2009

This time last year: Nicaragua, Leon’s ancient stone cathedrals with bullet holes, joyful children with firecrackers in the street, large papier mache puppets, a beautiful young man swimming in the empty Pacific, we are gliding through tropical waters, sitting and sweating on sacks of grain on converted school buses, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, laughing

Resolutions last year: Improve posture, eat more lentil mush, survive school

Month 4: turned in a thesis. Declared a master of science. Passed my first medical licensing exam.

2 months of surgery, touch my first pancreas, see my first brain, place my first suture, run my first trauma

Watched a man die. And be brought to life again. And die again.

8 months of no breath and ascending madness.

Accrued frozen pictures:
(1) Code blue in the cath lab, a frenzied tableau framed in the window. The lone cardiologist quietly exits, drops his mask in the dark, curses softly. His wire punctured her heart. On the x-ray screen there is the dying woman’s rib cage, and the delicate bones of the intern’s hand pumping rhythmically. On the machine, all the bones are the same.
(2) The sun rise in the ICU
(3) The neurosurgeon’s precisely placed bolt in the doll faced toddler, 10 physicians and nurses crowded in the room staring intently at the ICP monitor, the wrong line, the wrong wave, the numbers incompatible with brain life, the machines still breathe, his cheeks are still pink.
(4) The labor suite had 9 women: the single new mother, her own mother, the ob-gyn residents, the students, the nurses, they strained against her body, like the soldiers in the famous photo—the soldiers of Iwo Jima, the women giving birth. The room was too warm, thick with everyone’s sweat, smelled of blood and shit. We are women too, the pediatric resident and me. We greet the only male in the room, a small wriggling gray thing amid the women, the blood and the shit.

1 more year of San Francisco, the warm glow of the city by the sea, now a maze of obstacles: a place to park, the bus to catch, shouting madmen to avoid, the young and carefree to resent.

A year to be weary of what is to come. A year to revel in the things I have seen.

2 years seeing the beautiful young man, who endures my madness, who fills me with light.

Bowls of lentil mush consumed: 1.6

Resolutions next year: Survive school. Nurture mental health. Build strength, build skill. Stop whining. Love the boy. Love the tribe. Buy fewer lattes.

The Final Manifesto

by Joshua Mehigan


1. We see you.
2. We know who you are.
3. Your ideas are worthless.
4. Your aesthetic is stupid.
5. Your “technique” is a welter of narcissism, superstition, and habit.
6. All your little tiny ideas, all your whoring attempts at creation, and you yourself are nothing, nobody wants you, we despise you, it’s in our nature.
7. You should be kept as a pet.
8. You are a Philistine, the Paul Bunyan of decadence, an acromegalic fraud.
9. You are a minnow, a speck, a stain.
10. The genre humain is sick, and you are to blame.
11. You are a necrophiliac.
12. You are a museum of irrelevance.
13. It will take years to make Art vital and important again.
14. You are from this moment forbidden.
15. As the Italians say, Parla quando piscia la gallina.
16. We are here now.
17. Our aesthetics is empirically grounded.
18. Our taste will be raised to principle.
19. You and your band of jays will be flushed out.
20. Yes, Art is resurrected today: Victory is ours!
21. History will forget you and salute us.
22. Here you are, and here is oblivion.
23. This is the final manifesto, and the only one.

Judgement

i am a smart geek, a guy this author wants to sleep with, a person who loves excess verbiage, confirmed 90s literati, someone who can start a fire. A liar. A drinker of scotch, good at crosswords, a girl who keeps a journal, a conspiracy theorist, (bigger than even the orwellian), a person who has read only one book my my life and it was to kill a mocking bird (and it was assigned reading in the 9th grade); a girl who loves guys in skinny jeans, a man who owns a cottage (one with an adjustable rate mortgage), a man who uses the words 'dubious' and 'tenacity'. I am that kid in your philosophy class with stupid tattoos, i am a premature ejaculator. I moved to Thailand after high school for the drug scene, I can quote the comic guy from the Simpsons I am a youth group leader that picked my nose in the 4th grade, a girl who cannot spell "leheim", who bought the first generation Amazon Kindle, i turned vegan to cover up my eating disorder, i played Creep while smoking pot and having sex, and I took care of my dying grandparents. Some of these are lies, some are not.

You too can stereotype people by their favorite author: Readers by Author