Blue Eyes

  ‘The ego creates, autocratically, a new external and internal world; and there can be no doubt of two facts - that this new world is constructed in accordance with the id’s wishful impulses, and that the motive of this dissociation from the external world is some very serious frustration by...

I lead in a rumble once, out at Desolation, an Easside - Wesside umdeilu that happened on our turf, by the train tracks, on a stormy summer night. There's condos there now, and a chain restaurant that inherited the vibe of the land it sits on, or at least has had a hard time shaking it. For years...

Maria Alva Roff University of Iceland  Reykjavik 2002 Note: this essay is reproduced here without footnotes due to platform limitations. For the original document, with footnotes intact, please contact the author. The subjects of space and place and the urge to define them have been constant...

for days the world shifted into some kind of something i’d never seen before, like it bubbleized, and i was smack there in the center. life became a cell and i was the nucleus, the kids floating about in the cytoplasm too, dna and mitochondria-like. the cell was exactly the size of our apartment,...

It would be easier to talk right now than to write. I don’t want to write, I want to smoke cloves and drink beer and fade a little bit. I want to do nothing, become invisible and be entertained at the same time. I most certainly do not want to fall. Not off a cliff, not into my glass of Classic,...

dear you my caramel baby with that sweet wicked grin and all you get away with, that unwashed hair and those big shining eyes and fokk! you’re so funny a tumble of golden laughter and the quaalude luv tunes from before you were born soundtracking our mutual adoration. and from across the nearly...

from what angle do you see things? i can assure you that the one you’re used to using isn’t doing you any good. try standing on a chair, or on your head, and notice how everything alters. snap a shot over your shoulder with no clue what’s behind you. capture that, a part of your past, and notice...

it’s decades ago, i’m a jaded baby, and i’ve been drinking. summer night on the lava rock, down by the big bay with that treacherous looming mass of old-school mountain, rubbed smooth by winds and rains and snow. younger than the jagged beasts of the continents but more worn, gully-lined and...

a man falls from the sky. a man tries to swim from europe to new york, just for crazy fun. a man builds the world’s highest tower. a man disappears. a man lives for 40 days in a box hanging from a bridge. a man holds his breathe for 17 minutes. a man helped dig up the sidewalk outside our house...

it was the year of the dry rains, the ones that never quenched the grasses and that seemed to leave the dust untouched. we laughed wryly at the coming apocalypse, finding it ironic that it would happen to us, in our lifetime, feeling special somehow because of it. we were stupid, but how could...