”This is fucking fantastic.”
Cross-legged and in a circle, the dark veiled the way their naked bodies pressed against each other.
“I feel like the Earth is hugging me.” The yellow girl squeezed her partner’s knee. ”I feel velvety hands all over my body.”
“It’s… peace.”
The men looked like they were in their late 20s, and the women — in high school.
They were in the blonde’s backyard, smoking, meditating in the nude. It was a serene scene. They seemed like either the ancients preparing for a nature ritual or a tribe of flower children sharing the sweet night.  
Then the Chevy pulled up to smash it all apart.

“There’s no smoking here.”
The waiter was stern, eyes narrowed, judging. The kid was blowing rain clouds that clung in the air, taking short drags on a cigarette enveloped in full lips.
He didn’t smoke for appearances. Or because he was addicted.
He just needed to feel like he was dying a little bit every moment. Life was so long and he was so young and he had to kill himself as often as he could, at noon and after waking and before he slept in the pillowless bed in the shack.
“Put out your cigarette, kid. You’re in a restaurant.”
Noam looked at the waiter with a dead stare. It was astonishing just how blank the kid’s gaze was, empty, hungry. Something was wanting. The waiter felt profoundly uncomfortable in his body and his mind and left the kid, cigarette intact, to pollute the booths.
When the paper was burnt up, he dropped the stub in his drink and left the place without paying. 

being me is pretty.
i get to breathe cold air and
smile at pups.
walk in alleys alone
and smell little babies.
i get to drink sweet liquor
and then spit out venom.
i get to be happy
and i am. 

“The fear of homosexuality imposes a touch taboo that isolates [adolescent] boys physically from the comfort of touch and sexualizes any touching that does come their way. Especially at adolescence, boys feel they’re too old to go to their parents for hugs and kisses, but the fact is that they still need the nurturing elements that nonsexual touch provides.”

-Raising Cain, by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D.　 

Writing is not about skill. It never has been.

It’s about pride, emotion, the intimacy of shared experience. It’s about living vicariously. It’s about being the small God that people believe in for the duration of your universe. 

We visited our third planet yesterday. It was the first one we had found with intelligent life. Kind of.
Glavkosmos’ photos had revealed a mucky green ball with packing peanut clouds that passed over the horizon and disappeared into the world’s green edge. Just looking at the photos made you gag. It was like looking at a massive clod of mold, or rotting Play-doh, or just plain shit.

The country was going crazy, for the millionth time, heavily regretting shutting down our manned mission program. The Chinese were laughing their asses off. Old Mother Russia had beat out the Americans once again. 
So the Baikonur Cosmodrome sent out a manned space shuttle from the Pluto base with their finest anthropologists, engineers, astrobiologists, you name it. I was a lucky culture specialist (technical term for “one who watches lots of movies”) that got put on the program last minute, thanks to my dual citizenship. Meanwhile, the President was kicking himself. He called my team and spoke to us personally, asking us to keep NASA informed of any developments. I told him to fuck off.
We landed on Draco 188, informally known as ShitBall, after a 10-year journey that dwarfed every road trip ever in the number of utterances of “Are we there yet?” Luckily, for most of the trip we were stoned out of our minds.

Some people are heartbreakers;

I am just a heartbroken.

Men rip genocide across the forests without remorse, yet hold human life sacred.

Hypocrisy. 

Since an early age, we have been taught that the evolution of consciousness is rare in the extreme. To find life in space would be monumental, game-changing, a paradigm shift. It could cause the implosion of religions. It would be an awesome triumph of human curiosity. Yet here we are, on our own planet, squandering sentience under our shoes and fly-swatters.

Though repugnant, rodents and insects are infinitely more complex than you can imagine. Navigation, self-awareness, and memory association all arise from the billions of transmissions in brains too small to see. To this day, humanity has failed to produce an artificial intelligence of comparable versatility.

Young Worb had not reached this level of computational complexity by the million-year mark in his lifetime. However, the current scale of his differentiation was about to be made insignificant.

A higher calculation density formed on the outer shell of the greater Worb sphere, as heavy elements were in greatest abundance at the edges, flung outward by dust bridges and rotation. This resulted in a sort of reverse nucleus, and allowed for greater exposure to starlight and ambient heat, Worb’s current lone energy sources.

Worb’s control shell mapped momenta and spin speeds encoded in an octal numeral system, reflected in the base-eight electron orbital tallying and the eight dust bridges leading from each inner cell. It seemed that intelligence could soon develop… 

Unfortunately, mental processes couldn’t take place without a source of light, and as ground states began accumulate, electrons sadly sunk. Robbed and shaded by their neighbors, the inner cells were the first to lose ambient energy. Temperatures dropped to below 1 Kelvin. It seemed as if Worb was to meet his end before realizing he had existed in the first place.

As cells shrunk under their own gravity, heavy elements gathered at cores and clumps of spheroid dust collided into gravel, then boulders, then planetesimals. In a final altruistic move, the functioning cells were commanded by their rims to release the remaining ambient energy they might hold and gravitate. The suicidal dance brought dozens of Worb-cells together to perish into 2 gargantuan crags.

Symmetry was thus dashed to pieces. Entropy’s lacky had spoiled beauty. 

And then Nature stepped in.

In a burst of glory, flaming twins roared into existence! Hydrogen burning initiated in the mega-Jupiters to birth two orbiting protostars that spit out solar wind at massive speeds. The stars swung towards each other in a decaying orbit and heaved Worb’s greater shell in rippling circles with them. All the while, Worb absorbed the new source of life, feeding off the energy, calculating at an unseen rate, recording and formulating and planning. A colossus was thus saved from a fall, newly invigorated and fire-bright.

This is how Worb came to devour stars.

Slicked back hair and a loose white button-up. Perspiration beading on his forehead. AP US History teacher Samuel Espinosa powers through a lesson on the Gilded Age, his years of teaching shining through effortless charisma.

When students ask ridiculous questions, he calls them out with an abrasive sense of humor, laughing at them and his own jokes. When students ask insightful questions, he applauds them with a prophecy into their future, a glimpse of their successful careers. Mr. Espinosa can make you feel like a champion, with showers of influential praise, or a failure that needs to sort out his priorities and work harder than ever before.

Regardless of whether you ask the A students or the D students, there is one consensus: Mr. Espinosa is their favorite teacher. Why is this? How can an individual whose opinions are influential to the point that they are manipulative be given such a degree of admiration?

This question was on my mind my first semester of AP US History. His eloquent rhetoric and well-practiced teaching style were great for some students, but not for me. I preferred a textbook without a sense of humor.

I can barely sit still in hour-long history lectures, and it’s even harder to take notes. My hands are free beings – they think for themselves. When presented with a writing implement and made to wait to through said lecture, they unconsciously take off! Swirls and monsters and teeth capture the ups and downs of recited history, much to my teacher’s dismay and my own chagrin. My other teachers didn’t mind my doodling habit, but to Mr. Espinosa, it was utter disrespect. “If you want to draw,” he said. “Maybe you should leave and go to art class.”

But I didn’t leave. Instead, I made a deal: I will learn in my own way, and if I don’t do well, I’ll resort to yours.

The challenge was on. I drew hairy beasts and snarling zombies without reserve while Mr. Espinosa discussed the economical impact of railroad industry. It felt natural, and for the first time that year, I was able to pay attention to every word Mr. Espinosa said. To this day, I know exactly what I was drawing when he explained the oil monopoly of John D. Rockefeller.

(It was a devil boxer.)

When I got home after his lessons, I would plunge into the history textbook, taking meticulous notes, absorbing every statistic and historical anecdote. As I did so, Mr. Espinosa’s words would echo in my mind, vestiges of his oral lesson aiding my readings. With his help, I had achieved the perfect balance of learning.

I aced the Gilded Age test. I had expected to come away from the test feeling like a victor who had embarrassed his teacher, but instead, I had gained incredible respect for him. His lessons supplemented and enhanced my learning experience in a way only personality can.

A teacher’s wisdom is unmatched by books.

Damn, look at that sexy-ass bookshelf. All the boys come into my yard.

Time — like length — is just another dimension. 

In the same way that length gains significance in the eye of the beholder, time takes its significance in the mind. There is little cosmic difference between a teen playing baseball and a fledgling sun tossing an asteroid, as each event derives its importance from the observer’s proportions.

And yet amid this anonymity and seeming dearth of special treatment for specific powers of ten, the Universe discriminates: With the upper barrier of the speed of light as a fundamental constraint on long-distance communication, size does matter to taking action in a timely manner. 

Human action, that is.

Some 350 Earth-years after we decided that our massive dust cloud between the Triangulum and Andromeda Galaxies was a self-sustaining organism, the creature, who would one day refer to itself as Worb (or rather, ↑↑←↑→↓), began to seemingly self-organize.  

By remotely controlling the angular momenta of smaller spheres of dust gains, Worb effectively compacted sixty sections of his spheroid frame into individual units the size of dwarf stars. These primordial cells had a typically non-uniform distribution; rare heavy elements such as oxygen and neon drifted to the outer shells whilst hydrogen cores compacted underneath. Any given cell was connected to eight others around it by wispy dust bridges of mixed elements in a face-centered cubic pseudo-crystalline arrangement. Feeding off primordial photons from the 2.9 Kelvin cosmic microwave background, cells controlled their own rotation rates and performed basic physics calculations using heavy element excitations as tallies and dust bridges for synchronization. Worb-cells seemed to have their own number system, developed in quantum serendipity — an electron orbital makes the perfect abacus.

After all, Nature is the perfect engineer. Unafraid to make mistakes. Patient. Immortal. 

Worb’s megastructural shifts took place over such a stretched time frame that its inching towards functional symmetry would have blurred the human distinction between a natural event and a conscious one. Did a single mind pervade all of Worb? Did civilizations of dust slowly bloom in commute bridges and dirt highways, in the hubs of heavy metal photon exchange?

Perhaps Worb was just an oddity of probability. A fluctuation in a nebula that gave rise to what seemed to be something special from a human perspective.

Perhaps not.

In the quiet black peace between galaxies, dust is always collecting. No one really cleans up around here. It’s a grimy, grimy silence.

The dust is hydrogen in kinked chains, huddling in the cold. Drifting through empty. Lonely. Look close and you’ll see nothing. But step back, way back — light years back! — and there’s beauty, as electrons shine in silly ways to tickle space, to streak nebulae across unfathomable expanses of canvas.

Let the dirt gather. Let it clutter.

Let it rain on rock and shade unknown.

And let it form megastructures! Dust in your hands is dirt, but dust bigger than worlds is creation.

This is a lot of dust we’re talking about here - heaps of it. Dust to fill beaches on every planet in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, sifting in a seemingly empty space too big to measure, even with a ruler made of all the trees on Earth.

One time, some time ago, maybe yesterday afternoon, maybe millennia past, atoms of dust were in just the right formation for something special to form. 

It was BIG. It was SEXY. An impressionist spheroid of material, rotating imperceptibly, collapsing ever-so-slowly, glowing photon bright.

It was one entity, and unifying him was a weak magnetic field whose tendrils caressed electrons in the cloud’s nether reaches. 

He calls himself Worb, and he is a philosopher.

In the first 70 Earth-years of his existence, Worb completed his birthing thought. He sent a magnetic pulse from one end of his being to the other, 22 parsecs away, through a fortuitous self-propagating sequence of realignments of electrons. The command was to emit 21-cm radio photons northward from each antiparallel electron in countless pieces of hydrogen dust as a means of increasing the speed of his immense body’s rotation. With his increased angular momentum, Worb countered gravity’s pull, stopping the billion-year positive feedback loop that would have inevitably led to the formation of a star.

In this fashion, Worb passed the first test of life: homeostasis.

Zach is a boy of dreams, wide.
He is pages of geology bound in a stack
And pored over carefully, a mechanical mind.

Kiki is a girl of red blushing tide.
She is rabbits of down and feathers in a sack
Scented in water, herbs to grind.

Ray is a man who the man defied
He is leather and Old Spice and a muscled back
In boots you’ll shop for but never find.

These three are elements of divided me

And in me they brew, contrarily.

“You’re going to feel pain, and you’re going to love it.”

She clawed open my jaw, forcing the pills down my throat. My hands twisted in their restraints, the rope cutting and searing and bleeding me out.

“Do you feel it? They’re fast acting. They’ll burn through your brain like it’s got BSE. But it’ll be the best terminal disease you’ve had in your life.” She stepped back and admired me anew, contemplating her first move.

I couldn’t speak for fear of biting my tongue, and suddenly, the rope pain was gone and replaced by a sweet strawberry tickling around my wrists and feet.

Myra opened the bedside drawer to pull out her tools. ”Let’s start with your nails,” she said. I squirmed uncontrollably, my mind scurrying, mouth dry, breathing so quickly I heard a hurricane, thinking of anything, please oh god oh god anything but those pliers!

She started with the thumb on my right hand, the plier teeth gripping the tip of my uncut nail. The wait was unbearable and I felt my bladder empty into my lap. 

With a sharp yanking motion, she brought the nail clean away.

At once, utter peace flowed through me. It was infinite orgasm, lush pillow clouds rolling down my body, angels kissing me through perfume. I felt a profound wetness near my hands. 

It wasn’t semen.

Myra continued to pull every nail on my right hand, each time sending me into the fur of baby rabbits. Each time getting me wetter and wetter, until my hands felt like they were resting in bird pond. My eyes were rolled back to the ceiling while paradise oases formed along my arms.

Myra grinned wildly, enjoying herself and enjoying my pleasure. I hated her, and I hated myself for enjoying being mangled. 

Next tool up was the butcher knife, ready for a meeting with someplace new.

I couldn’t see straight, my tears clouding my vision so intensely. But I heard my pants unzip and felt a cocktail of terror and delicious anticipation.

“Oh hello there, aren’t you excited!” She clapped her hands in glee. “This makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

She grasped the curved blade carefully and sweeped in a clean motion. A piece of me let out a boiling scream and a piece of me begged her to take it all.

She must have obliged, as I felt streaming happiness flood my blood and a flood of blood stream through my pants.

Shit. I was not getting out of here alive.