Two men walked down a prison corridor, when another man in plain clothes approached and walked with them. They knew he was an undercover cop, so they ignored all his provocations. At the end of the hallway they still had not given in, so the cop turned and arrested one of them. A scuffle ensued, and in the chaos one of the men began calling the cop by the accused man's name, thus incriminating him. The crowd caught on, having no way to identify the cop, and having the two men's word against one. Correctional officers arrived and arrested the cop in the other man's name, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Five years later, "Any inconsistency in your story only serves to weaken your case and confuse the jury," said a voice that was clearly well-versed in court proceedings. The cop's cell door closed, and the speaker turned out to be the man who had originally caused the mix-up. He had become a police officer, and now was in a place of power over the unfortunate cop. Outside the cell in the hallway, he burst into tears.

Didn't anyone notice that one man was black and the other white? Should anyone who did, speak up, or risk spending their own life behind bars?

As I drove home from work after class I thought about how if I were to slide between dimensions, possibly by dying, presumably my senses would be the first thing to go. If that’s true, though, it seems odd that I think of art as transcendent, as in, able to reach other planes of reality. Maybe art is the senses’ approach to finding truth, not truth itself. If that’s true, and even the best art disappears when our senses dissolve, the truth that it was pointing toward might remain, because truth is not contingent on your perception.

The other thing I thought before I turned onto my street was that that means you can’t hang onto pieces of art as you transition, like you can’t hang onto coins you earn from level to the next in a video game. When you ‘graduate’ or shift or slide to another level or dimension, while it would be wonderful to be able to carry something with you, like your favorite book or melody, in all likelihood you can’t. Art is transient, and because it is dependent on the senses, it cannot survive the transition. So you better hope that your understanding of it is strong enough to, because that might be all you get.

I turned this in to my philosophy professor as a response to the reading we were supposed to do on David Hume. I didn’t read it, so I don’t know how relevant my input was, but I was banking on him being sufficiently moved to give me an A anyway.

‘The paper was supposed to be ten pages long,’ he said, staring at my measly one page on his desk during office hours the next day. He frowned at it through it his enormous glasses. ‘And on the fallacies in Hume’s critique of the argument from design.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, truly remorseful.

‘However, I’m willing to make an exception,’ he went on, ‘If you can parse out what you handed in to me into a valid argument, by Monday, I’ll accept it.’ He steepled his fingers under his chin.

As I closed the door behind me I heard him mutter ‘And please read the critique.’

This was excellent news. I now had the choice between two papers to write, which meant one must be worth doing. Having only till Friday, I sat down that night with every intention to complete at least one.

The Five Burroughs

You know how when you remember part of your childhood, or something that happened a long time ago, the parts of that memory all seem to bleed together, as if they weren't discrete sections that you experienced separately, but one big mix of stuff? (Do other people feel that way?)

I love that feeling, and I think I try to dive into it when I write something.

Last night Johnny told us a good name for a band he'd thought of: The Five Burroughs. (As in, spelled like William S. Burroughs.) I said it sounded like a punk band, and he said he'd probably never change his band name from Secret Cove, so it didn't matter anyway, and I said he could use it in the book he's writing. That is another thing I love about writing: if you think of something awesome that you won't do, but might have done in another life, then you can imagine the world you'd want it to happen in, and create it.

Someday, looking back, my whole life will be a big amorphous flowing memory of all the things I did - maybe, far enough away, I won't remember whether I lived in NYC before South Bend, or if I went to Ghana or only imagined going to Ghana. And I think that in that mix will be all the things I wrote about. Maybe they'll even be as real as things that really happened. So for that reason, I owe it to myself to right great things, and to write a lot of them, and to write them well.

Hey friends,

Check out my story 'Fever Dream,' now online at PANK Magazine -

http://www.pankmagazine.com/fever-dream/

Cheers!

[new music][secret cove]

I checked out, and caught a ride
Flew into an interesting time

('Alice,' by Secret Cove)
(Check them out here: http://secretcove.bandcamp.com/)

Didn’t they know there was a cemetery there before they started digging?

I wonder how they knew it was a slave cemetery. Was it a name on a headstone? Did they know it was there before they started digging, and no one said anything about it until they actually found it?

* * *

I suppose it was a rather idyllic scenario, a fancy restaurant next to the beach, rolling waves and attractive people walking around, but for us, there was something eerie going on. Part of it had to do with the way we were able to go from the restaurant to the beach without a problem, even if we were soaking wet and as salty as the rims of our margarita glasses. And the people who were walking around—that seemed to be all they were doing, walking around. Even the man with the gray beard, who didn’t look much older than us. He was really, really attractive, and Evan thought so too. He was walking around farther away from the restaurant and the beach; if it weren’t for him, I might not have known there was a town nearby. He seemed to be staying away from the waiters. He didn’t avoid us.

It was clear that he was selling weed. No one else seemed to know what he was doing. I think that’s why he was staying away from the others but he didn’t mind approaching us. At one point he told us that we could get one eighth for cheap but two for half that. Buying in bulk is always better, he said. I knew that. Before we bought any we went swimming. While we were crashing around in the waves, it occurred to me that at that logic, why didn’t we buy three for a third of the price? Or ten for a tenth? It was obvious: the more we bought, the less we spent, so why not buy everything? It should be free, I reasoned, or close to.

 * * *

I’m a little apprehensive about being alone with Bianca. She hasn’t brought up the living situation yet but she keeps hinting at something, and she acts like she wants to talk but won’t bring up the subject. For instance, she walked me to my car the other day and kept saying pointless things as I looked for my keys and opened the door. But then she let me go.

It’s her turn to bring it up, or it would be if we were playing tennis, seeing as I sent the email outlining my opinion and basically inveighing her for picking an apartment I hate (after I signed the lease, of course) and she hasn’t said anything about it yet. I would bring it up but I’m afraid she’s going to say she doesn’t care and isn’t going to look for someone to sublet. But I need to start looking for my own place, if she’ll let me. The good ones will be gone soon.

 * * *

         
What was even stranger about the disturbing headline was that it was completely out of context; it referenced “Manhattan” as casually as one would expect, so I knew that I was somewhere where New York was a standard measurement of place. I didn’t like how it said “they” the way someone who spices up their conversation with clichés does. Don’t they teach you not to use vague pronouns as authoritative figures?

I went back to the newspaper stand to read the rest, after I realized I was more curious than I cared to admit, but I couldn’t find my way back. It was near, I remembered, where we met the gray-bearded man. It was a red box that asked for a quarter in exchange for the daily newspaper. A square red box about waist-high, like a little pet. It was the only red thing around, except the restaurant’s carpet, which, now that I think about it, extended out to the patio.

Of course, being thwarted in my search for the rest of the newspaper article, in addition to being mildly annoying, only enflamed my curiosity.

 I don’t know where Bianca was during all this. Hopefully she was at her wretched new apartment, learning to love to be alone so she wouldn’t want me to move in.

I took my friend Avery to the art museum to look at paintings on his day off. I think he enjoyed himself, but it was hard to tell if we were looking at the same things.

'Look at this texture,' he said at one stop, admiring from behind the velvet rope the frame around a painting. 'It's exquisite.'

'No, it's plastic,' I said, and tried to explain where the real art was.

He tried to like the painting, I could tell, but his eyes kept sliding away, this time down to the velvet rope itself.

'It's beautiful!' he cried, stroking the velvet and watching it change colors as he went with and then against the grain. 'How does anyone make something like this?'

I had to admit, I had no more idea if how to make velvet than how to paint a painting.

In the gift shop, we both picked out a few postcards to send home. I think he only bought them to please me, because as we walked out, he gave them to me, then carefully smoothed the bag they came in, folded it, and placed it in his wallet for safekeeping.