The 32-bit generation of the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo is widely considered to be the pinnacle of gaming. But during that era, most of the current editors of major gaming websites were twelve. When I was twelve, the Nintendo 64 was king, and I believe that no graphical monstrosity or million-dollar production could ever top the masterpieces that came out of that...
That space at the top of the door. I could hear everything that went on in that house in Surquillo, Lima, Peru through that gap between the top of the door to my room and the ceiling. I spent last summer teaching English in Peru on a work-exchange program, trapped in my tiny bedroom in my host family’s house by that opening. Time is certainly relative, but the same...
A birthday is returning to the launch site after a year away. We come in dusty, surprised to see ourselves in an old place again. We find our cities, our friends and families. In the parks, the trees with white paint ringing the base of their trunks are candles dipped in frosting. Blowing them out, extinguishing the little lives we claim in the midst of a longer one, we...
I am a great cork-popper. Now what on earth could that mean? Do we take the literal definition, that is, I am great at popping corks? Ergo, I am, à la a magnificent circus freak of collegiate proportions, gathered-around and ogled by the friends, well-wishers and acquaintances who coo and aspirate at my superb, pre-eminent, P. Diddy-like cork-popping abilities? Is that...
On Thanksgiving Day 2002, my family broke into a quarry near Lee Vining, Calif., and carried away several pounds of rocks in three paper bags. It wasn’t much of a burglary, as burglaries go — we parked our minivan on a deserted road in a lodgepole forest and climbed over the steel gate without any employees bothering us. They were all home in June Lake, the last...
