SUPER SOLDIER was not well received initially, the main issue being we were Marines and proud of that fact. Soldier was a pejorative; anyone calling us soldiers was either clueless as to the distinctions between the Marine Corps (small, lethal, aggressive) and the Army (large, bloated, soft), or messing with us. So when a huge cardboard box labeled SUPER SOLDIER arrived at FOB Williamette, our first thought was to burn it.
I guess we moved fast. That’s how it happens though, right? Apparently, there are couples out there who started off as friends and then grew together, realized it was something more, something permanent, long-lasting, but I’ve never met them. Still, it must be pretty common. We’re not pandas after all, are we? Stick us together in a cage long enough and we’ll either fuck each other or kill each other. Or worse.
That Bluechew one is on, having modified its vertically formatted clips to our TV by shouldering them with thick black bars or, in the case of one woman, multiplying her image across the screen in many-headed tile mode, and Helen, on her phone, scrolling, tilts her head up from where it rests in my lap.
Tracy said capitalism was like anal sex — hostile, unnatural, pleasurable for men at women’s expense. She said that and a whole lot else, like “whenever we’re around my mom I feel like I’m suffocating” and “your brother talks way too much about wanting to see Winona Ryder’s tits.” I wasn’t listening. I know that now. I should’ve been. And especially to that comment about Winona, who, it was true, my brother Colin desperately wanted to see nude.
At his firm’s annual holiday party, Viktor Petrovich Zadorozhny was gulping down vodka shots, one after another, to build up enough courage to ask his boss for a promotion. He managed to pick what he thought was the right spot and moment, when the boss was walking to the bathroom, and cornered him with a well-rehearsed but casually delivered inquiry.
When I was a kid, writing and drawing were joined in my imagination as a single magical scribe-like activity. I got one half of the two-part equation from each of my parents. My father was an editor and writer and my mother was a commercial artist. In the beginning, drawing was dominant because it came naturally while writing had to be learned. But writing represented the ultimate power, embodied in a pile of typed or printed pages like one of the manuscripts in my father’s office or one of the dense books without pictures in it on his bookshelf.
You’re unhappy, she said, you’re unhappy because you’re an adult, what adults like most of all is being good at something, and what’s easier to be good at than being unhappy, at least at first, with time it gets complicated, the truth is there’s a thin line between simple, adult unhappiness, and total, endless, despair, it’s this line that adults absolutely love to tread, what adults like best is to seem, in public, to be just about coping with their complex realities . . .
This was some time ago on a Saturday in New England, in the home of a family of domestic missionaries from the South. “Quiet,” said Saul, “Father is in there with his sermon.” “If he’s finished, we can knock,” said Faith, his younger sister. “No, he’s finishing his sermon. Let’s make him breakfast.” “Let’s serve pancakes.” “Do you think he can eat while he works?” “Have you ever seen him work?” “No,” said Saul, “but he is so often in there working. It is why we do not see him.”
I slow down in front of the Snowbin residence. It’s Lon, alone, no wife, no family. He was here when I bought Utopia Gardens and I was warned he was fickle. In particular, the old owners, a consortium of bored energy dealers out of Maumee who wanted to dabble in Michigan real estate, had created a quasi-intuitive internal system of red and yellow cards to denote tenants who proved, over time, problematic. Snowbin flitted between red (most severe) and yellow (rather severe) with no discernible rhyme or reason.
Bud Wiggins Jr., a stubborn sixty-one and stubborner fifteen pounds overweight, was in the perma-crawl of LA freeway traffic when he ready-steadied for a bit of the old Mounjaro ultraviolence. From base camp, he heard thunder on not too distant slopes. Through the ages, men learned tricks to stanch ejaculation but when it came to tummy trouble, all strategies were a loser’s game. In a cold sweat, he scanned grassy onramps and adjacent knolls like a doomed pilot surveilling urban landing strips that would kill the least amount of civilians.
Oleg was at the corner of Broadway and East 12th, outside that Italian place across from The Strand, speaking on the phone to his friend Laure, who was explaining that at precisely that moment, a man was driving to her small pale house on a patch of muddy grass in a dark, gnarled corner of Montgomery, Alabama.“ How does he know where you live?” Oleg asked. “We hooked up before,” Laure said casually, entirely too casually, Oleg thought.
I was standing with Jane by the DJ booth when I heard someone say his name. It’s an unusual name, so I knew they were talking about him. Oh, he’s in Philly now, they said. He moved in with this trans girl. Suddenly I needed something. I went to the card table where they keep the lube and condoms and dug to the bottom of the candy jar. Beneath its crinkly white wrapper, the last lollipop was spiderwebbed like a broken disco ball.
I decided to pack it in that night…being in a band. I’d probably stick to the music all the same. Didn’t need any of these other cunts holding me back! Would probably empty out ma bank account, sell my guitar and get one of those big analog synths second-hand…one of those big Soviet fuckers…Polyvox or something…would just play drones and harsh noise on it…piss every cunt off…or not, whatever. I decided I didn’t want to be in a band.
On a Saturday in 2020, I biked into Haleiwa — a small town on the North Shore of Oahu. I mailed prints of my art. I bought a rose quartz for my girlfriend. I headed home. A black truck was leaving the gas station to my left. It wasn’t moving. I rode on. I saw the driver looking to his left, checking for cars. The truck advanced into the side of my bike’s back wheel. I put my right foot down on the street. The truck stopped moving. I got off the bike, walking it ahead. “Are you okay?” said the driver, looking out his window.
The writers came at night. Three of them, all dressed in black. The Napa Valley countryside was empty, epically quiet, its glades lit by moonlight. The screenwriter led them through the trees. He had worked on season two of Seal Team VI, and when it came to reconnaissance or questions of strategy, the poet and novelist deferred to him unerringly. They moved as quietly as they could, dark shapes in the darkness. Sam Altman’s weekend ranch was 950 acres, ringed by a perimeter fence.