By Isaac Handelman

“He hadn’t the slightest idea what to write, or if he should be writing in the first place. In sixth grade the asphalt was new. The yellow painted lines were brilliant and they let us play our game. Four-square, it was. We had a pact. It was bullshit, we were little shits, but we had a truce. The four of us would stay in there forever, it seemed, bouncing the ball back and forth to one another until The Great Betrayal (which was actually a number of betrayals). I was never The Betrayer, I was always The Betrayed. I don’t think that makes me any better than them, I was a willing participant in our practice of social stratification on the blacktop. So, Jane would slide the ball with all the strength of a sixth-grader into the corner of my square, and out it would fly, and with it my hopes and dreams of eternal neutrality, undying friendship, unwavering trust. And to the back of the line I’d go, until my next turn. These flashes came to him sometimes, flashbulbs burning for a moment. ...

If I told you to wait a second, it would mean the same thing as “wait a moment.” Second = moment. Of course, that isn’t entirely true. A second is a quantitative, measured, precise unit of time, albeit a totally arbitrary one that someone somewhere decided meant something. But now it means something real, something specific. But a moment is a little bit more abstract. It’s like a second but looser. It’s got the same stuff in the middle but it might extend out on either side, or it might recede inward, it might be shorter than a second, infinitesimally small until no one nowhere at no time has invented a quantitative unit small enough to express the idea of the moment anymore. But for us, a second is basically a moment, because of the way we structure our lives and think about time. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or not. I don’t really care about the strict, formal distinction between the two. I only care about it for the purpose of understanding the commonly-espoused life motto “li...

Fuck it, if it happens it happens. You can go, just go. You gotta just let it go how it goes. You gotta close your eyes and say goodbye to that shit. Only let the other stuff get in. That’s all that’s worth it. You’re thinking it as you’re walking, I know you’ve been there. Of course I do, I am God! I made you, so of course I know. I’m lying, of course. Did I get you for a second? I am not God. I’m just waiting for pizza. I have to be in front of the building by 10:36. I am supposed to be home by now, but I’m not. That’s how it is. We’re here. 10:36. Only a few minutes left. Stop trying to make the time pass. It’ll pass whether or not you try. Stop putting energy into it! 10:36 is closing in. Gotta get home soon. What’ll happen if I don’t? Don’t care to find out. The walls are taller than me and the darkness makes the buildings look even taller. Oh boy, I might have messed up. No going backwards, ever. No use trying! Go forward, move ahead. This is not plagiarism. This is just the nat...

Sometimes, you get stuck. In mud. It’s a thick mud, and it weighs you down. Not in a soul-crushing, demoralizing way. Just in a way that slows you down and makes it hard to move. You can look around. You can still move your head and your eyes and you can breathe fine. The mud isn’t poisonous, luckily, and it feels fine enough on your skin. It’s just gunky. Gets in your joints, stops the gears from moving, and keeps you from wanting to get the gears moving again. Feeling stuck, he takes a deep breath and plunges into the mud. He opens his eyes and, lo and behold, he can see! It’s a clear sort of mud. It’s an ocean of mud. Like coffee. But thicker. He comes up for air and he is somewhere else. He thinks he is somewhere else, although the mud seems to have gotten in his ears, toyed with his brain a little bit. It might be making him forget. He closes his eyes and lets himself sink back down into the mud and be enveloped by it. He tries to allow the mud to do whatever it wants to him...

Things I hate: Corporations, but not enough to do anything about them.  Aimlessness, but not enough to do anything about it.  Perhaps I don’t exactly hate aimlessness, but it’s something that I feel I might be better off without. It’s something that can be crushing, and that can make me feel like I’m wasting something. Time, I guess, or youth, or life. Another part of me leans in a different direction. In a “fuck it, I’ll do whatever the fuck I want to do whenever the fuck I want to do it” kind of direction. It seems, though, like human nature, or some kind of fucky, unseeable force, won’t let me fully embrace such a worldview. A balance seems in order. I’m not good at balancing. I have friends who are. I have friends who seem able to walk along near-tightropes with confidence. They might be struggling more than I can tell, but...I can’t tell. So, you want to bring down a corporation or two, but you don’t want to leave the coffee shop. You’re privileged as fuck. Y...

By the time he realized what happened, it had already been another lifetime. The day he awoke arrived without a jolt. Through the foggy indistinctness of half-sleep, he opened his eyes and the dream ended. Not all at once. The alarm — he could have sworn there was a fire alarm going off. And then, the sound on the table beside him, his eyes, blurry shapes, colors, the world… again. It took him a few moments to come to any sort of terms with this new world, this second place that seemed to exist. Things had been just fine back there. The grass, freshly mowed, dumped into the bin on the side of the road. He was standing there, squinting down the street in the late afternoon sunlight, wondering where the electrician was — and then it was all gone, and he was here. Soon, things weren’t blurry anymore, and he realized that he was in bed. An odd revelation, to be sure, as it wasn’t his bed. Or… no, it was his bed. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t the bed he’d had the night before, but it was t...

It occurred to me that the thoughts in my mind are too complicated for me to comprehend, or at least too intricate to grasp completely, holistically, at any given moment. What that seems to suggest is pretty damn fascinating. Consider an analogy: a story written down on a piece of paper by an author. The story exists, but it cannot comprehend itself. The analogy may be somewhat faulty since the paper is actually inanimate and cannot “comprehend” anything, but I think it’s still telling. No one would ever claim that the paper itself, the story itself, represents the whole picture. It’s the story in context, the fact that the story emerged from the author’s thoughts, that makes it a joy to read. Words on paper are meaningless and orderless and cold. The words cannot fathom the act of writing, of creation. That’s the author’s job. The author is, in the case of consciousness or awareness, I suppose, natural selection, but that isn’t really my point. I’m more interested in the sticking poin...