Category: Yo Ivanhoe

There was a time, believe me or don’t, when machines didn’t have memories. They opened cans, maybe, or suctioned dirt from carpets, and that was plenty wonderful. We were happy as fucking clams when we no longer had to trudge out to a shed in the backyard to relieve ourselves. And put this in your…

–Illustration by James Dankert Here’s a new wrinkle in the gray, clanging days before Christmas: Uncle Jumbo has been playing miserable pet store Santa Claus, wrestling squirming cats and dogs and even the occasional bird or lizard in my lap while a wrinkled and alcoholic little temp-pool elf tries to snap photos for somebody’s sad…

Those soft, colored lights that make such a comfortable compromise –almost a real peace– with the darkness. The shiny glass bulbs and talismans that have the power to both cradle light and build tiny fires from memories that are almost lost. The warmth from those fires is powerful out of all proportion: a window, a…

—Irwin Norling My grandfather played Santa Claus for more than twenty years, purely, I liked to believe, out of the goodness of his heart. His annual ritual was completely a volunteer effort and a solo undertaking. This was in a small town in the Midwest, and every November my grandfather would build a tiny candy-striped…

There were increasingly more mysteries than he could get his head around. The puzzle of texture, pattern, and repetition. The idiot wonder prompted by even the most prosaic mosaic or randomly occurring stain. Prompts, responses, and resolute silences from the interior continent. Sounds of no clear origin. Desires of no clear etc. Desires. Desire. The…