• Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapters 40 – 41

    41. I don’t sleep much that night because I worry what would’ve happened if I forgot something meaningful. Like how to write? Or how to edit. Given I have no recourse, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Obviously, it didn’t happen, and I can cover that friendship with Peta. It doesn’t look like I’ve lost anything I need with her, and I can rebuild the working relationship, but I can’t shrug off the threat of something that seemed so whimsical meaning something more. Come the morning, I struggle to haul myself out of bed, and am just eating a bowl of bran for breakfast when my phone rings…

  • Sleeping Wide Awake

    Eight

    Lying in bed at night, I think about the things I never want to hear again. I never want to hear one of IDIOT FRIEND’s bullshit excuses for why he hasn’t done work assigned to him (he once told me he hadn’t take pictures I required for a pitch deck because he couldn’t hold the camera straight due to our thirty-second earthquake), any of his mindless (and unsubstantiated) attacks, or any of his remorseful but shitty, provisional apologies. Sometimes, you offer perfunctory acceptance in return because it’s just too much effort to extract yourself from a mire of shit, stupidity, and idiocy. That’s why so many people persevere with terrible…