w i l l g a l l i e n
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I met Sarah and Amber in an undergrad writing program at The Evergreen State College where we, with some friends, formed the 'Dimlab' writing group. Our primary methodology—when something doesn't work 'madlib the fuck out of it.' We moved to Seattle. Drank Miller High Life at the Shanty Tavern on Lake City Way where one can still play pool for fifty cents. We congratulated one another on our obvious brilliance with awkward high fives. We shared a two bedroom basement apartment across the street from a Thai restaurant. Amber smuggled her cat. Someone stole my Diamondback mountain bike from the back porch. Sarah's finches kept everyone awake. There was terrible pizza and rum and scrabble fights. I vacuumed a lot. I love vacuuming. Now I'm old and two cities later I still love vacuuming. alice blue has bridged then and now, somehow, and though the slog of submissions was occasionally disconcerting and the sad, formative tension of decision night still tickles my eyeballs, I will miss quietly reading each finished issue and feeling part of, however invisibly, a community of interesting writers. And so complicated and careful thanks are due to everyone who has shared work with us and read or appeared in alice blue, and certainly to Sarah and Amber, whose friendship I will always value. |
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Bob considered sinking the Rover in the Puget Sound. Trading it with Gerald was a major error, one Bob didn't want to regret at his quarterly review, though he supposed it was, after all, his own GPS device and superior detection skills that lead him back to the Rover and Gerald on his foolish mission here in Seattle, and so, in response to whatever reprimand he might receive in the future he could always relate that his own skills, preparedness, etc… had lead him back to the Rover, which he would presently retrieve for the nameless government entity that occasionally deposited large sums of money in a variety of linked offshore accounts, whereby Bob eked out his meager existence here in these United States of America he so dearly loved. All of this activity, without neglecting his primary mission and while on vacation—he was a true patriot after all. The Rover had been used in the commission of numerous felonies to establish Bob's cover identity over the course of three years, while he infiltrated a severely right wing domestic terrorist organization based, strangely enough, on the Californian coast, that bastion of liberalism, nestled among the cliff-twisted trees of Big Sur. Bob was a poet at heart and couldn't reside in Big Sur without thinking of the beats, whom he passionately hated—he called them 'gibbering asshats' to anyone who would listen. He much preferred the New York School, poets not painters. Not that it mattered in the case of the Rover whose sturdy aft compartment had never held a poem or even a book, though it often held innumerable bundles of cash money, cocaine kilos, chemical barrels, the remnants of which could be detected via diligent investigatory techniques. But should he wait for Gerald's return, or abandon him here, on his silly mission, attempting, Bob figured, to pin an unwanted child on his very own gonads, so as to create out of nothing the family he'd sometimes imagined? This, Bob knew, was a losing gambit, rife with monetary risk, and absolutely no reward. A desperate move against loneliness and like total despair—a final attempt to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless void of chicken buckets and empty Pepsi cans. Not that Bob knew what he meant when he thought that, but somehow, now, glancing into the rearview mirror for signs of Gerald, Bob could only picture Gerald standing disconsolately with a chicken bucket clutched to his chest. Red and white striped. Greasy. When Bob thought of Gerald he thought the words 'sad sack,' not that he thought of Gerald often—but in those rare moments a special ham-fisted kind of sadness for humankind split his chest into reedy, inarticulate half-sobs, which he hid behind closed fisted coughs or hollow grunts. It was not so much that Bob cared for Gerald, or anyone for that matter, but that Gerald encapsulated, for Bob, the singular struggle all humans face in their blind attempts at human to human connection—connection Bob knew to be impossible. We are after all, Bob thought, one hundred percent self-contained meat buckets. Gerald continually proved to Bob that life was a meaningless series of occurrences, that random chance had as much to do with success or failure, beauty, sex, struggle, death, sickness, love, and whatever as anything else. And, in his mind, the image of Gerald clutching a chicken bucket was really the image of humankind giving up, waving the white flag, surrendering, curling into a ball and whimpering alone in a closet with shiny, imperceptible fingers, sallow unhealthy skin, pimples. A final step in the journey toward inevitable, meaningless, singular death. And so Bob both hated and loved Gerald for his weakness, and this confounded Bob, and now left him twiddling his thumbs in the front seat of the Rover, knowing nothing good would ever happen again, no matter what decision he made in this particular moment. |
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WILL GALLIEN writes as various people including Ofelia Hunt (Today & Tomorrow, Magic Helicopter Press 2011, my eventual bloodless coup, Bear Parade 2007). in issues one five ten twenty-four |
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a l i c e b l u e t w e n t y - s e v e n I S S N 1 5 5 9 - 6 5 6 7 |