by Craig Cliff
‘The rules change when two people come together,’ he would say, and lean in to kiss whoever he was talking to.
It didn’t work often, and certainly not in South Africa, where people couldn’t understand his accent when alcohol was involved.
After a while he stopped going to parties. This coincided with no longer being invited to parties.
Some days he could not get out of bed.
On the days he could get out of bed he would stare at thorn trees for hours while drawing lines on the dusty pavement with the tip of his shoe.
Then one day his pillow, which had been just the right balance of softness and hardness, was suddenly too soft. He got up in the middle of the night and searched his house for something firmer.
He tried a sofa cushion. Too soft.
An old VCR. Too hard.
A stack of two phone books. Just right.
When he woke in the morning, Ken from Canberra was possessed by the sudden desire to list everyone he had ever met.
He called in sick and wrote the name of the colleague he spoke to in permanent marker on the wall above his telephone. He wrote the names of his immediate family in a line as he inched his way towards the bathroom. He wrote all of his cousins and second cousins and great-aunts and uncles on the way to the kitchen. While poaching two eggs, he wrote the names of all of his school teachers on his cupboards, the names of his sports coaches and piano teachers and university tutors on his fridge-freezer. When he made it to his bedroom, he wrote the names of all of his friends and their family members, then his school classmates who were not quite his friends but who he did not dislike, then, right down by the skirting board in tiny letters, those he did dislike.
By mid-afternoon, he had run out of names, but was surprised how much of his apartment was covered with permanent marker.
He returned to work the next day. The names of people he had left off his walls would pop into his head now and then. He wrote them down on Post-its and placed them in his pockets.
When he met someone new he also wrote their name on a Post-it and placed it in his pocket.
And so the week passed, Ken settling into the routine of adding the names from his pockets to his walls when he returned home each evening, before fixing dinner. Filling a blank piece of wall with another person he knew gave him a sense of enormous well-being. He wasn’t sure where he had heard this phrase before, but he didn’t want to Google it.
Until he Googled it, he could believe a sense of enormous well-being was his phrase.
2.
Logan and WayCoolMic had never met in person (Logan didn’t even know WayCoolMic’s real name), but they were gmail chatting about how their fathers were failures and how it seemed inevitable they too would fail in almost identical fashions.
At the same time, Logan was looking up unconnected things on Wikipedia:
Cherry Coke
Orbital Resonance
Ziggy Marley
When he typed ‘Tug-of-War’ he was redirected to ‘Tug of War.’ He wondered why he’d even used hyphens in the first place.
Under ‘History’, Wikipedia said:
The origins of tug of war are not clearly known. But there is evidence that tug of war was practised in ancient China and Egypt[citation needed].
Logan cut-and-pasted this into his conversation with WayCoolMic and typed:
me: that would have to be one long rope
WayCoolMic: huh?
me: a tug-of-war between China and Egypt
WayCoolMic: oh
me: GoogleMaps won’t calculate the distance between Beijing and Cairo. It looks like about 6000 miles
WayCoolMic: long rope
me: yeah
WayCoolMic: my father had huge hands
Another person wanted to start a gmail conversation with Logan, someone he had met in person but not seen since middle school. This person was called Oliver Carol, but everyone called him Oh Carol, even though nobody their age had ever heard the Neil Sedaka song — it was just one of those things, Oh Carol had told Logan once in a gmail chat, that every person in the Western world absorbed through the placental wall.
A few years ago, Oh Carol had written a one-act play called Cultural Osmosis in which the main character lay in a foetal position in the middle of the stage for the whole play and the other cast members circled around him doing impersonations of Buddy Holly, Henry Kissinger and Doris Day.
The play was never performed.
Logan typed:
me: did you know that unstable resonances with Saturn’s inner moons give rise to gaps in the rings of Saturn?
Oh Carol: Wikipedia?
me: yeah.
The special case of 1:1 resonance (between bodies with similar orbital radii) causes large solar system bodies to clear the neighbourhood around their orbits by ejecting nearly everything else around them; this effect is used in the current definition of a planet.
Oh Carol: just clicked on Clear the Neigbourhood: Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either.
me: if everyone knew everything, the world might work
Oh Carol: unlikely
me: pessimist
Oh Carol: playwright
me: procrastinator
Oh Carol: guilty
me: I have been looking up unconnected things on Wikipedia since 4pm
Oh Carol: me too
me: I am going to copy and paste my browser history to you and you should paste yours, then we will look at the same stuff in reverse. Really connect y’know
Oh Carol: I lied, I was looking at cheerleader porn
me: me too. a little. I don’t care. Here’s mine:
Ziggy Marley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Basketball - Standings
Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Basketball
Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Basketball
With starters chosen, West coaches have tough job
trying to pick reserves at guard - NBA -
Welcome to Facebook! | Facebook
Welcome to AdSense
VISIT KIMSPLAYGROUND.COM
Ur target Advertising
Typewriter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
tyler.mpeg (video/mpeg Object)
Tug of war - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
turkey buzzard – Google Search
Turkey Vulture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Toto’s Biography – Last.fm
Tim Burton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Their Satanic Majesties Request - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
The Maltese Falcon (disambiguation) - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
The Maltese Falcon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Impressionable Jon Culshaw - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Teen sex videos
Styx’s Biography – Last.fm
Styx (disambiguation) - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Styx (band) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Styx - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stellenbosch University - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
StatCounter - My Projects [loganberryyeah]
StatCounter - My Projects [loganberryyeah]
StatCounter - My Projects [loganberryyeah]
Snake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Short Story - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
short story definition - Google Search
serj tankian torrent - Google Search
See My GF - Homemade Sex - seemygf.com
Search - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Search - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Sausalito, California – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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/>
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Rhinoceros - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Returning Visits (loganberryyeah)
reader of depressing books
Ramhorn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Queen (band) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Queen (album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Po River - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PO - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Piñata - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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photo.php
Peregrine Falcon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pau Gasol - Los Angeles Lakers - News - NBA -
Yahoo! Sports
Orbital resonance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NBA - Philadelphia 76ers/Charlotte Bobcats Recap
- Yahoo! Sports
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- Yahoo! Sports
NBA - New Orleans Hornets/San Antonio Spurs Box
Score - Yahoo! Sports
NBA - Los Angeles Clippers/Memphis Grizzlies Recap
- Yahoo! Sports
NBA - Los Angeles Clippers/Memphis Grizzlies Box
Score - Yahoo! Sports
NBA - Indiana Pacers/Miami Heat Box Score - Yahoo!
Sports
My Friends Hot Mom
My First Sex Teacher
My Account
Mr Mister – Music at Last.fm
Mr Big – Music at Last.fm
Mozilla Firefox Start Page
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Monique Allen - Digital Dreamgirl
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minties - Google Search
Minties - Australian-Food.com
Mike Starr (I)
Mike Starr (actor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mike Schwartz (II)
Mike Schwartz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mammal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Magnify User (loganberryyeah)
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List of universities in South Africa - Wikipedia, the free
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List of placental mammals in Orders Tubulidentata
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of placental mammals in Order Perissodactyla
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of placental mammals - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
List of mammals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of amphibians - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kim Carnes’s Biography – Last.fm
Kenny Loggins’s Biography – Last.fm
Jazz (album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
index.cgi
Image: Mammal species pie chart.png - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Image: Kasza gryczana 01.jpg - Wikipedia, the free
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hanging pot plant - Google Search
hanging pot plant - Google Image Search
Google Mail - Inbox - [email protected]
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Google Mail
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FREEGONZO.COM Free Sex Movies and Sex
Pictures
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Free porn pictures and movies galleries
FreaksOfCock.com
Fling.com Horny Babes looking for Sex
Fantasy on Yahoo!Sports - News, Scores, Standings,
Rumors, Fantasy Games
Facebook | WayCoolMic’s Photos - xmas & New Year
holiday
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holiday
Facebook | WayCoolMic
Facebook | Ryan’s Wall
Facebook | Oh Carol
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time
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NBA - Yahoo!Sports
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- Yahoo! Sports
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me: are you there Oh?
Oh Carol appeared to be offline.
WayCoolMic appeared to be offline also.
Logan opened a new tab which, in time, displayed pictures of naked cheerleaders.
3.
Mitzi Visitacion had done everything right.
She had the pseudonym, randomly generated from US census data.
She had the MFA.
She had permission to quote her manuscript assessors’ words of praise (‘Ms Visitacion writes as if English is our second language …’; ‘Blue Belly Blues is unforgettably … memorable’).
She had the perfectly crafted submission letter.
And of course — of course! — she had perfectly crafted stories.
But all this got her was rejection. Rejection letters, rejection slips, rejection emails, rejection text messages, rejections scrawled on Denny’s napkins and slid under her bathroom stall, rejections instead of prizes in her cereal box.
When she received a rejection note from a journal she had never submitted to — she’d thought she was signing up for an annual subscription — enough was enough.
She opened a new Word document and typed:
Dear Famous Writer,
We here at Xyzphage are looking to publish writers at the peak of their powers, though it is admirable that you are still toiling away. So it’s a no from us.
Yours in pre-emption,
Xyzphage Editorial Board
She looked up ‘American writers’ on Wikipedia and copied and pasted the names into an Excel spreadsheet. One by one she tracked down each writer’s email address and rejected them. If she could not find their email address, she left a comment on their website or advised their agent of their rejection. Rejections for deceased writers were sent to their estates.
It felt good to reject Ernest Hemingway (‘not butch enough’), Hunter S Thompson (‘too constricted’) and Grace Paley (‘reads like another writing workshop prodigy’s pale imitation of Grace Paley’).
If a writer was really old but still writing, like Philip Roth or Elmore Leonard, she still addressed the rejection, ‘To the Estate of …’
She was surprised at how many replies she received to her rejection emails. The audacity. It had never occurred to her to respond (let alone object) to a rejection email. Maybe this was what was holding her back.
But she was having too much fun writing rejections to worry about her own perfectly crafted stories.