You can have everything

There's a beauty in empty places that are supposed to be full of people. Not like your office after everyone's gone home, or a stadium in the offseason, but places that aren't ever supposed to be empty. Like a mall. Or a grocery store. Those things are never really devoid of people.

Some people think there's beauty in nature, in finding some secluded dell that nobody's ever been in, and being by yourself. But that's not the same. They're choosing to go where nobody has ever tread. I'm choosing to go where there used to be dozens of people, or thousands. I'd trade ten forest glades for an empty airport, and a handful of hidden waterfalls for the abandoned town near Chernobyl.

It's exactly because these spaces used to be filled with people, their sounds, smells, and thoughts -- and are still filled with some of their stuff -- that makes them magical. A place built for nobody with one person in it is pointless. A place built for millions with just one person in it is magical.

It's fine if some of the windows are blown out. There's still plenty of room here for me, and for my stuff. I guess I may as well refer to all the stuff here as mine. I never really wanted a shoe-polishing stand or three thousand and eighty-four pickup trucks, but if there's nobody else to claim it, I guess there's no distinction to be made between "my stuff" and "not my stuff". Maybe it's all just "stuff" now.

I like having everything to myself now. I just wish I knew what happened that I'm still here, and everyone else is gone.

Ur

Ur, the debut album from Chicago rock outfit Aurochs, seems more like two short albums in one. While many bands lead with a bombastic opener, Aurochs have chosen to start off with a lighter touch, with the gently strummed, heartfelt "Maxwell" and the darker-toned, subtle ballad "11:30 PM". Throughout the first half of the album, Aurochs keep the music quiet though the mood wanders from starkly cynical to claustrophobic, quiet mania, to a sudden burst of optimism (if not outright egotism) in the first half closer, "Everything/Anything" -- and then the riffs begin. The second half drips with riffage at turns euphoric, desperate, and sinister (and in the best passages, all three at once), starting with the searingly cheerful "Facade" and turning more fierce soon after. "Inside" and "The Taste" dip back into the dark complexities explored earlier in the album, and just as quickly jump back out. Some may find back-to-back tracks "Cave Paintings" and "Recessive Potentials" perplexing; the former features doom-tinged heavy guitar-and-bass work paired with incongruously chipper lyrics while the latter is a ferocious, disturbing stomp that seems to, at first blush, glorify Burgess-style ultraviolence and a sort of Caveman-chic ethos. The album closes with an improbably poignant ballad version of Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting".

While most of the songs stand on their own, deeper meanings lurk just below the surface of the lyrics, ready to pounce on any listener who looks for them. While the album spans most of the emotional spectrum, everything is just a bit off kilter. Joyous songs either veer towards uncontrollable, unrealistic positivity, or lurk just above a cynical undertow, while even the most depressive song contains unmistakably optimistic streaks. Amidst the ebb and flow, the one constant is that nothing is ever one hundred percent true. The point seems to be that life is never all good or all bad, it's everything all at the same time, and that's just fine. A closer look at even the more seemingly obvious moments reveals a hidden vein of irony or contrarianism -- but maybe that's just us reading too much into things.

1. Maxwell
2. 11:30 PM
3. In My Blood
4. The Ground
5. Even the Air Is Heavy
6. Everything/Anything
7. Facade
8. Inside
9. The Taste
10. (Spilled) Iron
11. Cave Paintings
12. Recessive Potentials
13. Kung Fu Fighting

haiku (diptych part 2)

when i decohere
will you gather me up like
leaves or fallen fruit

From the Library Inside the Event Horizon

I have been to the library inside the event horizon.

There is a book there, the text of which reconfigures the reader's language processing center so that, instead of normal text, he or she perceives the truth behind what is written in everything that he or she reads afterwards (what the author meant rather than what the author wrote -- the "deeper" meaning). If this book existed in a work of fiction, the author might signify text that a reader might perceive (i.e., not what is actually printed on the page) by placing it in italics to make it obviously different from the "actual" text. A more opaque author might not differentiate between the text and the truth, and leave it up to an astute reader to figure it out. This book consists entirely of a description of itself and what it does. It is a short book.

There is no way to discern the truth behind what an author writes. The reader constructs the meaning in collaboration with the author. Without the reader there is no meaning.

Mortar

Shoulders hunched against the chill, we pressed together, side-to-side, as much for the reassuring solidity as for warmth. Our clouded breath made my first two fingers twitch in my pocket as if curled around a cigarette for the first time in months.

"You don't get it," she was saying as I reminisced about the feel of smoke tightening my chest, "it's not what we have in common that makes people close."

"No?" I asked, even though I knew she wasn't waiting for me to.

"No. Think about it. What sorts of things do you tell your friends that you don't tell anyone else?"

"I don't know. Hopes and fears, embarassing stories, stuff like that." I tried to blow a smoke ring with my smokeless breath. I never could really do it with smoke, anyway.

She shifted closer to me -- for warmth, or because her left foot was tired of holding all of her weight. "Why don't you tell that stuff to anyone else?"

I shifted onto my right foot, away from the soft curve that I felt even through her jacket. "Why would you tell embarassing things to somebody you don't trust?"

She turned and looked up at me, and the light from the bar window highlighted her slightly too-large nose and made her bloodshot eyes look dark and sunken. My chest felt like I'd just smoked the cigarette I'd been thinking about.

"Why would you tell those things to somebody you do trust?" she asked.

She turned away. I shoved my hands further into my pockets.

"I guess to prove you trust them," I said. "Or because you already know some stuff about them."

She looked back through the window, although you couldn't see the rest of our group through the crowd. "So we identify our friends by handing them the only knives that can really cut us, and they do the same to us."

"That's some Cold War shit right there, isn't it?"

"Mutually assured destruction." She nodded, still looking inside. "Hell of a model for friendship, I know."

"So when you find out someone isn't worth your trust," I gestured with my chin towards the bar, although she wasn't looking, "doesn't that change everything? Now you're at war or something?"

"It changes things, yeah." She spoke so softly I could barely hear. "But not like that. Real relationships are built on top of scars. Hundreds of little ones, a couple big ones, maybe -- but that's what they're built on. None of that other shit matters."

"Then why the hell am I out here trying to see if you're OK?"

She turned back to me, her face again oddly highlighted in the shifting glare. "You're here because I ripped your damn heart out a year ago and you still love me anyway, not because we both like football or Chinese food or hanging out with the same bunch of idiots."

I blinked hard against a sudden cold wind that made my eyes water, and shrugged, but I couldn't tell her she was wrong. Another tiny wound to add to the long list, but maybe she's right. Maybe relationships are built on a foundation of blood and broken feelings, and not on love or good intentions.

I put my arm around her shoulder -- maybe just for warmth -- and didn't answer when she leaned against me.

What Makes Andy One Time the Best

Andy "One Time" Clemmons turned away from the reporter to contemplate the rows of green felt tables, now mostly uninhabited.

"You have to understand," he said, "that all of these amateurs here, it's like they're watching a foreign film without subtitles." He riffled a stack of chips with his left hand while he spoke. "If they're paying attention, they can usually figure out more or less what's going on, but they're missing all sorts of details. Now the pros, the pros, they can see the subtitles. Some of them follow the plot better than others, but you can't make it as a pro if you can't see the subtitles."

The reporter scribbled to keep pace, then when it was clear Andy was done, he looked up, over the top of his notepad, and half-smirked. "You didn't really answer my question, though. What makes you better than the other pros?"

"That's easy enough." He turned back to regard the reporter with a placid gaze. "I write the script."

Andy's eyes didn't waver though the reporter stared, speechless, for a full five seconds, before finally stammering, "then ... why don't you always win?"

Andy smiled slowly. "Do you ever dabble in fiction when you're not writing to pay the bills?"

The reporter blinked. "Yeah."

"Well, then you know that the characters don't always do what you want them to do, don't you?"