Quite excerpt. Endlessly unexamined. And very thankful to the Dan Coxon and the whole Litro crew for making it so. Excerpt? Word.
"Here’s what you need to know: my father is dead and Debbie and I are
talking about having a baby. My father was a complicated mix of artist,
teacher, activist, and world traveler, and yet despite that, he died
with regrets about things he had, and had not, done. The regrets did not
make the person, but coupled with his death their impact is profound
for me.
We think we can escape our parents’ shadows, but moving away from
them, or shutting off our feelings, even their death, does not make the
shadows go away.
Children are different of course. The shadows come later, but even
talking about having children makes the chance for adventure seem less
likely, and Debbie and I have definitely not been on enough adventures
together. And yes, I know, people go on adventures when they are
parents, but will we? I don’t know, which makes me think even more about
regret and shadows, which leaves me spinning.
It also makes me want to run away."
We are. For real. So big thanks to the Dan Coxon and the whole Litro crew. And drinks, many, on us, for sure. Yes. Excerpt? Cool.
"I am a child. I am watching The Day After. There is a bomb, a
flash of grey, things move in slow motion, and instantaneously the world
as we know it no longer exists. People are dead. The air is poison.
Things can never be the same because the fabric of the world has been
torn and re-shaped into something that will never be safe again. That’s
Armageddon. That’s not dystopia. Dystopia is slower, less pronounced.
Things spoil and curdle, the norms change, and what we expect from the
world morphs into something new, where the expectations about our
quality of life are lower, and life for the many is harder and sadder
and revolves around surviving a version of our lives that is lesser, and
harsher, than we knew before. We can talk all we want about Mayan
post-apocalyptic shit, but with the financial systems fucked, endless
poverty, power and money concentrated in the hands of the few, and the
expectation of work, real work that supports our families, diminished,
this is the true state of the world today, dystopic, and bleeding out."
