[sort]

He said the term Selbstetzungslehre meant self-positioning subject, and we said we’ll take your word for it. Waving her hand in front of our eyes, she said, “Maybe we’ve just been hypnotized to think we’re not hypnotized.” I reminded them of the no idea but in things dictum, and said I wasn’t a thing, so they could expect no help from me. Site-specific vs. lost. His voice didn’t reveal his age, but the sagging flesh around his chin did.
 
 
 
 

[sort]

The minute we pulled into the parking lot, we knew this wasn’t a real Hunan Palace: there wasn’t a Bud Light neon in the window. The blurb said this was the first time the photographs had been translated into English. Turns out the title was The Locus, not The Locusts, of Memory. We picked up the re-enactment at the point we lost consciousness, but we didn’t get very far.
 
 
 
 

[sort]

“Concerning the Alpine Larch the fact which even most naturalists know best is that they have never seen it.” The more he talked about my blind spots, the more I pretended I couldn’t hear.
 
 
 
 

[sort]

I’m nostalgic for the days of Neo-. When he holds a Styrofoam cup to his ear, he hears the ocean.
 
 
 
 

[sort]

She kept trying to tell her joke, but they kept hitting her just as she got to the punch line. He said, “change is inseparable from the account of it,” and I was ready to continue the conversation when I noticed him turn his hearing aid off. I hope I never hear the phase “This isn’t your aunt’s Renaissance Fair,” but I heard it in my head when I wrote it. Of course it all went up in smoke: that’s how you make smoke signals.
 
 
 
 
Mark Cunningham has recently been watching films from the late 1950s–early 1960s about nudist colonies—but the amount of volleyball playing that goes on makes nudism a daunting life-style choice.
 

 
Notes from Mark Cunningham:

The term “sort” comes from John Locke’s “sorts of substances,” with our understanding of each substance made of collections of ideas that are “supposed to flow from the particular inner constitution” of the substance (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2:23:2–3), and from FedEx’s “sort,” the twice-daily receiving and routing of packages at airport hubs.

In the third piece, the quotation about the Alpine Larch is from A Natural History of Western Trees by Donald Culross Peattie. In the last piece, the quotation about change is from The Cell by Lyn Hejinian.