Free Mature Themes by Andrew Durbin

Walpert, whose work I don’t know, writes, “Retallack uses two connected lines of the postmodern critique of science—linguistic slippage and paradigm-dependency— not to subvert or to critique science as an end in itself but to return,”
    summer in spring
    winter in fall
    spring in winter
    fall in summer,
    â€œbut to return,”
    spring in summer
    fall in winter
    winter in spring
    summer in fall
    â€œbut to return attention to the human subject, specifically in the context of AIDS,”
    fall in winter
    spring in summer
    summer in fall
    winter in spring
    â€œbut to return” to the plane that had been set on fire by Lil Wayne’s retinue of sociopaths (a celebrity is someone who desires to tell a joke that ends in the death of the entire world external to himself/herself) after they poured sizzurp all over the aisle seats and dropped matches onto the soaked leather.

    2
    You could say that by this point the night was in an advanced state of decomposition, illuminated by the flaming jet the local fire department could not put out. We stood by the runway, near the tall security fence, and drank Four Loko in the cool breeze.
    SOMEONE RUINED ANONYMITY.
    To return to my friend in summer, which was a kind of spring, he was telling me he was struggling with paying his bills while remaining an artist. What’s become a cliché reverts to a very powerful reality when it’s married to economics. We both have no money and as long as we’ve known each other (almost ten years) that has been the case. When we first met he was addicted to crystal meth and loved volcanoes. He liked to text me quotes from his favorite songs, sending the lines over and over again: “Hear the crushing wheel / Feel the steering wheel”; “You are my Ducati”; “I love the way you lie.” He struck me as a thoroughly original person who would go much “further in life” than me, into and scaled by whatever indices of success, progress, and attention art could offer him in ten years. He’s still addicted to crystal meth but has gotten over the volcanoes. In following his interest, I learned that volcanoes have a paradoxical effect on their environments, temporarily deadening life and disrupting fragile underwater ecosystems after they erupt. Later, these affected areas often become hotbeds of life, islands in the sea, and return with more force than before.
    VOLCANOES RUINED SEASONS.
    In 1816, the eruption of Mount Tambora eliminated that year’s summer, resulting in very cold temperatures for June, July, and August; reduced crop yields; increased sickness; and general malaise. In July 1816, “incessant rainfall” during that “wet, ungenial summer” forced Mary Shelley, John William Polidori, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley to stay indoors for much of their Swiss holiday. They decided to have a contest to see who could write the best horror story, leading Shelley to write Frankenstein , or The Modern Prometheus and Lord Byron to write “A Fragment,” which Polidori later rewrote as The Vampyre —a precursor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula . Byron was also inspired to write a poem, “Darkness,” at the same time. Those days were like a magic show, each manipulating out of their occupants curious events in literature that created entirely new acts of expression via the arrival and dismissal of certain ideas they harbored about one another. Dracula ruined horror, but not before betraying his first author by finding another.

    3
    DEATH RUINED THE RETURN.
    According to Wikipedia, the last member of any species is called an endling. The entry names five individuals who occupied this final slot in their respective evolutionary chains: Martha (Passenger Pigeon), Incas (Carolina parakeet), Booming Ben (Heath hen), Benjamin (Tasmanian tiger), Celia (Pyrenean ibex), Lonesome George (Pinta Island tortoise). Recently, I’ve started to say their names to