from [sort]
by
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 internal constitution’ of the substance (An
Essay Concerning Human Understand 2:23:2-3),
and from FedEx’s ‘sort,’ the twice daily receiving
and routing of packages at airport hubs.”
[sort]
She
said he was an egotist, so he sent her a friendship card through
e-mail, but she wrote back it was still all ones and zeroes. In A
Hard Day’s Night,
John Lennon puts a cola bottle to his nose—sniffing coke—but
it’s a Pepsi bottle. When I’m awake, I think about
my dreams, and when I’m asleep, I dream about what happens
when I’m awake. The officer sat, lights flashing, behind
an empty car. We’re cooler than they are, because it’s
the spaces between our “. . .” rather than the dots that
are important.
[sort]
Dear
Seneca: we, too, have learned that “when a few bodies
move about in a great open space, they are not able to ram into each
other, or to be pushed around,” so we defund Planned Parenthood
and increase the military budget. The essay was titled “How
Antlers Help Pro Athletes,” but we thought that seemed pretty
obvious. After she saw the book Animals Without Backbones,
she stopped donating to the Sierra Club. Now that I’m
into death metal, I consider my nipples umlauts.
[sort]
She
said she was a “virtual vacuum,” and I couldn’t
decide which worried me more, the virtual or the vacuum part. They
tried to read his thoughts, but there were too many spelling mistakes. We
couldn’t tell if the things were invisible or if it was just
too dark to see them, so we turned on the lights and glare-blinded
ourselves. It’s probably not a good sign when everybody
starts looking like Jacques Lacan. My ass makes my butt look
big.
[sort]
The
fine print said the health bars might contain traces of “peanuts,
wheat, and other tree nuts.” According to the pamphlet,
nature is the “destination of all life,” but the researcher
warned us not to base our analysis on what we observed. The
sun is sterile. The poster showed Dracula looming behind a
giant spider web, which gave me the creeps, because I’m afraid
of spiders. She realized she was in a stare-down match with
her blind spot, so she was defeated even before she got started.
Mark
Cunningham’s latest
book is Scissors and Starfish (Right
Hand Pointing). 71 Leaves, an
e-book from BlazeVOX, is available for free to anyone curious enough
to Google it.