quarterlifemechanisms

whitman.edu/quarterlife

editormolly esteve

layout editorsbo ericksonhanne jensen

copy editorskarah kemmerlymadeline jacobson

staffgrant bradleyhaverty browngaea campegabriella friedmanandrew gordontyler kingemma nye

staff writerparis white

staff artistssam alden

claire johnsonchelsea kern

volume 6 issue 2 december 2011

quarterlife is a literary journal pub-lished four times a year that features

-tive journalism, and any other sort of written work Whitman students might create. Each issue is composed around a given theme that acts as both a spark for individual creativity and a thematic axis for the issue.

quarterlife is an exercise in creative subjectivity, a celebration of the con-ceptual diversity of Whitman writers

when presented with a single theme. Each quarterlife theme acts as the proverbial elephant in the room, fragmented by individual percep-tion: each portion is ostensibly un-connected but ultimately relevant to the whole. Every piece illuminates a different aspect of the theme. In this way, quarterlife magazine participates in the writing process. The magazine is not an indifferent vehicle by which writing is published, but rather is a dynamic medium with which writing is produced.

letter from the editor

In the beginning, pig embryos and human embryos look fairly similar. Although distinct, both embryos pos-sess mammalian organ structures. With time, however, the colon of the pig spirals, and the liver of the human develops one less lobe than that of the pig. Somewhere

-ger—takes over and masks these underlying similarities. The embryonic journey of the literary magazine works

ancestor, something of humble origins but still distinct. While some spines are held together with staples, others use thread and glue.

This issue marks another stage in quarterlife’s development. The magazine is bigger (a full 86-pages), stronger (new binding), and it carries itself with a little more of that upright swag. As you journey through, consider the mechanisms at work—the way pages turn, a line breaks, the image of a “Far-Side” coffee mug triggers a memory, each cause and each effect.

embryonic  journey

contentsThese Shapes Are Not Easy to Carry (a letter)

Karah Kemmerly 07

Edward Weinman Four Poems For Tessie 09

Laundry MechanicsHavertyBrown 13

BabbleGabriel Lewis 15

Your EyesMelissa Shaffer 35

Shelley RiffChris Conlon 37

DistanceElizabeth Hambleton 38

We are what wepretend to be.

Beth Daviess 40

43The DNA of AA/NAErin Kanzig

The Big StreetNick Michal 48

MechanismsEllie Newell 50

Problems With SexPhilip

52

54Dear Mr. MailmanKatie DeCramer

Canon FodderGrant Bradley

A Woman Agrees to Lunch With Her Ex-Fiancee and Rips Out His Throat Over a Far-Side Coffee Mug

Joshua Tacke

56

58

The Unnatural History of Whom?

An interview by Paris White with Gerry Matthews: Walla Walla resident, artist, and curator of the Museum of Unnatural History

63

Cover Art by Sam Alden

7

Examine this diagram, place itin your pocket-carefully-and leave it until bit by bitit buries itself into your hiplike angular shards of broken bone.

My words are no better than diagrams;they can easily be unraveled against the traveling backdrop of space, so please,burn my letters to you, leave no trace of evidencethat I’ve been tampering with crime scenes in the solar system.

After all, dear, you and I are already accomplices inthis mess. You knock numbers down from the skyand I press remnants of dust into pages and we bothconfuse stars and satellites too frequentlynot to be guilty of something.

Try to pluck a star out of its rotation above us and press it in your pocket-

These Shapes Are Not Easy to Carry (a letter)

Karah Kemmerly

8

don’t protest, we’re both thieves anyway-

You see, dear, some parallaxes are too distant to measure.

9

Edward Weinman

Four Poems For Tessie

Sunday Dress

I still hear your twirling dress

cotton hemline rubbing long, green stems.

squeaked your kindergarten voice.Sunday’s now deceased: one wedding,

one divorce, plus 33 hard years racing past like a set of steel-belted radials over a potholed strip of Hwy 20.

But I spied on you that summer day

before you left. Did you see me wave when the orange moving truck stole you away from our cul-de-sac?

10

Rain Song

The Willamette River runs heavy,brown and bloated from 26 straight daysof rain. I escape east of the mountains,searching the cool, arid land of JunipersI discover you in the Palouse

where radios play the gospel,bumper stickers still read: Bush-Cheney.Native lands burned and turned into waves

painted home. Wait. I’m still mapping my way.

11

—untitled

You’re gone,whisked away like recyclingfrom a cold, white room;sticky yellow surgical lights

How do we say sorry? No need.“You were never here,” she said.

when the wind slips throughthe screen door’s twisted, metal holes?

glimmer inside the woman I once adored. What was she like? She smelled like one of those dreams

12

Done With Winter

It will snow on the ThursdayI drive out of your life

with ice, clawing cars to a standstill.

We lumber on the couch,your embrace shelters us from winter,

but soon you’ll seek space. Now you crank up the thermostat,

we sprint like frightened thieves

dive into bed and strip, trembling bodies rubbing together like kindling.

In the aftermath, our breathing bends to normal. Snow starts falling.

13

That moment of liberation,freedom as the clothes spuntheir cycles, took off on their ownclean mission, took that metalcontraption and placed it onthe Women’s Mount.The idol of feminism beforewe a popped a pill every day. Are they bought with this same pride?

Give me that washing machine,and I’ll take my freedom, too.

Instead, it’s the everyday tread,the heavy slam and the— shit, wheredid these red pants come from,and the double shit, my skirt is nowa frothy pink. But I’ll take the stain.

Laundry MechanicsHaverty Brown

14

Bare my legs, caress each buttonof that corrosive machine that pinchedmy grandmother on the ass with a winkand a Get ‘em sister Dorothy!

15

I was screaming down the interstate with a cracked plastic mug for company, high as a midnight moon on a brew of coffee and cheap whiskey. The mug sat buckled in the passenger seat to make things feel more sociable, sloshing with the dregs, and when we topped a rise and didn’t fall into the sky I laughed and gave it a pat on the cap. In California, a literary conference awaited me; in California, my new book and my wit would bring me fame, sex, and tenure. I was going to be a drunken exegete, a caffeinated sage, and that mug would be my oracle. The desert stretched out unending beyond the rise. Trash was scattered wide across it; worn-out tires and abandoned trucks, a burned-out trailer and plastic cups; barbed wire and telephone wire reached from horizon to horizon, but still the land waited there, broadest of all. I turned the radio louder.

BabbleGabriel Lewis

16

After a few hours, the mug was empty, the sun had staggered off somewhere, and about 700 miles still stood between me and California, so I pulled off the interstate at a Love’s truckstop. The parking lot was washed in white from a mercury-vapor streetlight, so bright that when I emerged from the car I had to shield my eyes to take my bearings. I set sail for the door of the little orange-trimmed Love’s Restaurant, tacking occa-sionally to account for unexpected cross-currents,

air. After a near-shipwreck against a stationary

peered in through the glass. The place was closed. Its lights were off and the buffet trough crouched there in the dark, empty, with a malignant mer-

nose against the glass and taunted it silently. The -

fet was content to continue brooding in the fog. Inanimate objects had such patience, I realized, and I suddenly felt tired. “When you come down to it,” I thought gloomily, “we are all going to be outlasted by our buffet tables.” It was then that a voice called out from behind

17

me, and near. Dry and lean and weathered, it might have come from the land itself. “And they said, ‘Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven...’” I spun around and saw the silhouette of a tall man, thin and listing slightly to the left. “And let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” I nodded politely and then yanked on the door handle, but of course it was locked, and my legs came out from under me in surprise and all of a sudden I was sitting against the wall, watching that bent sliver of a shadow grow huge in the cold mercury light. “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built.” “Please go,” I said hoarsely. “Please go away, I don’t want anything biblical right now— I’ve actually just had a religious experience, you see, and —” “AND THE LORD SAID, ‘BEHOLD,’” the voice thundered, and I screamed and covered my head. “Are you listening now?” the voice asked

18

eclipsed the street lamp I saw a half-crumbled smile set in a ruin of a face. “It’s just so hard to get people to stop and listen these days,” he said. I tried to make a smart remark, but my mouth didn’t work right. “Now, I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, fumbling with something in the side pocket of his long, black coat, “and you’re going to listen.” He eventually got out a gun, but he held it out sideways, showing me, as though it were a license permitting him to do this sort of thing. A breeze was blowing in from the darkness beyond the parking lot, smelling like a thousand empty miles of creosote, mesquite, and sage. The stranger’s

and too short, and I saw that he wore white socks under them: one had a hole in it and the other had fallen down around his bony ankle. “You know,” I said, doing my best not to vomit on an armed man, “I was just in the mood for a story anyhow. It’s a good thing you came along.” I patted the concrete, and gravel stuck to my damp palm. “Sit down awhile.” The man blinked. “I’ll stand,” he said, putting the gun back in his pocket. “I want you to listen.”

19

He took a deep breath, and his face turned upward, hieratically still, and there were shadows where his eyes should have been. “Are you going to talk, or...” “Yes,” he said serenely. “Now please shut up.” Then he began. “We built a city out there in the desert. We were people from all over, and they hired us to build a city, and then, a tower. It was our pride, two years of our lives, and then it was gone. “First we broke the land with bulldozers, and then we paved the streets and named them after trees that had never grown there and famous people who’d never been there. We built the houses, almost perfect except for plumbing,

-ture bought straight out of a catalog. We lived in the houses while we built the rest: the shops, the church, the town hall, the school, and we fell in love with the town as it grew around us, loved it so much that it almost became real. My house was at Oak and Spenser, the only real house I’ve ever lived in, with a front porch, an apple tree, and a creaky bench-swing. I used to sit there in the evenings, listening to my Slovak neighbor

20

drink and sing rancheras with the Mexicans, and I would imagine that the house was mine— I was going to have children and paint stars on the ceil-ing of their nursery.

and began on the tower, a few miles south. It was a big steel-girder thing, about eighty feet tall, and work went slowly. Something was always go-ing wrong; the scaffolding fell down or the tools weren’t right or welds didn’t hold. The managers came down from Washington and yelled at the foremen, and the foremen yelled at us, but noth-ing in the world could have made us speed up; we all knew that once the tower was done, we would have to leave.

It was the greatest thing that any of us had ever made, and in the pictures we are all smiling,

“But that was it. Moving trucks lined up in the plaza, and all through the town was a babble of hundreds of voices in dozens of language as people gathered their things and talked about where they were going and what they would do

21

when they got there. Meanwhile, I sat on my swing, eating the only apple that my tree had ever grown. It was tiny and sour. I stared down the street, out beyond where the concrete ended, out at the tower far in the distance. That was where they were going to put the atom-bomb. “They took us away, but I came back a few weeks later, following a stream-bed into the scrub, through the cat-claw acacia, the saltbush, the

remained; the rest had been blown away, even the desert weeds, and the ground was barren, all except for a million scattered shards of strange, green glass, like an ocean broken on the sand.” The man stopped and swayed slightly. He smiled again. “I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought...” he said, and then shook

mine, and something inside me twisted. “Tell me,” he said. “Why?” I tried to think of a reply, but all I could hear was the wind. “Why?” he asked again, and his face was incomprehensible, a jumble of empty canyons under the hermetic lamplight. “Why?” he asked, and then I saw that

22

the word was as meaningless as the story, as the wind and the desert and my cracked plastic mug. I rose shakily. He was shorter than I had thought, and the cold light glinted off a bald patch in his white hair. “Why?” he asked, and I told him I didn’t know. I nearly left him standing there alone in the middle of that Love’s parking lot, and I probably should have. It is unwise to associate too closely with desert prophets. But just as I began edging over to my car, I caught another glimpse of those damn too-short dark pants with those ratty white socks, one with a hole in it and the other fallen down, and I stopped. “What’s your name?” I asked, bitterly. I hated myself at that moment, hated my own foolish sentimentality, even as I indulged it. “Abner,” he said, still caught in his reverie. Somehow, my mouth kept talking. “My name’s Arnold,” I said. “But my nom de plume is J. H.

me. “And that’s your nom day what?” he asked. Why the hell had I told him that? “My pen name. What I sign on my books. On

23

my book.” “Oh,” he said politely. “That is more book-ish than Arnold.” Despite myself, I began to draw him out him out, asking how he had gotten there, where he slept, how long he had been here, and soon we

hitchhiking. Of course, it was the logical thing to invite him along to the literary conference, and

story, and I think that the company of other sto-rytellers might do you some good.” The explana-tion didn’t really make sense to me either, but I couldn’t tell him it was because of his socks. As he considered my offer, he turned to look over at the mesquite thicket where he had told me his pack and bedroll were hidden, just beyond the parking lot. My heart dropped. He was going to accept, I just knew it. “Don’t have much else to do,” he said, turning back with a wry smile. “All right.”

The trip was surprisingly uneventful. Abner had worked as a maintenance man with Western Construction for most of his life, and when he

24

wasn’t busy hitchhiking around, scaring the be-jeezus out of strangers, he sat in his trailer-home outside of Socorro, New Mexico and drew social security. He didn’t talk much. The next evening, I found myself standing with Abner at the door of an airport hotel in Los Angeles. This was it. The beginning of my career as a recognized author. I took a breath of the dry air, and it smelled like too-fresh grass from the too-green lawn behind me. The glass tower in front of me seemed to reach up to the sky. “All right, Abner,” I said. “Just give me room to maneuver when we get inside, ok? There will be some people who want to talk to me.”

thanked by a speaker from the Society for the Advancement of Popularized Semiotics, who told us, among other things, that the presence of so many writers and critics in this room was in fact a physically-manifested intertext. I nodded compre-hendingly. Finally, they set us free to ransack the hors-d’oeuvres. I held the stem of my wineglass like the hilt of a sword, and as I mingled with the others, I watched their faces intently. In part, I was trying

25

to enjoy my peers’ secret admiration for my new book, but I was also wary of the academic con-spiracies that must be forming. The only sensible course of action, I thought, would be to remain observant, to converse lightheartedly, and wait for the conspirators to reveal themselves. It was the third time I had to introduce myself to the blonde woman in a red feather boa that I fell into despair. Somehow, as I stood there in the sunroom of an airport hotel, I couldn’t escape the thought that I was trapped in a glass-walled asylum for self-involved lunatics, and I couldn’t even care enough to write the metaphor down on

my joke about constructive deconstructionism, excused myself and sat down in a folding chair. I nearly put my head in my hands and cried, but that would have been trite. Abner seemed to be enjoying himself. I watched as he seized a somewhat portly man by

speaking intently. After a few minutes or so, in re-sponse to what appeared to a query by Abner, the man shrugged his shoulders and shook his head repeatedly. Abner nodded absently and moved

26

on, repeating the routine with every stranger he -

ing his story. Without warning, a hand grabbed my shoul-der, and in a moment of joy I nearly stabbed the conspirator with a fork before I saw that the hand belonged to a man wearing a knit cap. He had a thick, gray beard, and as he leaned in close, I smelled fried food. He spoke, in a voice that was deep and rough and full of import. “I read your book and disliked it. You spelunked deeply into the navel of the modern world, but lacking the headlamp of expe-rience, you failed to truly illuminate your subject matter.” His eyes were wise behind his reading glasses, and he seemed writerly in his thick wool

buffet,” he said. He had read my book. For a moment I was happy that he had read it, and then I felt insulted by what he had said about it, and then doubt struck me. Had he really read it? I watched him

the pockets of his coat. What he had said, strange as it was, was actually quite generic, when I

27

thought about it— it could have applied to any-one here. And on second glance, he looked more homeless than writerly. I couldn’t imagine how he had gotten here. I began to laugh despite myself,

my book. But if a probably-crazy homeless man could make it among these scribblers, why the hell couldn’t I? By now, most of the people had gathered in little clusters near the buffet against the opposite wall, and I decided to go over and shop around,

accosted seemed to be holding court. “The poet must not shy from combat with his predecessors” he said, red-faced, “For the strongest poetry can be born only from the agon; it must be ripped still-crying from a rotting past.” He stared around

between Kabbalistic totality and nihilistic dearth, there can be no demilitarized zone— no, only trope, and the troping of trope. And perhaps even,” he said, raising his bushy eyebrows danger-ously, “the troping of troping of trope.” Feeling assaulted, I decided to move on.

28

In the next group another man was speaking, gesturing languidly with a rustle of tweed, and the atmosphere was altogether less hostile, but somehow more disturbing. His words fell ripely from his lips with a vaguely Continental cadence. “...And so, at every level of linguistic structure, the fractal synecdoche of narrative occurs and recurs, appearing, or rather, reappearing, as narrative qua-narrative.” A woman

“Each word entwines itself with the wortraum, the word-space, that surrounds it, transmuting to become a worttraum, a word-dream, groping outward beyond its boundaries, so folding inward upon itself, incestu-ous, recursive, envaginating...” His audience leaned forward as he trailed away in gnostic ecstasy, and the sexual tension was almost palpable. I felt sick. “Go on” said a man, gutturally. “Show us, tell us, please...” said the others. I hurried away before he continued. I didn’t want to hear how a word could envaginate. In the next group, people were chatting in a desultory way, something about whether or not Nabokov’s writing could be considered “crispy,” a conversation that I would normally enjoy, but I was still too preoccupied from my previous encounters. I went to the wine bar

29

to try to clear my head. The literary world was far stranger than I had imagined. Abner was there, and he was having the time of his life. He turned to me, munching happily from a plate full of brownies. “It’s so easy to make them listen!” he said. “I just grab them and start talking and they listen— so much easier than the parking-lot. I didn’t even have to point this at them!” He fumbled at the pocket of his coat, but I grabbed his arm and told him that I got the idea. We talked for a while, and then he left the wine-bar. After a few fortifying glasses, I re-entered the fray, determined to make my mark. Some people had left, and the various groups had united into one large circle. It would be the perfect setting to subtly divert conversation toward the subject of my book. I nosed my way in, spilling a little wine on a man’s cashmere turtleneck. Trying to make light of it, I joked that there was little harm in some Merlot on a shirt that was already burgundy, but he wrinkled his nose. “This shirt is Cabernet,” he said. I apologized profusely and then pretended to be engrossed in the conversation that was tak-

30

except that they were talking about a story that seemed somehow familiar. Abner was across from me in the circle, and his grin was as wide as it could be. “And besides, describing the apple tree just confuses your story’s topos,” a mosquito-ish, needle-nosed woman was saying. “The story is already an allegory of one biblical passage, and here you try to insert another one, and half-heart-edly at that. It makes a muddle of the original text.” An apple tree. I had just heard a story with an apple tree in it, but I couldn’t remember where. The woman was looking disdainfully at Abner, who smiled back, impervious, and I realized that

-ing to him. I supposed that that was why he was smiling. It was ironic, really, that my hitchhiker was getting more attention than I was. “I disagree,” someone said. It was the red-faced man. “The quote-unquote ‘original text’ is immaterial to this discussion; as Rabbi Isaac the Blind wrote in the thirteenth century— if you will permit me—”

31

The ruddy-faced man cut her off with a belli-cose rumble and continued. “‘Everything that we

in ink on parchment, consists, in the last analysis,

It’s not a question of faithfulness in interpret-ing an unknowable original. What matters is the strength of the misinterpretation.” In the ensuing silence, the tweed-coated European spoke. “There, now you have said your piece, and we are all duly impressed. We accept

“Yes,” the other man grumbled. Now was my chance. “Yes,” I said, “I agree completely. But what about more contemporary literature? For example, I just read the most inter-esting book—”

“It fascinates me.” Others murmured in assent, and I faltered. Abner seemed thoroughly enter-tained by the proceedings, and the bearded man in the army jacket watched us intently as he ate cucumber sandwiches from his pocket.

32

“It’s funny you should say that,” I said, gather-ing myself again. “This book I read actually does have an apple in it, and it’s really quite impor-tant—” “Yes, when one talks about an apple,” the European said languorously,“one inevitably tran-scends the fructian... The latin for apple, mallus, is irresistibly close, perhaps inextricably close, to the word mallum, or evil...” “Well, in this book I read, the apple isn’t really evil, but I guess I could see some deeper—” No one seemed to be listening, and the man contin-ued, savoring his words. “...Which is why, I suppose, St. Jerome trans-lated it as ‘apple’ in the Vulgate bible, despite that the earlier Septuagint did not specify the fruit that grew on the tree of knowledge...” “You see, that is the epitome of strength,” the ruddy-faced man said. “Forceful, copulative ap-propriation.” “I mean, in the book, it’s just made into fruit

the main character, who—” “Similarly, the pomegranate; the pomme-grenade, the Granadan apple; was the fruit that

33

trapped Persephone in Hades...”

again. “The fruit salad is described as turning out ‘hellishly’— you see, the main character is a man who—” “However, the paradise of Britannic legend, Arthur’s dwelling-place, is named Avalon, a word whose origins lie in the Old Breton avall, or apple...” All of their faces were becoming blurred, and their eyes glinted like shards of glass. “Spare us the legends—archaicism is dead!” said a small man with dark, spiked hair. “Flaccid in its sentiment, weak in its themes,” agreed the ruddy-faced man. Caught up in the excitement of it all, the homeless man joined in. “Yes, a fulgent diatribe!” “Listen, this character I read about, he—” “What is more, the German term for horse shit, or nonsense, is pferdäpfel, or, literally, horse-apples...” Somehow a wind was blowing in my ears, and I could smell the desert.

34

“Yes! It is only such strong imagery that shall

by time!” the ruddy-faced man bellowed. “Turgid with pandemoniac fervor!” said the homeless man. “Listen to me—” I said. The wind roared, and I heard the foundations of the tower groaning. “And so, when one makes the utterance “apple,” one unavoidably invokes a host of varie-

“Listen!” I shrieked. Blowing sand stung my face, and I could hardly see the people next to me. “Callipygean pulchritude!” I was blind in the white light, and the tower was crashing down around me.

highest good and the purest evil,” “The agon and the ecstasis!” “the sacred and the profane,” “The sacerdotal and the pendulous!” “that is, one invokes—” “Listen!” “—nothing at all.”

35

spinning fastermini Wheels of Fortuneclicking clackingslowingstoppinglanding on mefocusing on Me--my heart stops. miniature sunspulling me ini am the earththey are the sunsno controlno choicei revolve around You. made of atomseach a diamondsparklingbeckoning

Your EyesMelissa Shaffer

36

welcomingmay i come in? i try the handlelocked.bolted.sealed from the inside?the wheel stuck.lids closed.my heart stops—

37

One night, with pals, Max Bauldly smoked the weedUntil his bedroom walls dissolved away.Then saw, across a smoggy plane, rustedIron claws, gripping Our Brain. The clouds displayed

Tenaciously, the worm-like tumors pulsedAs healthy glowing cells were yanked insideThe hellish organ, locked in cast iron’s hold.“I just realized, society can’t bindUs if we shift our focus from ‘real life.’We’ll form a network to wake up mankind.”His breath was bad. At gym class the next day,

And thought of meeting girls by acting gay.

Shelley RiffChris Conlon

38

A close acquaintance glibly told me that distance is

a lack of togetherness.

I told her it was space, or what the Japanese call mah,How far apart things are in space

a n d t i m e ,

Sometimes carefully measured

And sometime s skewed.

Distance is not an absence.

I say this because it has power,

And I don’t believe a lack of a thing has

power.

Distance can change the world.

Distance is what makes warriors learn to train their

eyes to aim their arrows to pierce other men’s

hearts and leave this place known as home.

Earth. Life.

Distance can break hearts,

when love cannot survive with another soul to feed upon

sometimes because it just isn’t worth it

DistanceElizabethe Hambleton

39

and the lovers pack up their hopes and go,

sometimes because it wasn’t real

and being apart reveals the sham,

which breaks the heart

but prevents it from shattering later in life.

When a soldier comes back from war,

having seen more bloodgutsmawdeath than

one man can handle or contain

having heard more

criessobsshrieksmoanswails

than he can bear,

Distance can heal.

Distance can bring two people together so they

no longer have to feel alone.

He does this by removing himself atom by atom

and feel electricity.

40

i am a fucking unicorni am a sailor and a semen and a captain and a parrot

i am a Nazi i am Captain Americai am Robinhoodi am Prince Johni am a hero and traitori am the queen of spadesi am a soldier in the war against myself i am a soldier in the war for more tragedy and more altruism and more Jon Stewart and less sugar in children’s cereali am a soldier in the war for more ideas and less polyesteri am a soldier in the war for more Bob Barker and less angry radioi am a soldier in the war for more, not less

i am a soft blanket of alpaca wool and buttons your grandmother painted

We are what we pretend to be.

Beth Daviess

41

i am not a disappointment because there is no one to disappoint but myselfi am not a fairytale because those have endingsi am not a novel because those have to starti am a web spun of words that all sound like washed up metaphors because i wrote them that way

Call me Ishmael.call me dangercall me calamitycall me cat on a hot tin roofcall me Clytemnestracall me Circe, Odysseuscall me callouscall me tomorrow call me tomorrow night around one when your taste buds are all glazed over and all you want is someone’s cold pair of legs in your bedcall me Cleo-fucking-patra

We must be careful what we pretend to be.we must be careful what we wish forwe must cultivate our gardenwe must stop allowing mercury pollution

we must know that its you’re not your

42

we must know that its whom not whowe must know that its i not mewe must not be so good at being ourselves that even we can’t tell what is real and what’s not

we must have unwritten momentswe must ignite paradoxwe must be incomprehensible

we must live under our bedswe must be our own monsterswe must die, not in vainwe must be perfect only because we are absurd

43

Growing up, there was never alcohol in the house. Now that us kids have grown up a bit, the occasional bottle of wine is hesitatingly bought by my mother, with advice from my sister as to what it can best be paired with. On New Year’s there was champagne, and the youngest of us, then just a brand new teenager, declared that it tasted like bile. My parents chuckled relief.

Sometimes I wonder what our lives would be

with God in college and then imposed strict lines of good and bad on a few factors of our family. It seems obvious that boundaries are tantalizing to cross, especially by those brought up in an idyllic childhood of boundarylessness. A miniscule town, a whole forest for a backyard. We were

anything about sex, drugs and certainly not rock

The DNA of AA/NA

Erin Kanzig

44

‘n roll until public school swept us up in tidal wave that took us years to maneuver. The oldest

Three different inpatient rehabilitation centers, including one before graduating high school, resulted in short respite from worry for the rest of the family. Then there was the two heroin overdoses that left some of us with permanent images ingrained in the grey matter of our

blue lips pressed against my dad’s as one breath, two breaths, pushed their way into his unresponsive lungs, punch, punch, his sternum bent beneath the weight of desperate hands trying to keep him away from death. He listened to punk rock music and had Cruella DeVil hair, studded belts and leather jackets. In high school

his closet, or would pour any full ones down the kitchen sink. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, pills, shrooms, weed, etc., etc. Criminal records, possession of drug paraphernalia, license

stole money from my younger brother to buy

45

drugs. He was a dealer. Homeless in Portland too, skeletal and absent from the family. Selling

sides. Brother or parents? The decisions left us on different trajectories growing wider and wider apart. Next one, me. The “goody two-shoes,” the “hard working, disciplined one.” Closest to the disaster zone of my brother, I somehow missed the shrapnel. Next is my sister, a one-of-a-kind force who reckons she knows best. Her plan was more elaborate and perhaps less of a result of personal unhappiness and more of a rebellious teenage stance and a declaration of independence. Escaping curfews, dating rules and the close supervision of my parents, she went all the way to Central America at age 16, drinking every night and quickly overcoming any sexual inexperience she may have had. Once she came home, my parents monitored her, suspicious of every move, but she applied to colleges and headed east, to get away from “this tiny damn town.”

46

She’s back in that little town after two semesters

Now she’s working at a grocery store selling cigarettes and rental movies. On the weekends, she takes pictures of herself drinking alcohol alone and puts them on Facebook. I call to tell her she’s pretty cool. Then I write her letters telling her that I believe in her, that she’s more than an Alcoholics Anonymous member in the making, but she never responds.

Like I said, the youngest still thinks champagne tastes like bile, but the other brother, he got wasted the other night. There are plenty of high school kids that party and don’t end up as heroin addicts or college drop outs, but since it’s been two for three so far, our parents’ faith in our ability to avoid addiction is low.

My grandfather was a traveling salesman who was a mean drunk, as far as I can tell. My dad doesn’t talk about him much. When I ask, he responds, “What is there to tell? He was an alcoholic.” He died when my dad was 15, of liver failure.

47

We like to hide what we fear, my family. My dad fears ending up like his dad, my mom fears losing

our siblings. Somehow, everything rises to the surface. Addiction is dependency, when all we

Growing up, it might have been good to have alcohol in the house, just to know it was something that didn’t have to be hidden. My parents probably wish the same thing too. Their own innocence made us guilty.

My brother and my sister and my brother and my brother and my dad and my mom and I have all said, in varying forms of sincerity, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

All I can think is: just don’t relapse.And please, don’t let me be next.

48

It was only after the dog had scampered out of the alley into the light that I got the strength to say to myself, perhaps I better ought to move poker to Tuesday.

What was I doing there? Where did this hand come from? Had I really laughed at that many sub-par jokes from bit-rate comedians? Could you even call that comedy? What does that say about genre? And that hand—there was a ring

sucker back? What was the point? Why didn’t bone stain with blood all over it? What was that smell? Who usually comes down this alley at 3:24? Why did Shaw contact me about the Chartreuse Tulip when he knows Santianti has Marlene, who has it? But isn’t she playing them both? Why did she say I looked like Alan Ladd? Who the fuck is Alan Ladd? Would Daryl come on a Tuesday? God I gotta get my games straight. What am I doing in this place? Why does the

The Big StreetNick Michal

49

doctor have no face? Which would work better on that goon that Santianti carried around in his pocket—a knife to the jugular, or a .38 to the jugular? Who designed the angle of these ridiculous lights?—I can’t read the number on this sheet. Aww forget it.

I stubbed out my cigarette, busted down the alley, and hit the black tar.

50

a breath unbornstill at the doorwavering door swings, singing suggestion

here we stand5This is it—the edge. the sand lock.the peace brigade

(is it supposed to feel like this?)

I tell my daughter to hold her head high.Head high. this world your world. owninglike an oyster—you’ve done nothing wrong

this catches in your throat— is not real is more real that real.

[A reel spins, the edge catching,

MechanismsEllie Newell

51

a tail punctuating the motion,

strip grainy, no chaplin althoughwe all laugh, It seems theonly way to be. Hot light w/ noheat, only a chill where the saltunearthed. This is the now]

A mechanism. An iron lungwheezing close

52

IV. Hometowns

Folkerth: “I’m from Enumclaw.”Evergreen Student: “That’s fucked up.”

V. Kitchens

One might saynight takes on the shape and pierceof brain-thaw relapse, yet it’s hardto tell as she keeps companywith so much that’s left unformed.

Still, she seems the champion ofall that irks: of desert-chefswondering at disappearingCO2 cream-cartridges: of never-ending aches behind the eyes:of walk-in freezers solidifying snot and dislocated lobsters

Problems With Sex

53

squeaking in their chill-ed exoskeletons while youshiver—not certain ifit’s the air or the recognitionof small death approaching,that causes this

in a 5 gallon bucket of sticky sweetsorbet, and TJ claims overdoseis more a metaphor for sprawl, (ed limbs, entangled yet disinterested, fuck-off-Nancy stab wounds)whether it be in blanketed suburbia or Rainier Beach,than for carpet-baggedintimate embrace.

VI. Oedipus

Night, although her friends seem suspectto me, is not the nothing gone unseenby nobody in a blizzard.Rather she is like beauty,who—If I’m not mistaken—fadesorjust changes hair styles so I mistake it for a womanwith the nose in pictures of my mom before she (mis)took it for ugly andopted for two black eyes.

54

doorstep because it is wrapped in plastic and smells like sympathy. This family does not need sympathy. I will break the stems and rip the

“your mother has cancer” and when she sees them, she will remember the tumor and she needs to forget right now. To forget the doctor’s appointments, forget the tiny cells taking over her body, forget the diagnosis of losing sleep and hair and dignity. But when girl scouts and yogurt lids are raising money for cancer at every corner, forgetting is the work of poets and alcoholics. So Mr. Mailman, please send us a bottle of gin instead of plastic sympathy because you’re composing a symphony that’s making this family nauseous with the words on the cards and the words of the prayers and every time we hear the orchestra tuning up to play Hallmark’s “Please

Dear Mr. MailmanKatie DeCramer

55

God, keep her in your thoughts” we can’t hear ourselves think because cancer is in every room

God has a sick sense of humor and I’m laughing while I break each stem in that purple bouquet.

56

How now!You speak in loud whispersDost thou go about and speak to me of ourCulture, Art, and Highest Heights? Without short there is no tall—without fat there is no thin—Without our crap we have no clean.We do not maintain our boundaries and trim our distinctions because it is fun. We do it because it is necessary.

Ah, Now thinks youDarling,Now says youWhat would you have us do? We have already constructed this glimmering trophy From which we rightly chisel out our names.Bless your sweet heart, You remind me,

Canon FodderGrant Bradley

57

pursuits in self-expression!

Oh dreary me, no, your talk just will not do—Come home to the universitas, universitatis,Return to our renovated halls of academe And ascend once again our mountain of corpses—Over yonder you can quite make out the contour of that ridge, Perhaps the elbow of a young poet,

But fret not, my dear sir and madam—The Masters have so cobbled together their heap that it gleams brilliantly and lovingly—What need have we to fear These coddled suppositions,Those soft rambling invectives which never reach their point?—forTaking a breathKeeping time Tapping your bakelite cigarette holder against your ivory ashtrayThe heap remains unaltered, shining forth in blinding light,Despite wild cries to steer our sight to deepest darkest night.

58

We are standing on your front step, the neighborhoodIs lovely, but it’s about to rain. Should we go inside? We are chewing the time,I will be polite, I will walk straight. It has been a long time.You’ll offer to make lunch, I’ll say yes please, and thank you.

Although at home I betrayed myself,Eating an eight inch triangular cluster of chocolate Toblerone before coming over.The discomfort is physical:Ravens are pecking at my scalp as I hang over

I’m already inside and my windbreaker is draped over the kitchen chair.

A Woman Agrees to Lunch With Her Ex-Fiancee and Rips Out His Throat Over a Far-Side Coffee Mug

Joshua Tacke

59

I’ll summon my limbs like a colony of worker ants

Your face rotting in a bowl of soup.The bread knife will be strategically placed,It will look like suicide. Oooh!

The tea kettle is hissing.

You are ripping apart a head of lettuce, you know exactlyWhat I want on my sandwich.I did exactly what you told me to do:I moved out—I moved on.

But you still have my Far-Side coffee mug

And are pre-occupied with the salad, so I help myselfTo the tea: reclaiming a probably thoughtless giftThat is collecting dust in the far-reaching plateau of your cupboard. Could you betray yourself? You seem serene and soft.

patiently Trilling the side of the mug. Well, time is about up.

60

The tea is scalding hot and my tongueAlways too sensitive. We could never go out to pizza.

I take a sip anyway, and as you turn to face me

my stomachAnd I lift the tea-pot above my head: your clean shaven face frozenIn a smile

(you knew I burned my tongue),As I bring it down upon the bridge of your nose.

You are screaming and tears are spilling out of me as an angelicChorus of Southern Baptists rejoice, a holy blast Of beautiful music so powerfulI am overtaken,

The smell of your scalded face An afterthought as I peel it off, pieces of your beautiful nose

Please, you scream and scream and scream

You used to say it more softly, you were so unsure,

61

So full of insecurity. I am clawing your throat.Who says we need to get married?Well, I did,

This may be hard to believe but I loved youTo the point where I sat and ached and missed you,

Expecting much more than the niceties you dangled

In front of me. Are we cool? You asked on the porch.Ice Cool.I told myself, I will not betray myselfBut I did,

place?

63

year oxen we were shuttled off to a fair number of activities, but one of the few that stayed with me was my visit to the “Museum of Unnatural History,” his public art space on Main. Even

could feel the weight of the author behind each piece. He’s a vocal man, and nowadays his works have become his soapbox: highly conceptual, socially critical, and laughing with him at the world’s absurdities—often, you get the sense, snickering. Matthews named the museum as a response to living across from the Museum of Natural History in New York City and imagining what a museum of “unnatural history” might look

The Unnatural History of Whom?

An Interview by Paris White

64

like. As you round a corner to come inside his space, a landscape of sculptures, contraptions and three-dimensional critiques, hits you all at once. In the tradition of the Surrealists, each piece serves as an unlikely meeting place for disparate objects, abnormal and mundane, coming together for the purpose of a message, often an offensive one. The man is certainly not afraid of walkouts. This easy acceptance of criticism might have something to do with his Jack-of-all-Trades performance background. Prior to moving to Walla Walla, Matthews spent most of his life as an actor, doing anything and everything creative to keep himself fed. In different instances he’s been a nightclub comedian, a character on “Lambchop’s Play-Along,” and the signature voice of “Sugar Bear,” the cartoon mascot of the cereal brand “Super Golden Crisps.” On the day I came in for the interview, I found Gerry in the main room of his gallery—he sat against the wall, blending in with his artwork. As the recording kicked in, and we settled into our chairs, I jumped into the interview with the small talk we’d been having

65

about his afternoon: he’d been butchering his chickens. While reading this interview, try to imagine his voice. It is soft, nice on the ears, and strolls from one story to another. Although, a forewarning: it bites.

PW: So did the actual taste of the meat [on the old hens] change at all?

it, a whole lot less meat on the breast. On the fryer, you get all the white meat on it—but these

you have to cook them all day, made chicken and dumplings.

PW: I’m actually really interested in your work: Would you use something, let’s say the feathers from the chicken, for your work? How do you go

GM: Yes, I could do that. It doesn’t take a whole

pictures or see somebody else’s work and I think: I could do something like that, only better… and

66

start out with something… like that pole behind you is covered with old rusty pieces of iron. I had that pole for several years before I did anything with it. I was accumulating these pieces of iron which started to represent man’s inhumanity to man, and animals, because those are restraining

devices mostly. So that became a symbol of inhumanity, how mean people can be. That’s one of my themes, exploiting people—resorting to commercialism and

everything. I see all the institutions are out to make a buck, you know? From churches on up.

PW: When you say becoming, what do you mean by that, exactly? Which would you say comes

GM: More often or not it’s the idea that I start with, but frequently the idea can be brought about by some object. That piece on the wall that’s full of masks is something that I saw—a

“That’s one of my themes, exploiting people.”

67

photograph of a 19th century artist, a Belgian artist, who lived over a shop that sold masks and costumes, and he was always using them in his paintings, and I loved the paintings. I thought it would be fun to make a three dimensional version, with my face right in the middle of it.

GM: I made some of them from scratch out of clay and plaster. Others I found on Ebay, just looking under “masks”. And I got a whole bunch of them there that are all pretty much alike, so I cut them, printed them, painted them and made them different—gave them hats and things and so forth. So it’s really just a fun thing. I like it.

PW: I imagine Ebay is this totally new avenue for an artist that uses physical, mixed media, as far as a new wasteland or form of the “ junkyard” to look through.

GM: Yeah, it provides a great deal of useful objects. It’s too easy, though, really. You can

68

several hundred thousand on there, but then you can pick and choose which ones you want… It’s more fun to just come across them. People bring me things too. They decide I should have cow bones, and so they bring me boxes of cow bones. There’s a bear skull up at the top of that pole that belonged to somebody. And this tower over here,

a fella who thought I should do something with it. I did.

P: What is your favorite thing that someone’s brought to you?

G: My favorite thing someone’s brought to me… Hmmm… I don’t know, I think most of themI’m not that mad about. [laughs] Well, that piece over there of the horse with Dick Cheney andGeorge Bush on the back, somebody brought me that horse, it was just a child’s toy, and… thatworks pretty well.

P: As far as the pieces of your art that move, how did you go about creating the mechanisms thattriggered the movement? Did you grow up as a

69

kid learning how to make little motors?

GM: Those things that are moving over there are the result of a kit you could buy when you were a kid. They came with little electric motors in them, and they have gears on them, they’re very unusual and rare. I never played with them much as a kid because my brother was older, and he dominated the scene—but about the time I turned seventy I started collecting those pieces on Ebay, and following their directions I built those two pieces, only I altered them quite a bit, made them a little more spectacular. And I think— no, I haven’t had any training or education in engineering or anything like that. Most of it’s just common sense. This one here, the US Army Corps de Ballet, is built on an old record player, which you can get down to sixteen and a half RPMs, or something like that. So I made use of that. I had the thing in mind before I got that far, but… I love that piece. Everyone who comes here likes it a lot and the one above it. They’re very politically motivated and cynical. All my adult life I worked in New York City in the nightclubs, and I did social and political satire there. So

70

when we, my wife and I, decided to escape New York and moved here to retire. I didn’t have any outlet for my naughty observances. I started building these things at home, then it got out of hand, so I rented this space and started moving them here around the time of 9/11, about ten years ago, eleven years ago. And then I got encouraged, kept building more things. I haven’t stopped.

PW: Was moving to Walla Walla the trigger for your exploration of art—visual art—as an art form? Because you had said, well, you were the voice of Sugar Bear, but you were also a clown, and you did a lot of performance art.

GM: I wasn’t a clown in the sense of being in the circus. I was a clown on television and in the theatre and in nightclubs. By being a clown, I mean being somebody who made a fool of himself, but not wearing a big, red nose. I worked for Shari Lewis. Do you know who she was?

PW: No, I don’t.

71

GM: She was puppet-puppeteer. She had Lamb Chop—

PW: [As I get it] Wait, the show? The children’s show?

GM: Yeah, the children’s show. I played a character on there called “Billy Bully” with freckles on my face and my teeth blacked out and a red wig, so I essentially was a clown, but most of the time I was making fun of Lamp Chop, throwing pies at him and stuff like that, so this kind of clown thing.

PW: So do you still know her very well?

GM: Yeah, I knew her until she died. In fact, we

she hired me to write a bunch of children’s books called “One Minute Bedtime Stories,” because she didn’t think anyone had time to read more than a minute to their child. And they were all based on things like the Old Testament and the New Testament and Greek myths and so forth. Mostly things that aren’t appropriate for children

72

at all. Especially the Old Testament’s just… gruesome. So reducing the Old Testament, which

a chore.

PW: More of a chore than reading it?

GM: Well, [laughs] about equal. No, actually reducing it was kind of fun because you can really get a full page—a typed page—down to one minute. It’s an interesting thing to try to do. I don’t think they’re very good. She paid me. Moloch here is one of the things I found in the Old Testament. He’s a deity that you’re

Testament. That he’s evil, and you should avoid him—but I liked him.

PW: You liked him. Was he described at all? What did you like about him?

GM: I liked the fact that the people in the Old Testament hated him. [laughs] And I liked the fact that he’s a no-nonsense god. He’s the kind of God where you can get the right things from him if you

73

do the right stuff, which is described on the other side of the box, which means if you are willing

get from him—you can attain world peace by making a whole

PW: How do you think your art has changed as you’ve gotten older, because you said that you have changed a lot of your artwork, that you’ve made revisions. How has growing older and looking at earlier works changed your process?

GM: I wasn’t very serious about it originally. In New York I used to make things too—there’s a picture of one on that door over there—that was just fun for me. Well that one, actually, is a complaint about the war in Vietnam, a sort of timely thing. And it describes the United States

“— you can attain world

peace by making a whole list of

74

in a very unsavory way, if you care to come over and look at it. And I didn’t do them very often either. I’ve been married several times, so every time I got divorced I had to leave everything behind, and I didn’t bring anything like that

we didn’t have much furniture. We didn’t bring anything with us to speak of, so I started making furniture in the basement. The more I made, the more involved I got with it, and I did that for about ten years, and people started coming to buy it. We started selling it in New York, and Seattle, and then I realized that I’m supposed to be retired, and I didn’t want to make furniture all the time. People would order ten dining room tables, you know—that’s labor. I was doing it by myself, with my wife’s help. That’s when I put my foot down and started concentrating on making these things that I had fun doing, this way I’m able to express my opinions about life and society without having to stand up on a stage with a bunch of cigarette smoking and hope that no one throws up on the stage. A night club is a pretty heinous place to work, possibly. A lot of heavy drinking, and a lot of heavy smoking, in those

75

days.

PW: Do you ever go back to New York?

GM: Not anymore. I used to. For a long time I was still going around and doing the voice of Sugar Bear. And I had to go to New York to do

the way of all good things.

Walla Walla as an artistic community? Do you think there is an established one?

GM: What there is is not terribly successful, I don’t think. And mostly it’s for home decorating, something you’d want to hang over your couch. There’s nothing in here you can hang over your couch. And most of the art here I think is well made. It’s just that they’re watercolors of sunsets and streams and wheat

“There’s nothing in

here you can hang over your

couch.”

76

to do things like that, but I don’t imagine that anyone takes it very seriously. This place that was a gallery for a while, Willow, was it called? Right down the street? Anyway, they just closed up after about three years, and couldn’t make a living selling art to anybody in Walla Walla.

PW: What do you think is necessary for a piece of artwork to be taken seriously?

GM: It probably needs to be made by our resident genius Jim Dine. You know who he is?

PW: I know the name.

GM: He has a couple of studios here, and a house here. He has one in New York, one in Europe, and so forth. He’s probably the most famous living American artist. He’s a little younger than I, and he just churns them out, mostly with the help of assistants, you know he’ll say, “Okay, well make that a little larger, and get that, and—.” So he does some pretty interesting things, but I think he’s totally commercial now, and he can

77

sell anything he makes. He did that Venus that’s on your campus: big tall, colorful thing. He’s got those Venuses all over the world—there are several in New York City, and one in Japan. He makes them out of Styrofoam, and then they cast them in bronze, which he doesn’t have anything to do with. So that’s what you need to do to make

and he lives in Germany, has for many years, and he has never made a cent doing it. His wife has a job, so they were able to live, but now she’s kicked him out and I think the German government is taking care of him, because he’s an artist. It’s a hard road of hope, art. I’m glad I don’t have to make a living at it. It’s hard enough making a living in show business, but at least there was a market for that. You did as well as you could doing anything you could, and I did everything in the world to make a living as an actor, doing commercials and all sorts of industrial shows,

PW: What do you think allowed you to be successful at doing that, where other people haven’t been?

78

GM: I don’t know. I think about that a lot because I’m eighty you know, and thinking back over the past quite a bit, my wife and I are the same age, and she was extremely successful on Broadway, won a couple of Tony awards, and had every reason to be successful. I was just a mediocre actor, but I had a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and I decided after much thinking about it, that a lot of people thought I was cute. Men and women alike. So I had people taking an interest in me. That surprised me now that I think about it; why did she spend so much time helping me, why did… you know. The man I worked for mostly in the nightclubs was a gay man, and I know that he was after my ass all the time. But I wouldn’t give in, you know? I simply said, “You can hold my hand, but I’m not going to kiss you.” [laughs] I had a good time in show business, but it also got to be a real drag, you know. I did six shows, what was it, no twelve shows a week, two shows a night, six nights a week, each show being two hours. So I worked four hours with a forty minute intermission every week, and that’s a lot of work—especially if some of the people don’t like it.

79

PW: How did you stay sane during that? Did you have certain things you would do to—

GM: I drank. Alcohol. And for a while I was smoking marijuana, and I found cocaine to be a great boost. But I kicked all of it. I didn’t do it with any regularity. But drinking was… after all.. I worked in a night club and there was a bar, so I could have a shot of scotch or something before the show, and by that time everybody in the audience was drunk so they didn’t know whether I was or not. And there are a lot of performers like Dean Martin who never worked without being drunk, so I guess it works for some of us. And after all Sugar Bear is imitating Bing Crosby and Dean Martin.

PW: Oh yeah?

GM: Yeah, it’s their voice. You know [here he switches to Sugar Bear] talk like that, hey hey. Hey Granny Goodwitch, how’s your magic.[sings]Can’t get enough of Super Golden Crisp, it’s got the crunch with punch. Yeah.

80

PW: Do you ever do any sort of acting or performing now? Do you miss it?

GM: I don’t miss it at all. We’ve been asked at the college and the little theater around, but that’s all. It’s a bit snobbish of me, but it’s all very amateur, and I can’t think of anything that would entice me to do that. It’s not a relaxing work. I’m so glad not to be doing it, because I’m not worried about it. I’m not worried about the next audition, or if I got the job worrying about opening night, or going on every night and not forgetting the lines. That was all very tense, and yes I went through periods of having to drink more than I should, and went through periods of wondering if when I got through the curtain

can go mad trying to get over that. I suffered with that quite a bit. After you’ve been working a few years, there’s certain expectations of what you do, that it’s going to be good, or at least

little scary. So I really liked making commercials because you didn’t have to do that, I could read

81

right off of a piece of paper, over the microphone. Easy, easy work. I used to say Sugar Bear was an eight hour year, most people have an eight hour day. Because Sugar Bear took no time at all—it was just go in, sit on a stool, read the lines and go home. Not very noble work.

is that different from what you’d imagined?

GM: No, I don’t think so. Because I’ve done it a little off and on for years. But the satisfaction is quite huge because it’s all mine, and nobody else can tell me what to do. So I opened my own museum and don’t charge anybody to see it, and it’s my stuff and I like it and I’m proud of it. And when people come up and see it and they like it—that’s very satisfying, more satisfying than acting.

laugh at you, and they often don’t.

PW: And do you think that plays out, on a smaller level, when people walk through?

GM: Mhm, to some extent. [pause] I noticed the

82

lights are out in the hall, did you notice that? It’s black out there.

A pair of heads peek out, young people, and this is the end of our conversation, more or less. He lets out a “hello” and they walk around the room, paying us little attention. As

about his skateboard, he says, “It looks like it’s smiling.”

Thanks

quarterlife would like to thank the Associated Stu-

support, without which the production of this maga-zine would not be possible.

Our utmost gratitude goes to John Sasser with In-tegrity Design, The Whitman College Pioneer, blue moon, and our advisor Professor Gaurav Majumdar.

All work featured in quarterlife magazine or on the website is displayed by express permission of the au-thor or artist, who holds all relevant copyrights to her or his work.

This magazine has been printed on paper from100% post-consumer waste.