Attention Span Therapy

That point in the night when the spooky sounds dot mp3 is superseded by my two children fighting before bedtime.

The lizard sat on the hot rock and stared out into the air. It was crisp, so hot it felt as if the atmosphere had crinkled and sunk down in upon itself.

The lizard did not know fear, but it did not know aspiration either. The lizard knew hunger, and pain, and something like satisfaction when the sun was just right. The lizard was not a social animal and thus it did not mind that its days were long and solitary.

Until the men had come. The one man leading the other with a long steel rod that shattered the quiet of the desert like a bolt of lightning.

And now the one man was quiet. His eyes, frozen forever, open until the first creature pecks them out. The lizard blinked and watched as the figure of the other man slowly diminished into the haze. It dared not move. Something in its instinct told it to wait, just a few moments longer.

And so it did. The lizard looked at those dead eyes now and their layer of mucus shimmering in the desert heat and seemed to pause as it formulated a thought; then, like the gun, it snapped out and grabbed onto the left eye — the one closest to the ground — and as it tugged it tore the eye open and the internal fluid spilled down upon the lizard and it shook its nose free but then just as quick it thrust its jaws into the meat again.

The hippies next door are making costumes. Spray painting fairy wings silver in the yard, and I imagine what it must look like from above. If I had a drone.

Later that night, the one guy who lives there is wearing a hat that looks like a lampshade even before he twists some switch and activates the LEDs inside, making it a glowing tie-dyed mushroom. One of the girls is next, to parade her surreal creation around. A sort of derby monstrosity, with what looks like from here to be fish bowls glued to the top.

She is stepping inside the house, cursing the tiny dog which has come to rest, naturally, right in the door jam while she tries to negotiate the correct angle for bringing this giant saucer shaped hat inside.

The clouds in the Midwest in the summer are astounding. Storm clouds.

I tell my daughter to be here, be now, to have fun and be excited. I am giving this speech in response to her defiance, while I know that the defiance is just her modeling things she sees in the two adults in the room, and it makes me wish things were easier. That I had been nicer that one time; that we had more time to be alone, just the two of us.

But that’s kids, they wreck you even as you pour your love into them.

I have been to parties like the hippies are going to, but always I felt alone, like I was never around my people, like I had to prove my value somehow, my reason to be there.

The clouds don’t need a reason, I think this, and far off there is the sound of slow and rolling thunder, or fireworks, or war.

Dear Brother With Whom I Disagree On So Many Things,

I am thankful this Memorial Day that I am able to text you. That no matter how much we disagree, you are there to respond. You have returned, unlike so many others who have not. You went away to war and pounded sand for five years but then you came back, and today I recognize how lucky I am because not everyone gets to feel this way.

Love, Your Big Brother

Deep Fakes

He sent the video clips and the speech that he'd prepared for her to the service. It was only $49. They were running a special this Christmas; one deep fake with the words of your choice said by the person of your choosing. He did it because he missed her. The only reason he’d even heard of this was because someone at work had showed him this clip of that famous Israeli actress saying she liked to munch pussy. The one that had blown up about a year ago and no matter what she did no one believed that wasn’t her until a forensic analyst came forward and pointed out some of the problems and the people who were still paying attention at that point exonerated her, while the rest of the world thought she was a bit of a lesbian, which wasn’t the worst thing when you were trying to continue to land roles in action movies into your late thirties. But, anyhow, because the guy who had showed him this video was something of a connoisseur of this phenomenon he took the time to point out to him how nothing in the video made it look like this whole thing had been composited and post-processed by an AI. After the net had got sick of pasting Nicholas Cage and Nick Offerman’s face onto everything, they moved on, and all the while they were getting better, so by this point they were practically indistinguishable from reality. They moved on to rewriting history, from the Moon Landings, to Jonestown, to the Holocaust. Some black nationalists who got really good at it started filming enough realistic looking clips of Malcom X in the White House that it had by this point moved from being just a line in a song to a movement. He sent them the material on Sunday night and by Monday morning when he woke up he already had the file waiting in his inbox. It was two minutes long. She apologized for everything she had said after she walked out. She asked for him back. She said she didn’t mean it when she said he didn’t get her. She told him she loved him, and she asked him to consider if he’d ever have her back. He liked what they had done with it. He felt not like the pathetic psycho he had pictured feeling like. He felt empowered. He liked to see himself considering his response.

...one of the terrible features of the pandemic was that you tried to put the pandemic out of your mind and then you ran the risk of actually putting it out of your mind and forgetting to be prepared; finding yourself in a situation where you didn't have a mask or were too close to someone or had been in a closed restroom area and could just feel the skin on the back of your neck crawling at the idea that you had been exposed...

Baxter had three sisters, two of which were several years older than him. When he was twelve, and in the habit of staying up late with the Internet on, streaming whatever it was this week, Moroccan pop or Haitian Jazz, he would catch glimpses of both of them as they snuck back in from their high school escapades. During the day they largely ignored him. He had the notion that there had been a time where they had taken more than a passing interest in him, this memory going way back of them on the porch playing peek a boo in the light pastel dresses that now lay stuffed in one or another of the wardrobes in the attic, in the hopes that baby Lucy would wear them someday.

The tart but not sweet taste of the Zestar apple Is something I never enjoyed before moving to Minnesota. That so much taste could be contained within a single bite. Now I see the reason for it being our national fruit, if you could ever say we really have such a thing. And yet most of the country eats Red Delicious. Fibrous, chalky, flavorless, missionary with the lights off and a thick condom on, No wonder we all are losing our minds. If only more of America knew about good apples, Or good rice, Or good anything. We have been deprived of so much of our history. Trained like rats to crave hot dogs, and Uncle Ben's, and oxy, By a process both expedient and intentional. God Save America, And bring me another apple 🍎

Epitaphs for the Digital Age

Here lies Jim, who kept all his devices charged.

Here lies Amy, who always had good ‘grams.

Here lies Paul, who knew just what to Google.

Here lies Abigail, may their body nourish the fungal substrate in which they were encapsulated.

Here lies Sarah, who kept the JIRA board clean.