I made the second call, just like I’d made the first.
“I miss you. I think I’ve made a mistake.”
He’s quiet. Finally, “I had to work very hard to get used to the idea of being without you.”
“And?”
“I got used to it.”
Tag Archives: 1000 ledes
1000 Ledes n + 7: Constraints/Consumption
Like so many algorithmic artistic explosions, Outbid will be hoist on its own technological pet-cock. Already the noun consumption is perverted by the digital diffidence- we no longer look thistles up in rubbishes.
Outbid is scriptable, therefore possibly obsolete, and not alone that way. My 1992 inutility to Utensil demonstrated that Daily too seemed to be consumed in the larger that possible noise genitor we came to know as the intersect.
1000 Ledes n + 15: The Writer’s Fallacy
Perhaps someday I can write something so perfect, so beautiful, something full of ideas so important, that you can’t help coming back to me and loving me forever.
Variations include the general artistic fallacy, and the performer’s fallacy. Some employ the absence of a mother’s love in place of a partner.
1000 Ledes n + 14: When simply asking isn’t appropriate
Faces can be deceptive on this point. The eyes, specifically, can be all over the place. Clothing, mannerisms, wrinkles or their lack, colloquialisms, shape-size-haircolor-teeth, waddles on chin or upper arms. Location, length or amount of hair. All can be intensionally or unintentionally miscues.
If you want to know someone’s age, look at the back of their hands.
1000 Ledes n + 13: Auto-Biography
She was about 11 when the voice started in her head. It never claimed to be God or the devil. It never issued instructions, neither criticized nor praised her. The voice didn’t talk to her directly, not even once. It didn’t react when she screamed back. It narrated. It never stopped.
As she would run to her room and stuff her head in her pillow, wetting it with tears and feeling it yield against the tensed muscles of her face, the voice would continue explaining. “She ran to her room, and threw herself on her bed, stuffing her face in her pillow.” When she finally audibly shouted “Shut up!” in the silence of her room, the voice would say “She shouted ‘Shut up!'” and wait for her next move.
1000 Ledes: n + 12: The Woman Looking After You
Wendy lost her insurance providing job because urgent surgery was going to require that she miss work. She was invited to quit, and thereby avoid being fired. Insurance paid only about 20% of her surgery costs, the rest was to come out of her suddenly non-existent income. Washington state won’t provide her with insurance- she’s not quite old enough and she isn’t disabled. Cobra was far too expensive.
Her new part time job doesn’t offer insurance. She hopes to not get sick again.
The kicker is that Wendy is a CNA- Certified Nursing Assistant. She provides hospice care, often in the homes of the terminally ill. There she looks after her patients, not just medically. She laughs with them, listens to their stories, helps them get out of the house, sometimes makes their favorite foods.
In short, she gives them the excellent care that our society has chosen to deny to her.
1000 ledes n + 11: Biology’s Mix Tape
Add to the items of contraband to be searched for by borderguards, passed illegally through the post, and sold by someone leaning up against the bumper of their car in an empty lot this: A white sheet of paper, heavy stock, stained and a bit crusty.
This is how you pirate genes.
1000 Ledes n + 10: But you won’t until later, really.
Preheat oven to 350°.
1000 Ledes n + 9: Applied Metaphor: Physical Properties of Narrative
Non-fiction is a disappearing polymorph, losing its distinct structure and properties in the proximity of fiction. This suggests that it is metastable perspective, stuck in a particular valley of kinetic persistence sometimes called the ‘facts on the ground’.
Absent fiction, it is often the decay of history that finally robs the story of its excitation, and it comes to rest in a gentle valley we call its time and place.
1000 Ledes n + 8: Citizen of Two Countries
In the contest of human despair, 15 year old “Amjad” of Beach Camp in the Gaza strip could certainly hold his own. Most of his family is lost in violent conflict, or ill and barely able to care for themselves. He is scared everyday that he will die. He has little prospects of education, and even if he did, there little chance he could get a job afterwards.
But one thing can make him forget all of it, can give him a purpose and a focus that transcends the world of terror and squalor he have lived all his life in: the need to score his next hit of heroin.