my dudes sam and alex and i do this circular email where we write one sentence. it’s not linked into a narrative or really connected. these are 28 of my sentences, in the order in which they occurred. most are just things i thought of, some are from pieces i am trying to write in my brain and or on paper.
- I feel like my brain is growing moss.
- Money is a mean kind of language.
- He stared at girls the same way some people stared at pictures of cats on the internet–a curious blend of compulsion and indolence.
- Nobody ever wants to acknowledge that the world is made up of people just like them.
- In hindsight it was selfish of previous generations to hog the Enlightenment.
- I felt stale and at odds with myself for weeks, but then I bought a new duvet cover.
- A few hundred times each year, the community assembles to don licensed apparel and scream at someone’s sons or daughters as they play a glorified version of hopscotch.
- Humanity has really lost touch with the mercy killing, as far as species-wide manners go.
- There is no sign, no border checkpoint between the country of your pathologies and of your personality. The dirt just quietly shades another color.
- Emotions are not clean fuels.
- There was a permanent kink in his neck from peering over his shoulder.
- His ears were slightly cauliflowered, not from rugby or wrestling or boxing but just because his blood pumped too much too hard too heavy.
- There’s ships that pass in the night, and then there’s ships that collide in the night.
- Her teeth glowed like a backlit screen.
- A black rubber river carried the rejected merchandise toward Fisher’s weary arms: vacuum cleaners, dresses, sea salt, books, shoes.
- I had a phase where I ate a lot of venison, on some misguided belief it would bring me closer to mother earth.
- Coming to terms with my particular consumerist death trip is a lifelong process.
- We used up our allotment of just wars.
- Everyone everywhere is choking on history and they don’t even seem to mind.
- What were people nostalgic for before we had nothing to worry about?
- Cities live and die on a different schedule from human lives, like owners outliving pets.
- We’re fucking up outer space just like we fucked up regular space–zooming to natural boundaries and then backfilling with weakly hopeless suburbs.
- If we’re going to build utopia it’s going to have to be a market-driven, individual-consumer-driven process.
- I can totally understand that there are different breeds of humanity and that your breed cares a lot about $400 jeans but I can also understand fuck you get away from me.
- Maturation is not an irreversible process.
- Jesus wasn’t a very specific guy.
- I hold on to the dying embers of relationships like ticket stubs. There’s a drawer full of them in my mind.
- I forgot which one of us was the puppet and which was the hand.
These are the opening lines to 28 separate short stories. Compelling. Love it.