the closing of the american mind by Alan Bloom -- or -- the author's admission that he is old, useless and in the way.

Allan Bloom is a hysterical, raving, reactionary lunatic. He and his academia ilk are exactly the reason why education teaches kids nothing, because they know absolutely zero about the children they’re supposed to teach. mostly, this book is little more than a “get off my lawn” diatribe against any and all (race, sex, drugs, rock [...]

it was a half a sandwich an some bottled water

a woman, lying in the park with her knees and tits and face pointing at the sun.
the leftovers of a light lunch lay beside her as she dreams — of what?
while the rest of us walk by on our way to somewhere we don’t want to be
thinking, we want to be in the sun instead.
no, [...]

From "The Apiary"

Where is their hive and why did you settle for mechanized translation back and forth as intentional language. There is something to two bodies in a room, working in parallel. We were no less careful than I have been with anyone else (and I have been with…) The desire to be born works its way back and spills over the rim of the condom. If through carelessness I could remake [...]

my anxiety is that i get labeled

i love frequent Atlantic contributor Sandra Tsing Loh. She has the uncanny ability to nail, succinctly, the slices of the pie that make up our culture. This is from her “Classed Dismissed” [...]

message in a body

The girl on the bike in front of me keeps showing me her panties. Well, only the band of them as she’s hunched over pedaling. But I can see their outline good enough through her shorts. “Sugoi,” it says across the band — I bet it means something in another language. We’ve been leap frogging each other since Fulton and Divisadero, even though I’ve been more than willing to lag behind and watch her calves flex under her olive skin. [...]

(shortly after I left Mountain View, California for good)

The pool was in the center of Redwood Way Apartments. A palm tree planted by the hump of the kidney leaned out over it. She and I were diving under, grabbing at ankles trying to pull one another [...]

conversation between cousins

“Four days before dontcha know she’d cut herself,” my cousin paused through the phone. I could hear the phone scratching on something, his face, shoulder, while he was knocking at something with his free hands. “You know. Slashed her wrist.”
“Oh yeah,” was all I could think to say.
“Yeah. I mean, that’s the only reason I married her.”
“I thought your son introduced [...]