The traffic light out the living room window keeps me great company on lonely nights. I watch it click from red to green to yellow and back to red. It reminds me that the world is still going on out there, not matter what. The abstract metonymy is not lost…

“Gin martini, straight up, heavy on the olives.” “How many’s heavy?” “I don’t rightly know. Three. No. Five.” “Let’s agree on four, then. I gotta watch the inventory on garnishes best I can. Gin’s a-whole-nother thing.” “You know what they used to call gin?” “What?” “Blue Ruin. And beer was…

The Millicent Rose Dining Saloon was full, or almost at Max Capacity, with the usual array of in situ bastards and sly, wiry gabardine strangers who buttoned-up onehanded and caused a mild ruckus in the borderline unusual gripes of their later evenings. “Per se, this is just to…say, that is.” …

I get nothing but terrible submissions from private morons looking to go public with their idiocy. Terrible titles. Terrible grammar. Terrible stories with terrible narration. This is what it’s like to run a literary magazine. This is where we are at with the current state of the written word. History’s…

Slumped, more not of it than most, he shoulders his mostly feeble way, rakish and awkward, recklessly slaloming through the crowd with an almost shuddering abandon towards, well, nothing. He has no destination. Nowhere to go, or be. There are just these motions that he makes. He goes through things…

We are hyper-aware and self-conscious to a fault — lackluster beings full of barbeque-flavored chips and bubbly water. The squirrels scramble like apostrophes through the scrubby brush, relating amorphous flights of branches and seeds, the scrawny language of pre-coffee collages in what dawn’s light hasn’t risen to yet. The highway’s…

Dostoyevsky’s wife had to pawn her underwear to pay for his gambling debts. Me? My mother was a swimsuit model in the ’80s. So, that’s what I had to deal with growing up. It was an emotional deductible on my sudsy well-being, being dragged forthwith by so many just/unjust causes…

I wonder if these sorts of clouds change the kind of thoughts people get. That certain prance in the sky, there. Do people come to different conclusions because of the manipulations of the weather? Are we merely creatures of circumstance? Auspices be damned. We’re drifters, at best. Clamped to the…

THOMAS JEFFERSON: I woke up maladjusted to the world today. Suddenly, now, I don’t fit in. Can’t make it like the rest of them do. I’m here willfully on the outside of everything, drooling towards Saturday’s bliss-point crave, not a place for me in the whole sun-smeared world. EUGENE V…