The context, or at least the jumping-off point, was a newswire mentioning people with the desire to be famous. It's just an investigation of where that desire might come from in one person, what miseries a desire to impress might create under specific conditions. In short, it's self-indulgence in the clothing of…

Thanks. It's just me trying to exercise the parts of my brain that feel dusty sometimes.

Ineluctable modality of the fart joke as comment.

It can happen like this: you wake up and you're 40. The last 12 years of your life were spent ferrying death into the black rivers of your veins, but the project was unsuccessful; you are still alive and still unable to own the possibility of your own mediocrity. The only thing left in your wallet is a picture of…

Listen: an orphan lashes out at a world that never cared. He is hostile eyes; a puny fury, crashing drunkenly through the trees; an elephant assigned to quiet stalking. You whisper, "it's not your fault, charlesemerson" over and over until he cries. You sit patiently beside him as he waits to be deleted.

Unavoidable hairstyles of those who have gone before you, howling with hormones and dread into the soft down sleep of Jack Daniel's. You wore it once, though you have destroyed most of the photographs, uncomfortable with the evidence rising up against you. Sometimes, when the radio plays "Radar Love", your former…

By shaking the martini, the molten gin runs through the seams of the cubes and breaks them like the pieces of your heart that you carry like a pocketful of stones. You become more of a watered-down version of yourself with each shake. Once it becomes too watery to taste the gin, you hand it to a friend and pretend…