Slipcover
If you’ve ever marinated meat in pineapple juice, this question will make sense: If you eat enough pineapple, does it digest you? Once, my friend (who had a soft belly) hugged our professor.
Wildlife
Ever since I learned that Wordle’s answer words are predetermined, and saw with my own eyes the list sitting there in the source code, I’ve felt less supertitious about the game.
School
In The Sims, adult sims are all exactly the same height, but almost any object can scaled up or down at will.
Summer Before Fall
The advertising campaign for the Metropolis–what to call it? “Apartment complex” would be a class lower than the one it intended to target, when it was conceived, before the pandemic–depicted future residents as palimpsests, or more accurately, green screens.
Ford
On the phone, a couple who believed their marriage to be a force of morality upon the world told me that she had given birth to their child.
The Garden
In a badly written piece of praise for a walled garden in a city my friend feels is less bearable than the city she lives in, that the same friend wants to visit during a two-day trip-within-my-trip that I won’t tell anyone I know in the city about, there’s a passage from The Secret Garden:.
Waves
I’m listening to a cantankerous artist say that her work isn’t about anything, it’s only itself, and I’m driving on a highway winding in tandem with a river that figured in someone else’s dream that I have discussed at length with a friend and that, flood-full of mud and flotsam, like a shrimp vein, will disperse into the Pacific Ocean.
Board Games
On a van routinely parked along one of the rat trails I take through the place I grew up, there’s a bumpersticker that reads “Catan: The Game of Our Generation.” I feel like I’ve met this person at a game night.
Whole Roast Suckling Pig
Is it possible to not scratch if one breaks out in hives? As kids, my friend and I used to concoct solutions from household chemicals and spray them at wasp nests.
The City
In The City, infinite aesthetic distance is always possible.
Wearing Eyepatches
If there’s one thing that marks somebody as nuts, it’s laughing loudly to nobody in public.
Ferry Travelogue
The boat has a hole in the hull and it would be filling up but there’s someone on it, in it, belowdecks.
Great Dogfights
My father emailed my brother and I to tell us he witnessed a “great dogfight” between two birds: “It was a draw.
Home Decorating Tips
On Instagram I saw an ad for I don’t know what that showed a woman in coveralls covering a mirror sliding door with an adhesive sheet of chalkboard.
Pee on the Brain, Twice Daily, Until Symptoms Improve
Every morning and every night I cleaned up the dog’s piss.
Developments in Audiovisual Equipment
In this unseasonably warm weather, some of the clouds look yellow.
A Monster Is Another Monster's Incomplete Meal
Mosquito bites accumulate around my ankles, I think because that’s where I don’t notice mosquitoes.
A Quiet Place
Sound-murdering monsters inherting the Earth in order to give one family a pretense to eat off of kale leaves and wear heather wool doesn’t seem far-fetched.
Down and Then Out
I don't want to insult you by assuming that you haven't heard from more people than you'd prefer that all stories are about producing stories, and I want to write a story that is told through bowel movements..
Sketches of Movies
“It claws its way down your stomach,” is how my friend describes digesting milk, after a pause, like she edited this line a few times.
Futurism
In the year 2016 the newspaper–not that there is a newspaper–asks you “what kind of fat are you?” There has not been an invasion of lipid-based life forms; you are a fat; I am a fat; we are all fats.
you vs work
You not u. Y-o-u..
Classical Training
Tom Hiddleston plays a better actor than he is.
Milk and Honey
The man from The Lake Committee accompanies us on the boat, and writes down my father’s every word–“I wrote down what you were thinking”–as if somewhere among them is the solution to the lake, how the lake will self-actualize into what the homeowners imagine.
A show that's nothing but cold opens.
BEGIN TITLES.
Pink
The almond blossoms are falling petal by petal into the gutter, spiky clumps of green leaves are poking through, and it feels like a late commentary on Valentine’s day.
Offensive Offal
Are we offended by words, or by what words reveal about minds, like the still-wriggling tendrils of Sannakji? But there are no minds.
More Vader than Vader
Computing is moving away from the geek dream of infinite flexibility, which is to say infinite burden, infinite self-sufficiency, as if all software that someone else has written and hardware someone else has built is inadequate.
Maw & Order
The conceit of *The Human Centipede* is gruesome because it's recognizable..