Expired Domain Girl
(c. 2005 - 2008)
When I couldn’t find a website, I would often find her, which judging by the mission architecture and soft golden light, puts her somewhere in California. You may have seen her too, Expired Domain Girl, most likely at her college campus between classes, the weight of Econ 101, Art History, and some granola on her shoulders. The trace of red on her backpack suggests an enrollment at Stanford, a fine university nuzzled in the south bay with Google, Apple, and other centers of the virtual world. Of course, she’s a model, though a “modest face” model; not a high society model to make you feel bad, but one whose common features serve to ingratiate with the regular folk, meaning, you. Her blondness is “dirty blonde,” an odd phrase considering the assertions of Aryan purity, as if the sequence of her hair’s low- and high-lights is a slow corruption over time, the cross-breeding American Pâté of Europe’s liver. I’ve always found the benign placation of her half smile saying “sorry, that website is dead” arbitrary, yet prophetically sullen; for she too, now, is a thing of the past. I went searching for her, paradoxically looking for dead sites, hoping to come across her. In failure, I googled “expired domain girl” and found her, still there, the same locked pose, like a slice of inertia on a slide. I hope she got that B.A. or B.S., maybe then a Master’s or PhD. She probably has a ring on her finger, a more relaxed labia through which two craniums transgressed, and maybe a few wrinkles on her face. Her favorite painting in that 2 lbs. art history book is now a $25 print in her kitchen, which is how art is both beautiful and sad. Life happens like Proust: meaningful in theory, most of the time boring, and then we find out it was all gay. On my death bed, propped up with the bloated surrender flag of my last pillow, may my nurse look just a little like her. We’d talk about the weather, and she’d say it was nice out that day.
Happy Holloween Kill Yr Idols
Who do you hate you used to love? For instance, I not into Tom Waits no more. Think he should have shanked Screamin’ Jay and moved the fuck on. Anyway. Tell about it.
Geography Thursdays #7: Human Landscapes in SW Florida
The Rotonda West neighborhood, originally developed in the 1960s, never quite fully completed, located in Charlotte County, Florida. Map, Street View. (© Google/Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO) c/o Boston.com
We Are All Very Busy Being Busy
We are all very busy. We are busy being busy. We worship at the altar and suckle at the teat of busy. When I say we, I mean you, me, us. We are a cult of busy busy people. If you are busy, we will follow you and drink your Kool-Aid. We love to talk about how busy we are. We say I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy—an exultation. We say we are busy and feel flushed. We are busy, therefore we are. To be busy is to be important and to be important is everything. We will Twitter and Facebook and blog our busyness and we will do so with the conviction of martyrs. We will bear our busy burden. The burden of busy must be borne because to be busy is to be important and to be important is to matter. We matter and are made of matter which is meta. We have work and school and work and school. We study, we teach, we grade and grade and grade. We live below the poverty line but revel in that poverty because we have a second and third job that keep us busy. We go to mind numbing office jobs where we are busy with boredom. We hold cushy corporate positions we love to talk about because we make so much money being busy we don’t have the time to spend it. We have meetings and sometimes we have meetings within our meetings because we are that damn busy. In our limited free time we edit three magazines and run a small press and we may never respond to you or actually publish anything but we’re on the masthead and we have many official sounding titles so we have proof we are that busy. We get so many emails each day demanding our attention and our time and we try to keep up but we cannot so we are busy stemming the tide of electronic correspondence, sending messages but never reading the responses. We have online presences so we have to visit several sites every few seconds to remind ourselves and everyone we know and love and loathe how busy we are. We write 3,500 words a day and then exhaustively edit those 3,500 words once twice three times and we make sure to mention on Facebook that we’ve done those things, oh yes, we will tell you what we’ve written for the day and how important we are for taking that care with our words despite how busy we are. We will tell you what we are going to write while you idle people are sleeping because we do not sleep, we do not need sleep, we have not the time for sleep. We will go places and meet people while we are there though we won’t spend too long because we are so busy. We’re in four writing groups where we critique the work of our friends and enemies and later talk shit about that writing to other friends and enemies. We read obscure literary texts and think deep thoughts about those obscure literary texts and write things about those obscure literary texts so everyone knows we are reading obscure literary texts despite the fact we are so busy. We curate two reading series and boast about all the Internet Famous writers who will be reading with us. We pretend we don’t watch television but really we do, oh how we do and we spend moments of our precious time thinking about the unbelievable fact that Vanilla Ice has a reality show on DIY and how none of the new TV shows this fall are any good even though we can’t stop watching them. We have kids and those kids never leave us alone when we are busy working on our laptops but the kids are so damn cute so we’ll bitch about how busy they keep us and how much we love them even though they get in the way. We’re married or in relationships and once in a while we have to have sex with our significant others and otherwise give them some attention. We look at our lovers day in and day out and acknowledge that yes, this is really it for the rest of our lives and while we’re so busy, we ignore the nagging feeling we are doing everything yet nothing at all because we are far too busy to do anything well and doing all of that each and every day keeps us extraordinarily busy—it is a vicious cycle.
6 beer rules for writers i have known or been (with subtext)
1. if someone buys you a beer at a bar, buy them a beer soon-or-later (you slaw-cheeks fuck)
2. when you drop/dwell by my house and bring a 12 pack and then you have 1/or maybe 2 beer remainder in the 12 pack don’t take the 1/or maybe 2 beer remainder with you, leave it as a thank you (you lint-shuffler fuck)
3. why are you yipping about your own book while drunk/loose-lipped at a bar? (you cloud-hound fuck)
4. you didn’t tip the bartender?! whoa. we all noticed (you smart phone blue-haze fuck)
5. you may have visited my town, i might have even asked and glowed and paid you to visit, but that does not make me your babysitter (you donut-slusher/late night bailout caller fuck)
6. that is all, maybe (tonight)
Why We’re All Going to Die {Thirsty as Hell}
(and it won’t matter who can string together a pretty sentence)
