Machine to Tower
by Pete Segall
A sufficient accumulation of wasted days will eventually make up for in longing what they lack in experience.
I trust my memories of joy. I believe my memories of pain.
The light through the trees and the light through the window. The difference between expectation and history.
The surest sign that an idea was good is its irretrievability in the morning.
I share a home with a dog with no eyes. It seems like there is something to be learned from such a roommate. Up to now the only lesson is, moving the furniture is an act of treachery.
The bulk of the civilian casualties of the American invasion of Grenada were suffered when Marines shelled a large building that didn’t appear on any of their maps. It was a psychiatric hospital.
Her radiance is light pollution. It obscures something much lovelier.
When moving down the center of a crowded staircase, do you slant your shoulders or wonder why you placed yourself in such a difficult spot?
People say he isn’t really a misanthrope, it’s just a posture he adopts to disguise how afraid he is of people not liking him. If his motives are scrutinized like that, he can scarcely be blamed for fearing what people think of him. Or for simply not liking them.
Brevity is bewilderment’s singing voice.
Desire deceives us. It was divine punishment to cleave apart what we have, what we are, from their perceived higher rungs. Contentment is neither compromise nor resignation. All of us would be better off if we were Welsh.
The word loser was first used as a pejorative in the nineteenth century in reference to a man’s lack of creditworthiness.
First resent your rivals, then cheer them, then meet them with abject indifference. The dust is coming.
You let a ladybug wander your arm. You talked about revolution.
I have been a bit player in the drama of so many lives, including my own.
Only baggage handlers and stray dogs know for sure. The rest are just guessing.
The goalscorer in the unfathomable American defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup was Joe Gaetjens, a Haitian immigrant who worked as a dishwasher and was possibly killed by the Tontons Macoute. Galeano misidentifies him as “Larry.”
Within all of us is the urge to return to the prelapsarian moment. Nobody agrees on the cause of the fall so we are bound for a paradise of litigants.
All things bend toward silence.
When the first escalator opened on the Underground, London Transport had to hire a one-legged veteran of the Great War to demonstrate the safety of the new contraption to frightened passengers.
Envision, then forget.
Progress is nobody’s fault.
On a forgotten functionary of the British Colonial Service: he was an exceptional mouthpiece for the last person who had spoken to him.
Kurosawa was asked why he framed a certain scene in Ran the way he did. He replied that if he had moved the camera slightly in one direction, a Sony factory would have been in the shot. In the other, the airport. The blessings of limitation are easily mistaken for ingenuity. Rather, it’s embracing the impossibility of anything ideal.
Pete Segall lives in Chicago. His work has appeared recently in The Drift, The Bennington Review, and failed states.
