was bulky.
Even through the paper, I could sense exactly where the Triops was, crushed in one corner of its plastic box and sprinkled with colored gravel. It still didn’t seem right to stick the bag in the hallway, and neither did I want to descend five flights in my nightgown to drop it into the trash. So it stayed within the house, my x-ray vision boring into the bag, performing last viewing rites.
“People, after midnight, they start to look for themselves.”
Watch my dear brother Alexander talk to the Nachmans in Tel Aviv.
One of the greatest mysteries facing me—one of the smallest and most pedestrian too—is the question of what I will do next.
This applies equally to basic things (talking, wandering or eating) as it does to non-basic things (thinking, writing). There’s nothing to do about the mystery, either. Focusing too stringently on solving it leads to making weird faces.
Death of a Triops
This Friday, November 20th at 7:00pm
Please join editors and contributors Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Chad Harbach, Allison Lorentzen, David Noriega, Marco Roth, and Katherine Sharpe to talk about recession and the environment, the neuronovel, gay marriage and abortion, Juan Villoro’s fiction, and, of course, Internet dating—as well as anything else of interest from Issue 8.
McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince Street (btwn Lafayette and Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
Free and open to the public
A charismatic roof
The good kind of rain began at three o’ clock. It came down evenly, in mid-size drops, at only a slight angle. The kind of rain in which umbrellas work well. Polite, atmospheric rain. Rain that disposes of itself down the drains without obstruction. Movie-day rain. Et cetera.
I can’t remember the last time I was crushingly humiliated, and this amounts to a forecast that I will be crushingly humiliated very soon.
