but I hate short stories

Today went to Powell's, headed for the small press section. Am wearing hoop earrings, and as I was walking down the street I realized no one who I want to love me will love me if I'm wearing hoop earrings. Also feeling self-conscious about wearing a black hoodie from Old Navy that my neighbor was getting rid of.

Bought Barthes for Beginners, since I need to have even less faith in signs and signifiers. Thought of buying the newest Believer, but its dense columns of text written by people doing with their lives what I would like to be doing with my life seemed like steel mountains to climb. Originally had gone for the Tao Lin, but it was $14 to where the darkest channel of my brain doesn't need to go to. Almost picked up an old Paris Review, but I hate short stories and it's only full of dead white ghosts whose 20th century trials seem trivial now. Finally settled on the $8 zine my own name is in, to send to someone or something, and the Barthes was an impulse buy sitting at the counter for less than five bucks. By the time I check out at Powell's, every time, it's all I can do to look the cashier in the eye, I'm so crippled with the words I've scanned and the new truths I've drafted in my head and my own brain is left seeping on all the shelves I've touched.

I always see Miss Lonelyhearts/ Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, read it when I was 18 and home for a while and put myself on a strict reading schedule and lived at library book sales, left with paper bags full of paperbacks from 1959. Brought West on a family vacation to Athens, Georgia to see parents friends. Mark has a Ph.D in American literature, he's a high school teacher, published, but still hasn't written the Great American Novel. He saw my book, commented what seemed pleasant surprise, maybe that some girl with high heeled sandals seemed to give a fuck about what people his age used to when they were my age. Anyway, the book features a particularly 1960s brand of apocalyptic despair, which now seems like a pretty cozy place to lie.

So now I've got the Barthes, a companion guide to Semiotics for Beginners I bought almost a year ago at a fantastically musty and dirty over-stocked used book store on an island off of Washington state, with my mom and more parents' friends. The husband doesn't believe in evolution, his reasoning explained over breakfast when he looked at a blueberry and wondered how we could possibly be related. Luckily I'd just almost passed bio and remembered that all living organisms are joined by a protein called WNT or something, a seemingly important fact that about 20 people in the world care to know, and I brought this up in a voice quiet and measured that I always use in situations where that's ten times harder than getting radish-faced and shouting and bludgeoning people across the head for being so unbelievably wrong and offending the sensibilities of anyone who's put in the menial time and energy to have half a fucking brain.

Anyway, this island off of Washington reminded me of Maine, because it was all tall grass and water, and it was quiet. Except one year when we had a vacation in Maine I listened to a lot of Bon Jovi (Slippery When Wet. Jesus fucking Christ, obviously) and we were on the South Beach Diet, and I thought that losing 15 pounds would be as valuable as any other vital accessory to the person I knew I needed to be, like a 1500 on the SATs or a boyfriend on the hockey team. But it was brutal, we ate peanut butter and ricotta cheese the entire time, and didn't lose a pound, and I remained a size four, my dreams of twos and zeros dashed along with those of a Little Ivy acceptance, and other things I'm really fucking thankful never reached my hands, and am now mortified and guilty and sad to admit ever held a place within my mind.

Those long dirt roads were beautiful though, bisecting this fluttering sea of bright green grass, and sometimes horses would come to the fence by the road, perfect: dumb and handsome, and the fields only stopped for a cliff at the endless gray-blue deep of the Atlantic that our porch sat right over.

And that's what Washington reminded me of, and we followed around the orca-watching tour vans in our car, and took a ferry back to the mainland, and of course the bright orange sun just melted into that water and absorbed everything except for the wind, and the trees got black against the pink and orange, and thinking about it now, it's almost too beautiful to believe it was real, sitting on the water and watching the day's end illuminate everything, even the wind, and just feeling like nothing in the face of it all, in a good way.

That's the last sunset I can really remember, almost a year ago, because ever since, when the sun goes down, it's been raining, or I've been at work, or drunk, and it doesn't matter anyway, because there's no water here (a river is not an ocean).

Service: In the Proper Adaptable Format

byMeredith Rivlin

My hands grazed the keyboard resting
making the distinct clicking and twitching
sound of idling fingers.

(Working hands, though.
These are my hands.
They are privileged hands.)

And I worked and clicked and spoke and
eased my own conscious back
into consciousness where productivity
also lies.
I practiced selflessness while clicking “send/
receive” in hopes of 20 new emails addressed
to me personally
with questions I could answer and people
I could convince.

Open minds and opportunities will
take the place of littered envelopes
(remnants of a culture of desire)
and broken sidewalk glass
(whose contents is used to forget selves and ease fears
as we lay awake
next to someone who might just
know the answers to
questions we lay
awake trying to forget,
like are we really special and where does that fit in?)

Working visions.
These are my visions.
They are out there and
unspecific and cliché.

And they feed off of devotion and passion,
though we think we have enough,
and get swallowed by cynicism and
another explanation
or excuse
of our generation.