You Like This by Andrew Rihn (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) On social networking sites, when I have to list all the special things that make me, me, I list my favorite movie as the Zapruder film. People message me about it because this makes me stand out. Look, I tell them, it isn’t as though I hate the Kennedys or am into snuff films. I knock back conspiracy theories like cheap beer and the Zapruder film simply has it all: travel and romance, intrigue and murder. Read the novelization, I go on, if you want some humor. The Warren Report: what can you say? That it would have made André Breton proud? Zapruder has it all, I repeat. Everything is on that film. Except intent. Except motive. But like all good art, it leaves the audience wanting more, leaves us electing our little brothers. Politics is already like a bad Facebook quiz. In the future, we won’t even have elections, only little boxes to check on our profile. Politics won’t be anything but an identifier, which is less than an identity. Lee Harvey Oswald doesn’t clean his rifle barrel, he updates his personal profile. He doesn’t go to confession, he adds another celebrity quote and wrestles with a friend request.
by Andrew Rihn (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) These days are like lawn mower laps around the yard. The wife reassures me I am working. Around the house. Like I just took some time off to spend fixing up the things that need to be fixed. Each morning cracks open like a new beer, and when it’s drained down to the bottom, there’ll still be another in the case, just as cold. Sometimes I feel weak, kind of drained myself. Without timecards, I don’t have those knock-out punches in me anymore. No more punch-in, punch out for lunches. I’m stuck on the speed bag, swinging a tiny, endless rhythm. I’m pushing this lawn mower around my yard like Sisyphus, the kids pushing my buttons, and I’m pushing forty. Don’t I deserve the pull of unfinished work? I thought when the pushing was finished I’d be left with something like meaning. Even when I’m dead I’ll be pushing up daisies.
by Andrew Rihn (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) In school I thought Scantron sheets looked so orderly, all their bubbles lined up and sorted like the overpriced medication that filled my grandmother’s stomach, little white tablets separated by day and meal time, true and false. When I look up at the clouds, I don’t see exotic animals or sports cars. I see the problems I couldn’t solve, their fill-in bubbles left white because I didn’t know the answers. Now I know that pop singers who talk about things like pockets full of sunshine are full of crap when we’re sitting hats-off in the shade of the work truck, knocking down sandwiches with discrete beers for lunch, sunburn like a steaming noose around our necks. We dug into those placement tests with sharp number two pencils, but the prescriptions they wrote for us were better left unfilled.
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