Incandescent

I feel most glamorous when I walk through Target. Look at the sheeple, now look at me. I've got a pinstripe blazer. I "do poetry." I listen to Gwen and Lindsay but only for the irony. I understand the Xbox 360 and Lost in Translation on more levels than you ever do. And all I'm coming in here to buy is a marked-down jar of J. Crew.

There is a tinge of innocence in how her voice, tagged with surprise, lilts at hellos passed from behind, unsolicited, she guessed — even in detached moraines where natural streaks hide under tans; even this deluded town, this sprawling, plaintive, noxious plow.

We were coming down Avinguda del Marqués de Comilla, all of us Americans, or at least the forty or so of us that were planning on getting decently plastered. Rachael had been one of the few halfway interesting people I hadn't gotten a chance to chat with during dinner, and given how hollow most of the conversation had been, it seemed perfectly appropriate to be talking about coming to terms with country music. I spent nine years growing up in Arizona, and while she trumped me with her seventeen in rural Tennessee, we both knew all too well the existence of Billy Ray. Good conversations always start with something absolutely banal in common li

First, there is life— behind, philosophy sits, demure, suggesting a colour for today's rationale, smiling and looking neat and trim. Helpful but hollow and ready, when needed, to be shuffled aside. Rigid and brittle as anything tested and true, a system for the ages— but see, these steps I take belong to me and, as they falter, are mine alone. And I refuse to be led by the hand by fallen angels of order when what I desire is precisely what neither reason nor discord can skin and pin down— and I won't allow it, anyhow. This conscience refuses a promise to act on more than its own accord: it works best under p