Gauge Magazine 19

INSTINCT

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G19 STAFF Editor-in-chief Evan Allen Creative Director Megan Donovan Managing Editor Talia Ralph Non-fiction Editor Matthew Haviland Photography Editor Sarah Jacobs Fiction Editor Rex Horner Poetry Editor Jacqueline Frasca Web Designer Meredith Pomeroy Assistant Photo Editor Jake Ladue Assistant Fiction Editor Nicole Fernandez Copyeditor Stefanie Le Marketing Director Jusmine Martin

Editorial Team Lilly Schneider ZoĂŤ Hayden Megan Seabaugh Sarah Ruggiero Mark Hildebrand Molly Coombs Contributors Clara Everhart Melissa Park Design Team Elizabeth Cormack Rose Parry Illustrators Rae Bourque Cole Dennis Hanna Edizel Emily Small Photography Staff Zoe Harris Gordie Hendrick Katie Neuhof Victoria Reuter Ted Rogers Elena Tarchi Valentijn van der Sloot Daniel Vignal Fiction Readers Asher Norris Julie Gagnon Web Writers Ariel Goldberg Winelle Felix Jamie Loftus

CONTENTS 2 4 8 10 14 18 22 24 28 34 36 40 42 46 54 56 62 64

letters soft camouflage cravings in defense of dirt lionheartland let go, come back coitus animalium out of breath, out of africa we stand at armageddon blood on the ice l’art de seduire the age of bitchface ode to meat photography poetry fiction you should etymology

Our theme is Instinct. It’s teeth-teeth-teeth, bruises, snarls, and the occasional flash of something tender. Fistfights and sex. Id hiding deep in our collective psyche. Love and dirt.

It’s been a semester of late nights spilling into mornings and edit sessions so long we left delirious with sore throats. Which is just as it should be: Instinct, it seems, can swallow you whole. It’s also my last issue—come May, I’ll be leaving Gauge behind for the wide world. I don’t want to go.

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Talia, my other half, I couldn’t imagine making a magazine with anybody else. You make me a better reporter. You make me a happier person. You’re one of the only people I hug. Here’s to perfectly-synced neuroses and a future full of many more magazines.

Letters

Jeff, I’m sure you already know this (being ridiculously insightful), but you’ve taught me how to be a good editor and an ethical journalist.

I will miss so much bothering you in your office and rapid-fire emailing in Czech. Don’t think you’re free of me, though—I imagine I’ll need your wisdom and sarcasm in the real world even more than I need it in the bubble of Gauge.

Matt: I’m happy to leave the magazine I love so much in your care—you’re the perfect mix of bizarre, hilarious, and obsessive. Thank you for being there to always do everything no matter how excessive the request or late the hour. You’re going to be an amazing EIC. Sarah: you’re mellow and brilliant and the images you come up with are shocking and beautiful. I live for those moments when you show up in the cave with your easy grin and your laptop full of mindblowing pictures.

Megan: watching you turn our ideas into a real-life magazine has been incredible. You made us a Gauge!

Rex: you bring so much heart to this magazine. I have loved working with you.

Meredith: I adore our website and I adore you.

Gauge is produced twice a year by undergraduates at Emerson College. For additional content, please visit our website at knowgaugebetter.com. Gauge always welcomes submissions for future issues. Pitch us your feature articles, fiction, poetry, photography, illustrations and everything in between. Copyright of materials reverts to the individual artists and authors. No materials may be reproduced under any circumstance without written permission. G19 was set in Corbel, Rawengulk and Tw Cen MT.

Massive thanks to Rebecca Saraceno for stepping in and helping us make Gauge happen; to Corey Starbuck for guiding us through all the SGA paperwork; to SGA for the $841.43; to the Atomic Bean for hosting our art show; and to New York Pizza for fueling our fire.

Gauge is my favorite thing in the world. I hope you love it.

Evan Allen editor-in-chief

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G19 reaches for the ground. It wants dirt under its fingernails. It wants to run through the desert and never stop. It wants mountain lions to leap from the shadows, survivalists to step out of the woods, bison charred on a searing hot grill. It wants to know how our faces contort so bitchily and what we crave so fiercely. The Wild West and Milky Way may charm and entrance us, but it’s our blood and guts that force us to go out there and get what we really need.

I’d been in love with Gauge since the moment I saw it, but it took me a while to weasel my way on to the team. Now, they’re probably going to have to carry me out of our cave of an office kicking and screaming. ...Really, Matt, you might want to get someone to help you with that. Otherwise, I have full confidence in your quiet brilliance, consistent calm, and flawlessly executed originality. There is no one I’d rather leave Gauge with.

Megan: thank you for building such a gorgeous thing for us to put all our crazy ideas in. You have such grace, ease and vision, I can’t wait to see where you take Gauge next.

Sarah: girl, you’ve got eyes. If you ever stop taking photos I will personally come find you and shove a Pentax into your hands. You’re beyond wonderful.

Rex: I’m just going to come right out and say it—I freaking love you.

Watching your mind work is like watching magic happen... and no, my metaphors will never hold a candle to yours.

Meredith: You’re insanely talented and even more insanely hardworking. I’d draw wireframes with you for the rest of my life if I could.

Evan... oh, Evan. You’ve led this magazine to everything it is, and it’s pretty damn spectacular. You’re my best half, and I have more respect and admiration for you then can fit here. Let’s make a googledoc about it.

Jeff: you’re possibly the wisest person I know. I don’t know how to thank you enough for all you do for this magazine and for us, so I’ll probably just bake you something and we’ll call it even.

Rebecca, Jussie, our epically talented staff, SGA, Journeyman, friends, family, roommates: thank you doesn’t cut it. You helped make this happen.

I want a reaction from your insides. I want to get at your guts and explore impulses, needs, intuition and predispositions.

G19 is active. Though light and able, it pushes for a response when colors bark or text crawls. It is simple yet stark. It is meant to be efficient in servicing the needs of the reader, and creative in allowing for evolution.

This has been my instinctual reaction to my new role in Gauge. It has been intensely fun.

I am in awe of the people who worked so hard to produce such a beautiful and candid magazine. It is one thing to be talented and useful, but quite another to be honest and hard-working. The effect of the fusion of these characteristics shines through the editorial staff and contributors of Gauge.

Evan: Thank you for providing the most incredible sense of team cohesion I have ever seen. You have really impressed me with your balance of all things. I wish you the best in the future. I am sure to see great things.

Talia: Your pep is contagious. I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to work with you.

Sarah: I think you should stick around for another semester. I have had a fantastic time creating this magazine with you.

Meredith: Thank you for offering your help. Your genuine support is all I needed.

Jussie, Rose & Liz: You are truly beautiful people. Thank you so much for your help.

Hanna, Rae, Cole & Emily: Your talents are incredible. Please draw forever.

Jumping into this seat was so much easier because of the kindness of these people.

Endless thanks to Jeff Seglin, Rebecca Saraceno, members of SGA, Sharon Duffy, and, of course, the students of Emerson College. Your dollars are what makes a product like this possible. Also, to my family and friends, thank you for being, just being. And to Emma Krause and Jacquelyn Schaab, for listening and baking muffins.

Now, go read this thing.

Talia Ralph

Megan Donovan

managing editor

creative director

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Soft Camouflage

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The first thing that we learn to recognize is another human’s face. It’s a survival tactic that allows us to quickly distinguish friend from enemy, and it lingers long after infancy as an instinct to unconsciously create or see faces in repeating patterns.

“Soft Camouflage” is a photographic response to this phenomenon. Taking an alternative approach to the custom portrait sitting, a tradition that sprung from the basic human desire to document ourselves, we placed the sitters behind a large diffusion gel. This creates a soft veil or blur. The viewer’s eyes look for features, and the subject remains recognizable, even though the face is not in focus.

words by sarah jacobs

concept and photos by ted rogers and sarah jacobs page

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cravings photo by sarah jacobs

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Sometimes my mother buys a box of cold strawberries in December. They are always overpriced and unripe, but the dark-haired lady who sells them slips my sister and me a string of lavender rock candy. In the evening, my mother rinses the strawberries and coats each one with brown sugar. We eat them for dinner, biting into their speckled flesh. Even with a skin of crumbling sugar, they still taste thin and bitter, of mid-frost. But we each get a plate of sour strawberries and no one leaves a single one uneaten. The next night, we go back to eating spicy soup and platters of dark, oily fish. No one craves strawberries again until the summer, when their cloying scent pulls us off the highway where the dark-haired lady is waiting with a crate of them, a bargain at only three dollars. They are still warm when we peel back the wrap.

words by melissa park

Rolling down a hill letting the earth spin beneath you ravage you the grass grazes your skin. Submitting to gravity. Getting up and the dizziness like earth sky earth sky, still flashing in front of your eyes. No catching your breath go back up the hill and fall again. Repeat until the blood pounds in your head but there will be no headaches today, you cannot stop running flat out like the devil’s on your tail, calling to your friend “you can’t catch me, you can’t catch me” dodging into the closest hiding place. Gasping so hard the air stings your throat but it’s a good cold-hot rush, fills your lungs so deep they shudder. Rush of blood through your body and there can never be anything better than this moment, you’re just a kid you don’t know you’ll be sore tomorrow morning.

words by megan seabaugh

In the middle of the road I stand. A longtime ago these houses use to swallow me whole— now they squeeze me by my ribcage. The sun blazes my forehead—no mercy for me today— the sun rains licks like fire and peas—licks for me, it probably say. These coral, mustard, and hot-pink colored houses on my left and right make my eyeballs jump—they span until the intersection breaks their rows. Who in their right mind would paint their houses those colors?

Maybe a longtime ago that was normal—I thought.

People robbing me blind—left, right—and focking center—steups. “Ah feel is because of that accent yuh pickup up dey. That is why he charge yuh that price,” the greasy policeman said. I know I still talk like alyuh—am I not a Trinidadian? Although this uninvited clear nasal tone clings to my words—who go tell me am not.

In the states they’ll ask, where’s my accent. I’ll start to count for them and instead of saying three, I’ll say tree. They’ll stop to correct me. When I repeat it again without hesitation, they’ll stop claiming me—right away.

So who is claiming me?

The mosquitoes don’t remember meh blood so it surely isn’t them.

It isn’t the skinny Indian police office with a black cap tooth who skin-up his face to say, “alyuh ain’t play alyuh miserable na boy!” As if to say, my American education annoys him.

It isn’t the drunken doctor who overcharges me when he translates the US dollars, 6 to 1— he must crave that. That’s enough money for him to misdiagnose me. The lopsided secretary say he getting on so because he cricket going on.

Meh friend say yuh know they could smell a Yankee a mile away.

Now wait—am confused. Yankee who?

I have craved their heated touches and kisses like bake and shark on Maracas Bay since the day I left—I have never stopped. But they have stopped—they have stopped craving me—a longtime ago.

And now—meh mother asking who would put obeah on me—in meh own country?

She say wash yuh self off with some Kananga Water to erase whatever it is yuh catch down dey—but how could I wash away meh blood?

I doh think Kananga water would wash away the fact that meh country doesn’t crave me anymore.

words by winelle felix

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in defense of

DIRT words by lilly schneider photos by sarah jacobs

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There was a time when you ate dirt clods like candy.

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his was probably before you had teeth. Your mother couldn’t hold onto you forever. Sometimes, she had to put you down to sign a check or check the mail, to rest her arms or arm her purse with hand sanitizer, bottled formula, baby wipes, and all other modern parenting weaponry against filth and germs and bad squirmywormies. While she was digging through the diaper bag looking for a clean bib, you were digging in the mud of the driveway, sticking a drippy fistful into your mouth like a bear with a pawful of honey. When she tested the firmness of Roma tomatoes with freshly sanitized hands, you tested the firmness of the shopping cart’s handle with your gums. When she unearthed her cigarettes from the dishtowel drawer and snuck away to lose or find herself for a moment, you unearthed an ancient cigarette filter from the soil of the rubber-tree plant and lost and found yourself in the grand adventure of new tastes, textures and bacteria.

And you ate poop. Poop straight up, poop on the rocks plucked from the playground, poop mixed with the wonderful hard plastic wheels of the toy truck that you steered across all creation and gnawed on at night.

You ate poop and soil because all babies who get the chance eat poop and soil. The power of observation will tell you this, or you can ask Dr. Joel Weinstock, the chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center.

“Children traditionally eat dirt, eat stool, eat everything around them,” he says. “All animal infants do it.

Monkeys do this all the time. Pigs do it.” The question, then, in his words: “Is it a bad habit, or is it a physiological response?”

Today we explore compelling evidence to the latter.

Today we go back to our roots—or, more accurately, to

page the stuff in which the roots actually grow. Today we explore the benefits of getting friendly with dirt. Because today, in America, there is a higher instance of gastrointestinal diseases than ever before—some of the highest rates for any country in the world. At the end of the nineteenth century, about one in every 10,000 Americans would be afflicted with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in their lifetime; now, that number is one in 350. IBD, asthma, food allergies, multiple scelerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, hay fever, encephalitis, Type 1 diabetes and other immune-deficiency diseases have been skyrocketing throughout the twentieth century.

The trend is matched in other first-world countries. As China and India boom with wealth, they too are seeing these diseases rise.

It may be a crisis of too much hygiene. “We know that families that are more clean and more well-to-do are more susceptible,” says Weinstock. “Epidemiological data shows that kids raised around cattle are not likely to get immunological diseases. People raised in homes with cats and dogs are less likely to get immunological diseases. People who live in houses with more bathrooms— every kid with his own bathroom—are more likely.”

In the 1990s, research by Weinstock and others led to the “Inflammatory Bowel Disease Hypothesis”: when people are raised in very clean environments, they are less likely to harbor the naturally occurring intestinal worms which, the theory holds, help to trigger the immune system in ways that eventually strengthen it.

“Every time you have a glass of milk, you’re drinking billions of live bacteria,” Weinstock says. “Half of the dry weight of stool is living organisms. That brown log is teeming with life.” Most importantly, they’re living inside you—be thankful, because you’d almost certainly die if you somehow sterilized your GI tract. Among other creepy-crawlies, there lives what could be our most important allies in the crusade against gastrointestinal diseases: helminthes.

A helminth is a parasitic worm, and it makes its home in all kinds of filth, waste and dirt. Then, if you ingest that dirt, it makes its home in your intestines.

Hooray for helminthes! New research suggests that certain helminthes work kind of like a natural vaccine against gastrointestinal diseases.

“In our society,” says Dr. Weinstock, “where dirt is

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relatively clean and water is clean, most helminthes cause no harm and can be relatively beneficial. When your immune system responds to a helminth, it tends to change your innate immunity.”

And Dr. Weinstock’s lab isn’t the only one with an eye on helminthes. “Many labs are studying aspects of this issue. It’s been accelerating over the past three or four years. It has the potential to help us understand and treat these diseases.”

Dirt-pills? Helminth lollipops? Perhaps. For now, you can undergo helminthic therapy, offered by less than a handful of private companies. It’s exactly what it sounds like: helminthes implanted in your insides! And some patients are claiming it’s cured them. Unfortunately, the FDA has ruled that adminstered helminthes—usually taken from pigs—are a drug. One of the biggest helminthic therapy companies is in Germany. An American company sends its patients to Mexico.

Not all parasites are good for you, of course. Dr. Weinstock is quick to emphasize that modern community hygiene—like clean water, clean food, and paved roads that aren’t covered in the waste of toiling horses—have saved and continue to save countless lives.

The challenge of the next twenty years, he says, will be to determine which elements of hygiene are good and which are bad.

Poor dirt. It’s gotten such a bad rap in our modern society: the babies who love it grow into adults who spurn it.

But not always.

The nearly two million annual attendees to the Boryeong Mud Festival in South Korea like mud so much, they smear their whole bodies with it over the course of

two weeks. They treat themselves to mud packs and mud massages, whip down a giant mud slide, mud-fight and mud-wrestle in both impromptu and festival-sponsored bouts, participate in cavalry battles (so much for those manure-free streets) and crown a Mud King. A vaguely worrying, perhaps ill-translated blurb on the festival’s website proclaims: “You will be put into a prison until you get some mud on your body.” Americans can get into the thick of it at smaller mudfests in Oregon, New Mexico, California, and Georgia.

Dirt brings us more than helminths and hootennany: often, it brings us home. Soil is the literal land beneath our feet, and that means a great deal to a great many people. Immigrants keep jars of homeland dirt. Tourists collect pebbles from their travels. David Urbel runs Dirt Shirts, a Texas-based company devoted to dying t-shirts with iron-rich red clay. Most of the clay comes from Texas, but for shirts marketed to tourists in surrounding states, local dirt is mixed in. “That way, you’re wearing a part of Louisiana,” says Urbel. “You’re bringing home a part of it.”

Each shirt, like each inch of earth, is unique. Urbel says he once received a call from a worried mother afraid the shirt would give her son allergies. “I told her, it’s just dirt. That’s all it is, dirt.”

Dr. Weinstock—who, it might be noted, is a clean man with impressively groomed hair—waves away the notion that our society has gone so far down the Purellpath that we can’t stop to play in the primroses a little.

“The principle of ‘this is good for me’ makes it routine process,” he says. “If rolling in a mud puddle once a week was shown to be healthy, people would do it.”

Do it. ^

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You ate poop. Poop straight up, poop on the rocks plucked from the playground, poop mixed with the wonderful hard plastic wheels of the toy truck that you steered across all creation and gnawed on at night.

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LIONHEARTLAND words by rex horner photos by valentijn van der sloot

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ave Harley, a barber from Chelsea, Vermont, was driving ghosts in one of New England’s heartlands. Avatars of a wilupstate in the misty early morning. The banks on either derness no longer untrammeled.

In Latin, the cats are known as felis concholor, as couside of the highway rocketed into the greenery. Harley’s headlights shone through the summertime fog, and sud- gar, or colloquially in Vermont as catamounts. There have denly a creature entered the beams’ radiance. The large cat’s been no officially documented sightings in the state since belly was to the asphalt. “That is a frickin’ mountain lion,” 1881, in the town of Barnard. But natives refuse to believe Harley said to himself. Harley and the lion locked eyes. Its fur they’re really gone. was the color of crisped pie crust but pale around its muzzle In the same Green Mountain valley where Harley trims and ears. As that lion leapt into the bush almost fifteen years hair, Pamela Dietz lives on Briar Ridge Farm, tending to ago, its tail unfurled and arched behind its haunches. “An goats, horses, and hunting dogs. The first time she saw a amazing animal,” Harley recalls. mountain lion, she was with her daughter. It was about elevDoug Blodgett, who describes himself as the “go-to en years ago. Dietz’s first thought was that it was a bobcat, guy for lions in Vermont,” records and investigates 40-50 an animal she’d seen before. She told her daughter to fetch sightings like Harley’s the binoculars. She The lions here are a spectral presence. describes the blonde per year for the Fish & Wildlife Department.

Native ghosts in one of New England’s heartlands. creature becom“Border to border.

Avatars of a wilderness no longer untrammeled. ing aware of being A cemetery in North watched and boundBurlington to the wilds of the Northeast Kingdom,” he says. ing into the forest. “It sprung up over the fence like it was But there is no solid evidence of the big cats’ presence, so a nothing.” This was when Dietz was sure it was a catamount. wildlife biologist like Blodgett can’t conclude that mountain Colored like a deer, she says, and leaping like a gazelle. lions have a breeding population in Vermont. In other states, The second cat was dark brown, as if singed. Only a year farther west, there’s clear proof that a wanderer is in lion ago, Dietz was walking her pastures with four Weimaraners, country. Mountain lions struck on roadsides three or four lean hunting dogs. The dogs roamed ahead of her, and times a year. Kill sites in cattle pastures. Scat. Fur caught Dietz startled as they crashed out of the woods, chasing a in a tangle of barbed wire fencing. No such evidence exists catamount. Dietz began bellowing. The pursuit was movin Vermont. The lions here are a spectral presence. Native ing away from her, crossing the upper crest of the pasture.

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The catamount outran the Weimaraners and disappeared back into the labyrinth of tree trunks and branches. Unlike her first sighting, this cat panicked Dietz. Her dogs’ safety was at stake. “I knew damn well and good what would happen if they tangled with it,” Dietz says.

She did not forget the cat’s presence that season.

She remembers how her dogs often ran in the forest and how a female returned with puncture wounds on her neck.

Dietz imagined the mountain lion had fastened its jaws on her dog’s neck. Though there were lesser predators—coyotes teaching their pups how to hunt in summer—that might have attacked the Weimaraner, the catamount haunted her thoughts.

Sightings branch out from Briar Ridge. In the same town, Tunbridge, at the estate that once was the Poor Farm, laborers saw a mountain lion in a hayfield beyond a low brook. Janet Wells, partial owner of the property, was driving away as the men tried to get her attention.

She thought it was a bear until she returned and learned that the men were certain it was a dark-furred cat. One of Dietz’s neighbors believes she saw the same dark mountain lion on her property. These two folk manage their households on a hill that swells above the two-lane route cleaving through the village. Just past the lanes of houses, parsonage, congregational, post, library and general store is a surging tributary of the White River, which in some stretches is dangerously close to the paved route. Beyond its far banks are the acres of forest.

Doug Blodgett is familiar with this type of encounter. “Leaping across the highway, flashing through fields, fleeting sightings of bounding animals,” he says. “They’re really good at not leaving signs. They may be unique in that way. Or maybe they could fly.”

Blodgett has been in the field on research projects, but never felt the hair-raising sixth sense of being stalked.

In the Vermont sightings, he sees little threat to the witnesses from the mountain lions. Further west, toward the “tough Rockies” that Blodgett calls the stronghold for mountain lions in the country, maulings are rare. “But it sure as hell happens. No doubt about it,” Blodgett says. A victim of a mauling might be a bobbing jogger who, to the perched cougar, is running prey. The cougar’s predatory instinct surges and it leaps at the jogger, even if it doesn’t need to feed.

The biologist remembers his arms sprouting goose bumps when he saw a different lion—maned, in Tanzania, in Africa. He was in a Land Rover in the bush.

There, Masai boys, ten or twelve, played where lions hunted. Blodgett was struck by the vulnerability of their lives.

Lions are still dangerous in Africa, reigning in their territories as top-apex predators. But their home ranges are being encroached on and thinned. The lions, even on the great continent, are becoming vestiges of a wild world.

At home, Blodgett’s skin tingles in memory. Vermont too has been transformed. Blodgett has read accounts of the wives of European settlers being driven mad by

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“Leaping across the highway, flashing through fields, fleeting sightings of bounding animals.

They’re really good at not leaving signs. They may be unique in that way. Or maybe they could fly.”

- Doug Blodgett

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the gloom descending from the forest roof. Mountain lions, feral and horrific to settlers, were feared. Enormous bounties were paid if one was shot. Industry bloomed in Vermont in the 1800s and the land was largely deforested.

The lions became apparitions and now, in the last two decades of the state, living phantoms. Eighty percent of Vermont has returned to forested land.

In the small talks Blodgett gives locally about mountain lions, he says that there is a prey base—white tailed deer—in Vermont. There is a land base too, but the area is small enough that the mountain lions should be easy to find. Vermonters should be coming across kill sites regularly; lions like fresh meat. Without tangible proof of the mountain lions’ existence, they fill a different cultural role. They tug at Vermonters’ nostalgia. An old creature recalling an old life. “The mystique—the ultimate symbol of wildness,” Blodgett says. Some taxonomists hold that there is only one species in the United States. It is one creature and one verdant land.

Like a mirage behind the curtain of pines, the lion hunches. Under its breath is an aortic beating and beating and beating. ^

let go, come back

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words by talia ralph photos by katie neuhof

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a few blocks east of the pacific ocean in santa monica, in dark rooms with padded walls, people are hunting for feelings.

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t’s there in their modest office that Dr. Arthur Janov, his wife Dr. France Janov and their small team of therapists guide patients through the deep and often dark recesses of their emotions. Their method is called primal therapy, and it operates on the premise that our early childhoods are the foundation for our neuroses and destructive behaviors.

A form of alternative therapy developed

by Arthur in the 1970s and outlined in his first book and bestseller, The Primal Scream, primal therapy has drawn hundreds of people to make pilgrimages to the center to scour their minds and hearts for long-buried anguish. It’s an emotional spring cleaning, if you will: a dusting

off of things long forgotten or ignored. We often repress the traumas we experience as kids, according to Arthur, and they need to be uprooted so that we can heal and grow.

“It’s very simple: people come to us because they know they’re in pain,” says France, who runs the center while her husband continues to research and write about primal. “That, or, at the other side of the spectrum, are people who are totally dead. Who walk around like a zombie. And we tell them, you have to feel the pain first, and they say, ‘Okay, I’ll feel pain, because I just want to feel something.’”

Because primal therapists dig so deep into their patients’ pasts, many patients revert to childlike behavior: they may throw tantrums, or speak in a baby voice, or even scream. Which is why the session rooms are dark, with padded walls, low cots, and a shelf of stuffed animals: they are designed to recreate the ‘safe’ spaces patients may never have had when they were young. Some of the patients will even ask to take a particular stuffed toy home with them, says France. Since the opening of the Santa Monica center in 1989, people from all over the country and the world have undergone primal therapy within its lowlit, quiet rooms.

The process itself is rigorous. Prospective patients fill out detailed applications before being accepted to the program. They are required to undergo a three-week Intensive and relocate to Los Angeles, some from as far as the East Coast or Europe. They sever much of their contact with their regular lives, shutting off family, work and friends. Their vital signs

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are carefully monitored before and after each session. But despite the extreme nature of primal therapy, many patients claim that it is the only thing that restored them to sanity.

Ruth Nyman was one of those patients.

She read The Primal Scream in 1977, after her older brother had passed it along to her while she was a student at The University of York in England.

“What drew me to primal therapy was that I felt like I was reading about myself,” says Nyman. “When I first read it, I didn’t think I was sick enough to go, because there are cases in there of people who tried to commit suicide, or had horrendous things happen to them when they were young. I couldn’t really put a finger on what had happened to me. I just knew I felt bad.”

Nyman couldn’t determine exactly what the cause of her pain was, and she had never done any kind of therapy before flying to New York, the site of one of the original centers, to immerse herself in primal therapy. Most primal patients have already attempted traditional “talk” therapy or other “cures.” Primal therapy is in many cases their last hope.

“Primal is not a matter of the therapist interpreting what the person is saying or telling that person why it happened,” says Peter Prontzos, the co-creator of a blog called The Primal Mind and political psychology professor at Langara College in Vancouver, British Columbia. “The only person who knows that is the patient themselves.”

Nyman is now a practicing primal therapist, and calls herself a “huntress of feelings.”

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“People come to us because they know they’re in pain. That, or, at the other side of the spectrum, are people who are totally dead. Who walk around like a zombie.”

-Dr. France Janov

In “normal” therapy, she says that patients are allowed to avoid painful subjects, or to dictate what doesn’t get discussed during a 50-minute session. In primal, therapists are taught to keep patients talking about those uncomfortable memories. “When I see a patient avoiding a topic, that’s where I want to keep them,” she says.

“We learn our patient’s minds, and as we do, they learn themselves,” says France of the therapy process. “So the idea is that they can do their own therapy after a while.”

A while is a relative term in primal. Sessions are not limited to a specific time frame: they can last as long as three hours if it seems necessary.

And patients can be in therapy for as long as seven years, or even longer. Nyman’s therapy took three years. All therapists-in-training undergo primal therapy, even if they’ve already gone through it once, as Nyman had.

Primal works through what Dr. Arthur Janov has called “evolution in reverse”: it starts by dealing with the higher levels of the brain, and gradually works the patient back to their childhood state of mind. “So the feelings, the pain, might start right here, today, with a friend that didn’t talk to you in the morning, for example,” says France. “And then it keeps cascading, and suddenly it will go back ten years ago, and then it will go back to something in your family from when you were much younger. The feeling is like a road: it keeps taking you further. And it releases new images and new pieces of memory that you never knew were there.”

According to Dr. Lou Cozolino, the author

of The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, seventy percent of our brain is formed after birth, and remains malleable into adulthood. Early neglect or abuse can damage the brain and keep people from developing social skills or other important functions. But our neuroplasticity means that there is actually the possibility of healing or restructuring parts of the brain that were harmed during traumatic births or childhoods.

Taking people back to these painful early memories is no small feat. “I’ve run into all kinds of hacks who say ‘I’m a therapist and will do primal therapy,’ and they really can damage people,” said Prontzos. “You’re really playing with dynamite if you don’t have a therapist who has a good sense of what they’re doing and respects what they do.”

Untrained therapists can completely unravel their patients if they take them back to their pain too quickly or don’t know how to guide them out of their dark places.

But some practitioners of primal therapy find themselves somewhere in the middle of the road.

“Do I think everyone should do it? No,” says Nyman.

“I think that, if you feel drawn to something like that, then look into it. The feeling I always got at the center was ‘this is the only thing that’s helpful’ and personally, I don’t agree with that. A lot of people don’t need to go as deep as primal therapy goes to feel that they have a satisfying life. I’m a firm believer in, whatever helps you, do that.”

Meanwhile, in a padded room in Santa Monica, someone is clutching a teddy bear, hoping that primal will help. ^

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COITUS ANIMALIUM words by sarah ruggiero photos by victoria reuter illustrations by emily small

Foot fetishes. Bondage. Chatroulette.

Homo sapiens have weird sex habits. But how do we stack up against the rest of the animal kingdom? Insecure about the normalcy of their own sex lives, Gauge sent one brave reporter out into the wild. She came back with dirt on her face, stains on her notebook, and these steamy examples of animal creativity.

Erethizon Dorsatum

Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Mammalia Order: Rodentia orcupines like to keep it kinky.

A misconception regarding porcupine mating habits is that the quills prove for difficult mounting, or that they provide some kind of sadomasochistic pleasure.

Actually, the quills stay out of the way when a porcupine couple gets it on: during intercourse, the female folds her quilled tail onto her back, allowing her rear-entering mate to avoid getting impaled in the heat of the moment.

However, the male has another means of providing prickly sensations. The tip of his porcupine penis has a number of spiny formations on it which “may stimulate orgasm in the female,” says Uldis Roze, author of The North American Porcupine.

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But the male porcupine’s game doesn’t end there.

He uses a surefire foreplay tactic to seal the deal: Super Soaker-force urination. Because, of course, what’s a hookup without being sprayed with piss?

“It’s a high-velocity urine flow. And that’s a form of courtship,” says Roze. “All animals court their females.

They do something to make the female accept the male more readily. In porcupines that’s very important, because if the female doesn’t want the male, she can injure it. She can do a lot of damage to a male that tries to rape her. So the male has to court her. And he courts her by urination.”

Charming. ^

Pan troglodytes Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Mammalia Order: Primates

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himpanzees are the shameless hussies of the mammalian world.

Dr. Zarin Machanda, a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard, compares her experiences researching chimps’ social behavior in Uganda to watching a soap opera unfold. Chimpanzee mating does not limit itself to one season—it happens all year. And according to Machanda, chimpanzee intercourse occurs very openly and very often.

“Chimpanzees live in multi-male, multi-female groups, and when a female is ovulating, she has this bright, pink swelling on her behind,” says Machanda. “It’s this big visual signal that she is ready to mate. It incites a lot of competition among males, and that female will mate with every male in the community. Sometimes up to thirty, fifty times a day.”

One reason for the frequent copulations is that mate selection in chimps revolves around sperm competition.

“The sperm will compete inside the vaginal tract,” said Machanda.

“So, the best sperm wins, and there’s selection for ‘fast swimmers.’’’

If male chimps are going to mate with a female ten to twelve times a day, they need some way to keep up. The solution? More storage space.

“Both of their testicles weigh as much as their brain,” says Machanda. Proportionally, if a man’s testes were the same size as a chimpanzee’s, he’d have balls hanging down mid-thigh. This is why the lady chimps simply cannot get enough. ^

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Ptilonorhynchus violaceus

Giraffa Camelopardalis

Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Aves Order: Passeriformes

Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Mammalia Order: Artiodactyla

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iraffe mating includes behaviors that would cause any sensible human to file a restraining order against their suitor. Widely regarded as a complete turnoff by humans, persistent stalking has the opposite effect on giraffes.

To assess a female’s stalkability, male giraffes first check out her fertility. And they catch her at the most convenient time, too: mid-pee. “The male sort of sticks his tongue in her urine stream, then presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth,” says Dr. Meredith Bashaw, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania who has participated in a two-and-a-half-year project on giraffe social behavior and hormones at the San Diego Zoo. The urine is then assessed by the Jacobson’s organ, which is used by many animals to detect certain pheromones.

“If she isn’t fertile, [the males] just wander off into the sunset, and they’ll try to find another female,” says Bashaw. “If she is fertile, they’ll sort of follow her around at very close proximity. A male will stick his chest up against the female’s rear end in a position we call ‘mate-guarding,’ and then will follow her around like that for most of the day.”

At least creepy stalkers don’t ask for urine samples. ^

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f the avian world produced its own version of MTV Cribs, the bowerbird’s lair would be the Playboy Mansion.

“They build these stick structures on the ground called bowers that have evolved simply as a function of courtship and copulation,” says Seth Coleman, an assistant professor of biology at Gonzaga University in Washington, who has researched satin bowerbirds over a period of four years in Australia. “The males build this avenueshaped bower with walls of little, fine sticks they’ve collected, woven together down at the bottom, kind of like a nice basket.”

But the bower itself is only half of the presentation. In order to truly woo the female bowerbirds, the purple-eyed, blue-tinted males accessorize their homes and lawns with all kinds of decorations: pebbles, fruits and berries, insect parts, flowers, shells.

“Their favorite decoration is the blue feather of a little, local parrot called the Crimson Rosella,” says Coleman. “And also freely used, artificial objects: shiny things, blue things. I actually had my toothbrush stolen—I made the mistake of bringing a blue toothbrush.”

The bowerbird will carefully pile up and arrange these accessories in and around his shag pad, showing off his flair for interior design. A song and dance accompanies the architectural presentation.

Apparently, shallowness doesn’t limit itself to humans. ^

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OUT OF BREATH, OUT OF AFRICA: words by megan seabaugh photos by zoe harris

a story of r u n n i n g

It’s ninety degrees. A pack of hunters chases a herd of kudu antelope across the Kalahari Desert.

They track one in particular, driving it from the herd.

They make sure it is always moving, never giving it the chance to veer away and blend back into the pack or stop and rest under the shade of an acacia tree. The only sound is panting and the dusty rhythm of feet and hooves.

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efore spears and arrows, we ran our food to death. So claims Dr. Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. In a world of claws and fangs, we weren’t born with much we could use against prey in a one-on-one fight to the death. But we did have invisible weapons: abstract reasoning, cooperation skills, stamina. Stamina, especially.

Humans evolved to run—and running, in turn, helped us to evolve. Two and a half million years ago, when our early ancestors started running down prey and eating the meat, they became more human than ape. Meat supplied them with bursts of calories and fat that helped their brains

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to grow, and because it required cunning, reason, and sociability to obtain, hominids that could think on their feet were healthier, lived longer, and had more babies. Our ability to run distance brought us pounding and sweating into modernity.

The theory took a while to gain traction, since most people don’t think of humans as incredible runners. In fact, compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, we’re pitifully slow. “Horse, cheetah, all those can outsprint a human being,” says Lieberman. “What humans can do is run distance.”

Lieberman worked with biologist Dennis Bramble to publish “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo” in a 2004 issue of Nature.

The two scientists found that human endurance running capabilities exceed those of other mammals adapted for running, like horses and dogs.

Everything from the Achilles tendons to our comparatively enormous glutei maximi helped make us ultramarathoners capable of running 100 kilometers in six and a half hours (Takahiro Sunada, Lake Saroma-Tokoro Japan, June, 1998) instead of apes.

Our lower halves are made for running.

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Although we barely use them when walking, the tendons in our knees and ankles are essential for our ability to run long distances without killing our joints. When you come down on your foot, the arch presses down into the ground as you bend your knee—and then, as you push off, your tendons help launch you into that next step. They’re like rubber bands. Our long legs help increase stride length and the amount of time our feet are on the ground. Our buttocks serve the same function when we’re running as tails do in other speedy bipeds, like kangaroos or roadrunners. In other words, we need our butts for balance; without them, we’d fall flat on our faces.

But of all these adaptations, our ability to cool ourselves down is one of the most valuable.

Once an animal gets too hot while running, it has two choices: stop or die. We have a third choice: sweat. Early hominids may have run animals into heat prostration: this is called persistence hunting. Scattered northwest Mexican and southern African groups still do it. It can take anywhere from two to six and a half hours of slow jogging to run an animal to death.

An entire South African community on the run.

The hunters are diverse: men and women, old and young. Not all of them are sprinters. They just need to keep going at a nice jog for a long time. They glisten with sweat. Hanging back are the fastest and the strongest, the men in their twenties who will go in for the kill. Their Achilles tendons stretch with their footfalls. Women lead the pack, looking for tracks when the animal weaves out of sight. They bend forward to see the marks. Elder men follow behind; they let everyone know what the prey is

most likely to do next. Overheating will eventually be the answer.

All of this helps us understand how we run, but it doesn’t tell us why we love it. “Animals that engage in endurance running are more likely to suffer injuries,” says Greg Gerdeman, an assistant professor of biology at Eckerd College. “And so that’s something that’s curious. What motivated the behavior at all?”

Every runner has his or her own reason for pounding out the miles, but most will tell you there’s a strong feeling of personal satisfaction at the end of a run: a runner’s high. How we define that varies. “Most people think of the runner’s high as the situation where you’re really euphoric,” says Gerdeman. “I think when you

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expand the runner’s high hypothesis to a sense of calmness and contentment, it becomes a more common phenomenon.”

He claims that runner’s high goes deeper than we think. Hominids required an incentive to evolve for our kind of endurance. Where other animals stop, we continue. “The notion that the sustained aerobic exercise, in and of itself, created a sense of well-being and pleasure,” says Gerdeman, “could have helped for classically conditioning.”

Gerdeman has been studying the physiology behind the runner’s high for ten years. He and his colleague, David Richen, believe that it’s not endorphins—the buzzword peptide for exercise buffs—but an entirely different neurochemical

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system that causes our warm feelings of reward: endocannabinoids.

Endocannabinoids are lipids that stimulate cannabinoid receptors in the brain. Without them, we probably wouldn’t run for pleasure.

The motivating factor is hunger. “When endocannabinoid levels go up, it’s associated with a desire to eat,” says Gerdeman.

Where regular hunger and this proposed effect clash is our sense of means. Endocannabinoids pump us up. “It’s a cue that you are in the context where if you pursue eating, you will get there,” he says.

“There’s a reward.”

In 2008, Gerdeman teamed up with Ted Garland, professor of biology at the University of California Riverside. Garland bred four different strains of mice to run extraordinarily long distances: kilometers every night. In their study, Gerdeman provided the mice with cannabinoid receptor blockers, used in Europe as an appetite suppressant. “You’re blocking these cannabinoids that normally stimulate you to seek a food reward,” says Gerdeman.

When given cannabinoid blockers, lab conditioned “high-running mice” decreased their nightly distance to that of the control mice. Without the inclination to eat, they lost interest in exercise.

“This relates to the running hypothesis really well,” says Gerdeman. available. I’m gonna go chase it down. And I’m gonna start feeling “There’s a cue to run, and they start better as I do.’” to relate that to, ‘Oh, I see this cue Still, endocannabinoid research is in its infancy. “A lot of literaand it means that there’s a reward ture is focused on endorphins,” says Gerdeman. The problem with endorphins, he says, is that they don’t tend to cross the blood-brain barrier very well, while the endocannabinoid system actually predates the long-distance running mammals that might have used it to evolve.

Either way, humans are a wonder of upright locomotion–and it was this that set us apart from other primates. “The original, fundamental adaptation in terms of being human is to be upright,” says Craig Stanford, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California and author of Upright: The Evolutionary Key to Becoming Human. “The fundamental shift from being an ape to being an early human had all to do with our posture and the way we move, and not actually about the size of the brain.”

We started thinking like humans only after we started moving like humans. Walking and running, says Stanford, were efficient ways to get energy-rich food like meat. But meat was not plentiful – it was a rare commodity, and so up sprung a complex bartering system that favored the intelligent.

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“Meat eating put a premium on being smart,” says Stanford.

“You can offer meat to your allies, you can withhold meat from your rivals, you can give meat to a female you want to mate with.

So it became a kind of currency.”

Social interaction became more sophisticated—and required more cunning and negotiation skills. No longer could a lusty hominid male coast on his good looks and brute strength.

Now, he needed mastery of an increasingly complicated meat economy to woo his beloved or become leader of his tribe.

“Think of a successful politician today,” says Stanford.

“They know exactly how to cut a deal, they know how to bargain for things, they know how to offer something to constituents in exchange for votes. And a [hominid] with meat is very much in the same situation.” The world as we know it, full of silvertongued politicians, wouldn’t have existed without our fleetfooted ancestors.

The pack chases the kudu for three hours, across a distance of about twenty miles. The animal is weaving. Hunters rub their stomachs as their pace weakens. Tribesmen and women begin to smile as their dinner stumbles into the bushes. The kudu staggers and falls against the branches. Somebody grins and exhales. ^

Humans evolved to run—and running, in turn, helped us to evolve.

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we stand at

armageddon words by evan allen photos by gordie hendrick

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wild boar rustles in the winding vines of the northern Florida swamp. Cypress trees stretch towards the darkening sky, and it’s cold, but not cold enough to send the snakes into the ground to hibernate. The earth is muck, standing water, and palmettos. Vegetation is so dense you can’t see more than 20 feet in any direction, and Ray Garvey, a Yankee hunting boar for the first time on unfamiliar land, is lost in the middle of it.

The first thing he does is swear, his voice ragged over the buzz of mosquitoes. Then, he prays. He sits down in the mud and tries to steady his breath, and looks to the sky for guidance. He has no flashlight, no compass, no way to make a fire. Just the shotgun on his back and the setting sun.

Seventeen years later, Garvey feels more at home in a swamp than a city. After his moment of panic, he became a survivalist. The 57-yearold is prepared for any calamity short of nuclear holocaust—has run the possible scenarios (economic collapse, riots in the streets, martial law, food shortages) over and over again in his mind.

He stockpiles food, water, first aid supplies, firestarting materials. He owns guns and knows how to hunt wild game. Ex-military, he’s trained in combat and basic first aid. He has a “bug-out bag,” a kit filled with food and supplies that he

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can grab and go should catastrophe strike, and a “bug-out location” to run to. If the world as we know it ends, Garvey is ready.

He’s not alone. Though a definitive count is impossible, survivalists estimate their number in the United States at upwards of 50,000. This number is conservative: survivalists keep their activities quiet, both because in an emergency they don’t want a hundred people showing up on their doorstep looking for supplies, and because in pop culture, survivalism is associated with homegrown terrorism, right-wing militias, neo-Nazis, and Timothy McVeigh. The image of the “survivalist” is one of a loner in camouflage, knife wedged between bared teeth, automatic weapons piled in the corners of a log cabin deep in the woods.

For most survivalists, this stereotype is both inaccurate and offensive. They run the gamut from small-government conservatives to conservationist hippies, but few fit neatly into any one category. The right wingers among them often emphasize environmentalism and grow their own food. While Christianity is sometimes a supporting narrative, social issues that matter so much to the evangelical right are political afterthoughts for survivalists who believe the government should stay out of their business. Counter to the picture of lawless anti-establishment

Central to the survivalist philosophy is the notion that man can step bravely into the unknown, carrying only what he can fit in a backpack, and he will be all right. page

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invariably the same: we prepare because we love our families; because the human race is worth saving; because community is the most important thing. “Good,” writes Garvey, “will prevail.” Danger looms large in a survivalist’s world, but the good guys always win.

Some survivalists, of course, really are as dangerous and hateful as the stereotype suggests. “The Dark Side lacks love for their fellow man,” writes Garvey. “They are consumed by hate. Their lives revolve around an agenda that is built on destruction instead of rebuilding.”

True survivalists are fundamentally optimistic.

They want to survive in order to rebuild. The At the heart of survivalism is a philosophy “evil” survivalist just wants to be the last man of basic human goodness. This is not imme- standing after he brings down society.

The very existence of this “Dark Side” diately apparent: survivalists can come off as paranoid, angry, strange. Deeply suspicious seems to pain most survivalists. When asked of the government’s trustworthiness, they to account for the extremism within the movethrow around conspiracy theories and accusa- ment, their voices rise, wounded. They feel tions about the Federal Reserve, Fort Knox, badly misunderstood. Some have begun to the Treasury, the World Trade Organization, call themselves “preppers” in an attempt to NAFTA, federal gun control, social programs distance themselves from what they describe like welfare — the list goes on. But ask a sur- as the “lunatic fringe.”

Jerry D. Young is a prepper in Reno, vivalist why they prepare, and the answer is wingnuts, most survivalists consider themselves quintessential Americans, drawing on the Revolutionary War-era archetype of roughand-ready patriots prepared to defend their country and homes. Most hold normal jobs — urban planner, musician, bookseller.

Still, the image of the war-painted savage haunts them. Most of the survivalists contacted for this story refused to be interviewed.

Almost all who agreed to talk requested anonymity. Garvey, cautious at first, opened up over the course of several weeks. Still, he spoke only by email.

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Nevada. He writes survivalist fiction and guidebooks on how best to prepare for emergencies. He stockpiles food, water, blankets and clothing in his apartment. He has a chemical toilet stored in his bathroom in case the water supply goes. He believes there is a big earthquake coming, and he wants to be ready.

But Young is disabled. At 58, he has serious back problems, high blood pressure, and a heart condition. If that earthquake strikes, odds are that he would have a heart attack.

Even if he doesn’t, he’ll run out of medication after a month or two. But for Young, prepping isn’t about saving himself so much as it is about providing for the people he loves.

“I plan on going through as long as I can.

But if I can’t, I have my supplies for my family to use,” he says. “My stuff goes to them and to the community to help them make it.”

Young’s preparations reveal something tender in the dark world of ever-impending cataclysm. “To protect the ones you love,” he says. “That is a stronger drive than the one to protect yourself.”

If survivalists are preparing for massive

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page upheaval, they are also preparing for life afterwards. And life afterwards for survivalists looks a lot like a romanticized version of life in the 1800s, with close-knit agrarian communities where each member brings a skill—doctoring, metalworking, farming—to the table.

“It’s a feeling of being born a hundred years too late,” says Steve, 56, a survivalist from Montana who asked not to be identified by his last name. Steve lives with his wife in a 16-by44-foot cabin in the woods. They live off the grid—relying on solar power, growing and canning their own food. At night they use kerosene lamps and cook on a wood-burning stove. When there’s no snow, they travel by bicycle to the nearest town, population 325, to pick up their mail—a 14-mile round trip. Mostly they stay on their property, going weeks at a time without making the seventy-mile drive to the nearest major shopping center.

Steve grew up in the Boy Scouts, reading about Daniel Boone.

The forest is ancient, and he is at home there.

“We aren’t sitting around gritting our teeth being afraid something will happen,” he says. “We prepare for as much as we can, but we enjoy our lives.” He and his wife have raised four of their seven children in their cabin. They know their neighbors.

They swap food and services. They look out for each other.

For Steve and many other survivalists, the power of the past is strong, and the postmodern life he imagines is a more peaceful one than today can offer him. “I would have loved to have been one of the mountain men exploring the Louisiana Purchase,” he says. “It feels like all the truly wild places are gone.”

Richard Mitchell is a sociologist who spent twenty years living with survivalists for his book Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. He wore the fatigues, sat around campfires talking apocalypse, shot rifles in the woods. Survivalism, as Mitchell says he experienced it, is more about stories and creativity than about armed warfare against some vague enemy.

“It is a tale telling,” he says. The survivalist phenomenon doesn’t depend on the earthquake actually happening, on the

riots spilling out into the street, or on the terrorists coming up the Mississippi River—life doesn’t take its meaning from destruction, but from invention. “Not necessarily [the invention] of dystopian worlds but alternative worlds. But not ones, indeed, that people intend to occupy.”

The worlds that survivalists create can seem like the paranoid hallucinations of gruff malcontents, filled as they are with danger, famine, and violence. But central to the survivalist philosophy is the notion that man can step bravely into the unknown, carrying only what he can fit in a backpack, and he will be all right.

“They’re like troubadours,” says Mitchell. “They’re singing songs about a place that people haven’t necessarily been, that are not necessarily factive. But there’s a neat tempo and a tune if they do it well. It’s not that they’re going to create Camelot or heroes or dragons or anything. Those things don’t exist. But the tune does.”

Ray Garvey still goes out into the northern Florida swamps to get away from the noises of the city. Animals pick up his scent or feel the vibrations of his feet on the ground and move away. He wears A.L.I.C.E. Web Gear—All Purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment—a vest and belt equipment-storage system developed by the military to lighten the loads of combat soldiers. He packs it with food, water, a compass, a flint, a knife, a gun. It was luck that brought him out of that Florida swamp: he stumbled through vegetation and mud until he came to a firebreak, a swath of land that has been stripped of trees and shrubs to starve the flames of Florida’s periodic swamp fires. He followed the firebreak until he came to a road.

He never told the friends he’d gone out with that he’d been lost or found, but the experience changed him. Luck isn’t enough. He relies only on himself. Today, he finds calm among the cypress trees.

“I have spent many a night in the woods with no light,” he writes. “At first it is hard, but later, it becomes a pleasure.” ^

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words by zoë hayden photography by ted rogers

are you not entertained?

bLOOD ON THE ICE H

In hockey, a fight is equal parts spectacle, bloodlust, and vigilante justice.

ow much time would you want to prepare if you were going to get punched in the face?

Try four seconds.

That’s how long Lane MacDermid, a left-winger for the Providence Bruins of the American Hockey League, had to contemplate the fist headed for his face. Mike Moore of the Worcester Sharks shoved him into the crossbar of the goal and the net came off its moorings, which stopped play. In grainy fan video taken from the stands, it’s impossible to see the gloves come off: they’re gone with lightning-fast flicks of the wrist, and each man takes a fistful of the other’s jersey. Moore raises his right arm, winds up, releases, and connects. MacDermid’s head snaps back. He takes a few more to the side of his head before finally crashing a solid slug into Moore’s ear.

Moore crumples to his knees as MacDermid rips off his helmet. They wrestle down on the ice, tearing at one another, trying to land one more hit, but two officials pull the men apart.

They’re finished, for now. If you looked away

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for longer than thirty seconds, you missed the entire thing.

About two weeks later, 21-year-old MacDermid stands in half his gear after practice, tall in his hockey pants and skates. His arms are stripped of their padding, hanging by his sides, long and sinewy. He has a hell of a reach—you wouldn’t have to fight him to figure that out. MacDermid explains the rumble in only a few words. “I got into a battle,” he says. “He pushed me, I retaliated, and we kept going.” Brutal and short.

The vicious fights that take place in hockey are almost unheard of in other North American sports. Football players tackle each other, and wrestlers pin each other to the mat, but that’s written into the rules. In hockey, a fight is equal parts spectacle, bloodlust, and vigilante justice.

“Hockey is self-policing. It’s been that way for 150 years. If you play dirty or disrespect someone or take liberties with a smaller player, you have to be accountable,” explains Ross Bernstein, author of The Code: The

Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in on her team who was being taken advantage the NHL. Because hockey is fast-paced, con- of by bigger girls. “I got into a shoving match tact-heavy, and played on a relatively small with a girl in front of the net and she punched me in the face. So, I went and punched her surface, the energy is violent and physical. in the face. You just get frustrated… like ‘I’m Enough time in a professional league, and a going to hit you back!’ I don’t want to think player knows when it’s time to fight as well as that I’m getting knocked around out there.” he knows when he’s hungry.

Fans get it, too. They shoot to their feet, Fighting establishes toughness, and sends a screaming, “Get him! Hit him! Knock him message to the opposition that a team won’t back down. The fight down!” Every observer wants to declare a The fight between two between two playwinner, needs to see players is almost never about ers is almost never about the individuals. that something has been done to address the individuals. It’s about the It’s about the whole whole team, the entire game, team, the entire the last big hit, the last backbreaking goal. games in the past and games game, games in the The tension builds and in the future. It’s the constant past and games in the future. It’s the then breaks with the settling of a score that doesn’t constant settling of a impact of knuckles to score that doesn’t end brow, and everyone end up on the scoreboard. up on the scoreboard. at the rink, on the Bernstein says that the mere presence benches and in the stands, sees it and feels of a good fighter on any team is invaluable. it. One moment is full of the desire to throw punch after punch after punch, to wrestle, to An official doesn’t always see a penalty, like a knee-on-knee trip or a crushing hit to the push and pull—the next is quiet and calm, with tentative fingertips finding cuts and tender head from behind. Even if he does, seeing a player being escorted off the ice by an official spots. will never have the same impact as knuckles “I look at it as just another part of the game,” says Annie Maroon, sports editor for straight to the jaw.

Even if the goal isn’t to ruin a career or The Daily Free Press at Boston University. She is a sophomore who has played hockey since cause serious harm, the possibility is very real. age 11, and covers women’s hockey at BU. MacDermid trails off trying to remember injuries he’s inflicted: “I think I’ve cut a few guys, Even though fighting is expressly disallowed and maybe a concussion, so. . . obviously in most amateur leagues, it happens. Maroon injuries are going to happen. You can’t restands 5 feet 2 inches tall, an entire foot shortally worry about it too much.” Broken fingers, er than MacDermid. She got into a fight just like MacDermid’s, in defense of a 13-year-old fractured hands, crushed noses, and shattered

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orbitals are all standard fare. When a player is tackled down, his head can bounce off the ice like a rubber ball, and head injury is a likely outcome. Perhaps, then, they should worry.

But the pain is hardly immediate, dulled by adrenaline. “You go numb,” MacDermid says.

“You don’t really feel it until maybe later.”

The pain can be tougher to handle at first.

The first punch of a hockey player’s career is an initiation. If a player survives the test, he begins to know intuitively when to take the risk again. It’s a nuanced lesson, but it’s a signature of the sport. Fighting lends hockey its drama and its appeal.

“You might lose some teeth, but you’ll learn to play the game the right way,” says Bernstein. “With respect.” ^

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Seduire words by matthew haviland photos by daniel vignal

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nerdy virgin and bombastic lady killer? Come back to the efore today, “cool” was dogma. smoky French café of existentialism. What stiff-lipped Men who got laid frequently were lucky. They had angel poster boy Jean-Paul Sartre described as “Responsibility”— feathers, eternally slick hair… God smiled down on them ownership of every situation: war, genetics, etc.—is exactly and filled their pockets with condoms. Then Nietzsche why Bobby Rio gets more action than you. TSB Mag calls it said, “God is dead,” and existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre believed it. They went to a café, erased their storybook con- the “Proactive lifestyle.” “This means accepting with oneceptions of irresponsibility and said, ashing their cigarettes, hundred percent clarity that you are solely responsible for “Man creates himself.” your life,” says Rio. “Accepting this can be either scary or Enter the pickup artist. liberating.”

Bobby Rio, “Editor and Chief” of the seduction website Beginners can buy rulebooks or expensive DVD sets TSB Mag, is a gate holder to the monstrous community of promising to cure the anxiety of approaching strangers. nerds who challenge their social fates every night. Since Pickup artists will even personally train those willing to drop a thousand dollars. But really, the classroom is “pickup” focuses on objective success—meeting women, getting laid—bystanders rarely appreciate the underground waiting outside. Even if you hire a pickup artist to train you, the only thing he’s ideology.

Coalesced to do (rather, the through online forums What stiff-lipped poster boy Jean-Paul going only way to make you (mASF), books (The Game), films (The Tao Sartre described as “Responsibility”— learn, leaving aside the tactics, pep-talks of Steve), TV shows of every situation: war, and pickup scripts that (The Pickup Artist), ownership e-books (The Layguide) genetics, etc.—is exactly why Bobby Rio can be found online) is bring you to a social and Magnoliaesque place, probably a night seminars, a surprising- gets more action than you. club, and tell you to ly sturdy doctrine has emerged. Rio’s cheeky re-wording of the classic title edi- approach that girl… right over there… right now. Go. What is commonly known as “the three second rule” tor-in-chief belies his serious grasp on philosophy.

Pickup artists (PUAs for short) are known for, amongst (developed by America’s favorite pickup artist, Mystery), is followed by the pickup artist community, especially other things, wearing crazy hats and blinking necklaces to the club. Called peacocking, the practice tends to undercut beginners, to cut down on staring, sweating and mumbling, “Screw this,” as you walk away. Once you see the girl, you their social finesse with absurdity. According to Rio, this is engage her. And then? a misinterpretation. “I’ve been in the community for five Pickup lines. Most of the ones you’ve heard aren’t leyears now, and hung out with some of the best PUAs in the world, and almost none of them dress in that exaggerated gitimate: “God wasn’t the only one who could make a kingdom come.” In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s not way that Neil [Strauss] described in The Game.”

So if they’re not supposed to wear funny hats—at least, getting you anywhere. Good pickup lines, or “openers,” are not required to—what allows one to cross the gap between conversation starters that A) catch the girl’s attention, B) gauge magazine

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aren’t (usually) sexual in nature, and thus, C) don’t register as pickup lines at all. You don’t want to rearrange the alphabet—you want her to settle an argument. See if she can name five white rappers.

Your father may not have read The Game, but he followed the same logic. Other elements exist, such as playful insults (known as negging, or teasing, or flirting).

“To show her you’re a challenge, you use what is commonly referred to as push/pull,” instructs Rio. “This is where you show interest and then take it away. Always leave her wondering how you really feel.” Detecting body language “green lights” is also important; naturally promiscuous guys do it subconsciously. This, like everything else, can be learned and applied until it becomes second nature.

Here’s where Jean-Paul Sartre waltzes in, twirling cigarettes blindfolded. Putting your self-image in the hands of hotties is what Sartre calls being-for-others.

According to existentialist thought, subjective consciousness (you alone) is godlike king of all he surveys. He acts without shame. Once another subjective being enters know better

the room, the first becomes uncomfortable. Whereas everything before was an object under his centralized subjective reign, he now becomes an object himself to theirs. This is why people feel uncomfortable in crowded rooms. We lose control of our identity with each pair of eyes. Pickup artists minimize their audience. Bobby Rio quotes PUA Christopher Williamson: “When you fear losing a woman you become cautious. When you’re cautious you become serious. When you’re serious you become boring.” Some gurus recommend getting blown out on purpose, until it loses sting.

What Sartre described as ‘existence preceding essence’ is why pickup artists can make complete turnarounds. Unlike chairs, which are built with a purpose in mind (sitting), we exist first and then choose our identity.

“What separates a pickup artist from a guy that hits on girls,” says Tony D, a seduction coach from Vancouver (absoluteability.com), “is a pickup artist practices obsessively, until he’s so attractive he no longer has to try.

He just becomes who he pretends to be.” There never

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were awkward guys. Just guys who acted awkward. encounters a wealth of tough critics. Pickup artists, like Successful gurus become known by online superhero Sartre at his most nauseous, accept zero excuses. Bobby aliases: Mystery, David Shade, Tyler Durden. What Rio is all about being proactive, or responsible as Sartre better symbol for new identity? Might as well be Bruce would say: “Maybe 20 years ago you had an excuse if you couldn’t lose weight or get laid… Now every man has a Wayne versus Batman.

As self-aware beings, what separates us from actual vast wealth of knowledge through the internet.”

Which brings us back to the beginning. Once you’ve peacocks, who wave their colors at females and get digits in no time (but are stuck with those colors) is that memorized the routines, performed the magic tricks, we are constantly presented with choices. Even the read their fortunes, gotten their numbers, approached choice not to choose is a choice, made when beginners them, taken them to another bar, approached them, kiss-closed them, apfear the outcome of an approach. They are “more There never were awkward guys. proached them, stood up approached them, worried with offending and Just guys who acted awkward. straight, approached them, and lied losing a woman than doing to them about how many girls you’ve slept with (the what it takes to attract her,” says Rio. So just because you utterly failed with that girl at only accepted lie in the community), you won’t need Starbucks yesterday when you spilled your coffee on routines anymore. Once they’ve practiced enough—and the floor and she slipped and broke her nose, doesn’t this means thousands of approaches, hundreds of cold mean you can’t go to Dunkin Donuts tomorrow and shoulders, dozens of belt notches later—pickup artists share bagels with a smiling stranger, who turns into next find that they can ride without training wheels. They are week’s girlfriend, or perhaps even the girl you kiss right no longer average frustrated chumps masquerading as there in the parking lot.

Tucker Max. “An alpha male understands that the world is full of According to Jean-Paul Sartre and Bobby Rio, they women, and whether or not he wins or loses one particu- never were. No one is a fixed value. Changed behavior lar battle does not affect his self-esteem,” says Bobby equals changed identity. Eventually pickup artists adopt Rio. Pickup artists teach students how to transcend the instincts of the alpha male. They will become “cool” imagined selves, and greet every moment as the without thinking about it. At this moment, they will start potential opportunity to say, “Yes!” where you’ve always to find the routines boring. What was once the “easy way mumbled, “No.” to get laid” has become the most effective self-improveRelinquishing control of one’s action (self-negation) ment program since first grade. It’s what Sartre dubbed to circumstance is what existentialists call “Bad Faith,” “authenticity.” What Rio calls “the proactive lifestyle.” and what pickup artists call “bad game.” Scrolling What Tony D considers “the ultimate self-help regimen.” through the message boards of pickup websites, one To game, or not to game? That’s about it. ^

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THE AGE OF BITCHFACE: A Comprehensive Examination of the New Dirty Look

words by molly coombs photo by jake ladue

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s long as mankind has had eyes with which to judge those around them, there has existed the “dirty look”—the icy glare that expresses complete and utter disdain for you, what you’re wearing, and everything about the choices you have made in your life. Such looks are calculated to allow the full weight of one’s polite disapproval to crush any lingering self-esteem the offender may yet still possess. Sporadic and unpredictable,

these glowers have been ruthlessly employed by a select few to keep the more disreputable elements of modern society in check.

Yet recent studies have brought to light a rather disturbing phenomenon—a disease of the face, if you will—that threatens to destroy the very foundation of social contempt as we know it. I speak, of course, of “bitchface,” the insidious neurological disorder that transforms the other-

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wise placid features of the average human into a twisted visage of scorn at the slightest sensory offense, be it real or imagined. Once the realm of only the most hardened, card-carrying bitches, the bitchface has spread rapidly in past months, infecting part-time bitches, those who are only bitches when they drink and, perhaps most tragically of all, children not even old enough to say the word “bitch.”

bitchface |bi ch fas| noun 1 the spontaneous facial expression made by those experiencing the feelings of a standard bitch. 2 informal derogatory one who, despite repeated requests, insists upon acting like a total bitch.

ORIGIN Old English bicce and the Latin facies SEE ALSO sneer, glare

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—Oxford English Dictionary, Revised Edition

Despite the short duration of these attacks, frequent bouts of bitchface, spawning According to a study conducted by New York University—an institution high- bitchface has been found to be extremely conta- endless screenshots of his uniquely conly regarded both for its academic prow- gious, especially among females between the ages descending look. Additionally, thousands ess and unusually high concentration of 15 and 35. An independent study, performed of teenage girls are salivating for the reof students infected with bitchface—as by the Partners for a Bitch-Free America (PBFA), turn of the queen of bitchface herself, many as 107 million men and women in examined the effect of bitchface stimulation on Kristen Stewart, in the latest installment the United States alone are afflicted with female social groups. The experiment found that of the Twilight franchise. According to Dr. this condition, most utterly unaware that when one member of the clique was exposed to Hayman, Stewart’s popularity sets a danthey have been infected. To put it plainly, a negative stimuli—be it a failing grade from that gerous precedent for adolescents everythat means that one out of every three gross slob of a science professor or the loss of a where: “She is, sadly, in the final stages of people in the U.S. has a bitchface. It could critical manicure appointment by an idiotic recep- the disorder, when the outbreaks come be the person to your left. It could be the tionist-—her subsequent bitchface would spread so frequently that she has nothing but a person to your right. But let’s be honest— to her peer group within a matter of seconds, of- bitchface left.” ten taking on new, more horrible characteristics it’s probably you.

Even as the entertainment indusLike a silent fart, the effects of bitch- with each successive manifestation. try continues to glorify this tragic disIt remains unclear where the bitchface dis- ease, support groups have been gaining face come on slowly. It may start with a well-deserved sneer at the freshman order originated, though historians point to the ground among those afflicted with the girl who had the gall to wear the uncontrollable urge to “make same cute wrap dress as you, but One out of every three people in the U.S. the face.” People who have this is only the beginning: soon has a bitchface. It could be the person to lost friends and relationships to you’ll be bestowing looks of unthis tic suggest all sorts of quick your left. It could be the person to your fixes: one woman, speaking mitigated bitch upon the slowright. But let’s be honest—it’s probably you. on the condition of anonymmoving Starbucks barista, the old lady taking her sweet time ity, swore that shaving off her getting on the bus, and that one weird kid rise of the Internet as a catalyst for its spread. eyebrows and drawing on a smile with “In 1990, the CDC reported only 250 incidents lip liner has effectively disguised her oftthat keeps trying to talk to you at work.

By then, the symptoms will have of public bitchface in the United States, mostly contemptuous looks. become more pronounced: the sinking at malls and high schools,” explains Tad “Shark” Yet these are just stopgap measures, of the eyebrows into a grim expression of Hayman, 24, a doctor of pop culture and the superficial solutions to a potentially lifeincredulity, the contorting of the lips into leading expert on bitchface; “By 2010, there threatening disorder. Studies show that an unforgiving grimace, the tightening of were well over 450 million documented cases oc- while incurable, bitchface can be manthe eyes into venomous slits of total de- curring each year, from the White House to Cha- aged by reducing one’s stress level and rision. Yet without a handy reflective sur- troulette to one notable incident at my daugh- reassuring yourself that although your face, most remain blissfully unaware of ter’s preschool.” ex’s new girlfriend is skinnier and pretThis rapid proliferation is no doubt aided by tier, you are much more interesting than the mask of ugliness that descends upon them; the NYU study shows outbreaks to the culture’s fetishizing of bitchface: as with an- her. Probably. A positive outlook on life last an average of only 7.3 seconds, leav- orexia and tuberculosis before it, bitchface is be- can make the misery of bitchface bearing no evidence of this instinctual bitch- ing increasingly celebrated by popular mediums able and, according to Dr. Hayman, is not ery save a lingering feeling of supreme like television and film. The hit AMC show Mad impossible to achieve: “It’s pretty simple. self-satisfaction.

Men has capitalized on character Pete Campbell’s Don’t be such a bitch, bitch.” ^

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ODE TO MEAT words by mark hildebrand photo this page by katie neuhof photos next page by zoe harris

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t’s a broiling summer day and we haven’t had a kill since breakfast. My Dad and I are prowling along Highway 61. There’s no life anywhere; not a scent to pursue. We’re running on fumes and fatigue is setting in.

And then—a green sign peeking out of the bushes, gold letters: Cabela’s Sporting Goods of Hamburg, PA. Ah, the holy hunting ground. Dad’s going in for it. He veers onto the exit, foot jammed on the gas, exhaust billowing behind us.

Cabela’s Sporting Goods is paradise for hunters, fishermen, outdoorsmen, or any pair of starving guys in search of exotic game. It’s also home to massive taxidermy menageries. The twentypoint caribou on the cliff top bugles to the morning sun. Delicious. A young buck, white-tail peaked, alert to coming annihilation. Delectable. A grey wolf in deep snow howls for his pack-mates.

He’s found a sick moose and wants to boast. Dig in, buddy.

On the second floor, there’s a woodsy restaurant where all those creatures are cooked. We sprint to its counter. My dad orders a venison sausage sandwich with onions and I, overcome by some gut instinct to one-up the old man, ask the griller for the biggest bison burger he has. He slaps a humongous bleeding chunk of flesh onto the grill. The flames erupt on impact and swallow the burger whole. It’s charred in seven minutes flat and on my plate in one. I nod to the cook and drag my meal to the table.

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Here at Cabela’s, humans wolf down all the wildlife they had to spit out into a napkin for our species to become “civilized.” Here, you can chow down without regard for propriety or good manners on any kind of animal part: turkey legs, elk rumps, bear backs.

Snarls distort customers’ ruddy faces.

I consider the colossal chunk of bison lying on my plate. Then I gorge myself.

Every lump of ground bison stampedes its flavor into my tongue. My teeth grind the tissue into succulent morsels.

I imagine I have killed this bison; tracked it down, exhausted it of its energy, and landed the fatal shot. I wonder no more why Natives Americans followed the bison herds for days on end. They knew what good food was when it thundered into the prairie lands over the horizon.

And I know how to eat it. I’m untamed.

I am a blend of man and animal, reason and wildness.

I finish the burger, belch, and exhale.

I lean back on my deer antler chair like a champion. My dad’s not even halfway through his meal. I snag an onion sliver off his plate. Must eat when you can. My satisfied belly swells and gurgles. I don’t use napkins. I lick the meat and grease off my fingers one tip at a time, the way Mother Nature trained me to. I don’t leave a scrap of wasted meat.

On our way out, my dad and I pass one of the taxidermy exhibits.

The landscape: the great dusty Dakota

plains, its big sky and dry shafts of grass. There, standing in all her stitched glory, is a motherly bison with her little calf by her side. On a gold plaque by her front hooves is inscribed the words: 2,026 lbs Shot November 2002 by: Randy Clipton. I rub the contents

of my stomach as a mother would her womb, and look into the eyes of that stuffed wooly head. I raise my right hand to my forehead, give her a quick salute as a sign of thanks, and then we males lumber out of the store.

Dinner is in four hours. ^

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lowell meyer

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townsend colon

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arvid brown

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hanna kelly

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elena tarchi

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sara hendricks

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daniel vignal

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sara hendricks

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will vanbeckum

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Once Made, Twice Forgotten words by claire paschal

Power-lined distribution chaotic like directions in cursive, but simple like ignoring strangers.

And who are the strangers stranger than, can we really know?

I know that I have nothing to know but knowing nothing– This nothing has seeped into my clothes like laundry detergent.

I smell nothing in the fabrics I so thoughtfully attempt to arrange and rearrange each morning.

I think about the spinning spooling thread I always forget to acknowledge– the “Made In China” label I forgot to think twice about.

Now I am thinking of opposites, like how something so sweet as honey in melted light shining butter through windows was once surrounded by the swarmed over combs of humming machinery creation sweat-shopping away days, little or no pay–and then I remember that I forgot to remember nothing anymore is quietly dropped onto our porches by storks, as are newspapers tossed onto lawns at dawn; sometimes thrown through sprinklers in July.

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Willimantic, Connecticut words by molly laflesh

It was the third Thursday in August, Willimantic, six dollars in my pocket, when a little hot air balloon necklace winked at me from a folding table at a head shop sidewalk sale.

You were there, you remember – the smooth silver pendant, the weightless chain.

I picked it up, smiling, fumbled with the clasp ‘til you offered to help. I felt a surprise attack of beautiful, my hair so long I had to hold it up with both hands while your nimble fingers locked it in place, sent shivers down my back.

Remember? You expressed to me the irony in adorning myself with a symbol of my greatest fear.

What’s next, a spider tattoo? A framed picture of a messy kitchen?

I wandered over to a stand selling Hosmer Mountain soda, spent my last two bucks: black cherry for you, and for me—I wanted pineapple but got root beer so I wouldn’t have to share.

We sat on a bench to drink our sodas and watch the state’s only green party mayor balance precariously on a ladder and screw in a brand-new light bulb to the great green streetlamp.

I heard she used to be a plumber or something, I said, and at the exact same moment you said, We should raise our kids here.

I reminded you about the heroin problem, but more importantly, the problem with that stupid bridge— you know the one.

Eight-foot frogs atop thread-spools at each end; man those eyes give me the creeps.

You laughed. Relax, you said, loosen up.

Tensing at your words, I grasped the pendant with cold fingers, wishing I had bought a bigger balloon.

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THE PROTEST words by rose pleuler illustrations by cole dennis

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T

he Department of Defense was afraid there could be any silence. Mom was bathing talked to her for a half hour the other morning about how beautiful aluminum foil was. because the death count was climb- a shrimp in cocktail sauce and paused with her After everyone went to bed, I went outfingers still in the dip, looking thoughtful. ing and announced that women were now alside to sit on the wicker sofa on the front “They’re rebuilding the temple that lowed into the infantry. I had always wanted porch. It was some combination of jet lag and to be a soldier. My reserve unit went active burned down on Pleasant Street,” Hart ofmilitary time that kept me tiredly alert. I sat fered. I thought then of a violent night in the summer before my senior year at Tufts and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkTehran in July, and a synagogue that burnt to University. While my little sister, Hart, swam at the ground. The heat poured from the crum- ness in the street. I thumbed the rubber sithe beach I flew overseas for a twelve-month lencers around the dog tags hanging from my pling building. Street-side pedestals were hot tour in Iran. My unit was split equally down the neck. The metal clanked together without the to the touch. My man stood five feet in front gender line. I got letters from my parents that silencers, though the need for silence seemed of me, I knew he was there, but the smoke asked about the weather and scenery and not arbitrary somehow. Iran was one wall of noise. drew a curtain between us. I lined up my shot. about the bombs and the dying.

A seagull called out over the ocean. I I hit my mark. Everyone made it back to base My tour ended and I returned to Boston. drank in the salty breeze. The dry Iranian air that night.

The May air in Logan Airport was motionless.

“Oh, but that happened months ago,” had taken a long time to get used to, but reI saw my mom before she saw me. She was Mom said. “That was before Labor Day.” She turning to my briny coast was effortless. wearing a floral print dress. When she recogMy body jolted as I registered the sound recognized her mistake after a moment and nized me in my camouflaged uniform and stiff of the refrigerator door opening inposture she began weeping openly.

She leaned heavily against Hart, I was going to have to tell her I was side. Then the legs of a chair being pulled out at the kitchen table. I laid who put her hand on my mom’s waiting for a letter from the government down on the sofa, so my outline back. Hart leaned close to Mom’s telling me to put back on my uniform. couldn’t be seen through the wingrey hair to say something that dow. I heard the sound, unmistakmade her laugh through her tears. able though soft, of crying. her face wrinkled into a wavering sob for the My feet were too heavy to lift.

There was another set of footsteps. A second time. Tension gathered in my shoulWhen we pulled into our driveway, I voice whispered in comfort to my mom. It ders. I was powerless whenever Mom cried. was sure I would feel different; there would was Hart. I pressed my face into the musty Hart took Mom’s hand out of the cocktail be a visible scab over the hole my absence cushions and didn’t make a sound. The warble had left. There wasn’t. It was the same blue sauce and pressed a napkin into her palm. to my mother’s weeping changed in Hart’s “Oh, Jule, I’m sorry, it just feels like you missed house with porthole windows, a front porch company. It was fervent, the way crying beso much,” Mom said, laughing through her and barbeque grill, and a garden to grow comes when you’re caught doing it, the way tears. She pressed the napkin against one eye. cherry tomatoes. pain intensifies the moment someone asks if “Sorry,” she repeated. She smiled at me shyly In the living room, Mom set out turkey you’re okay. sandwiches and shrimp cocktail and I started but I didn’t say a thing.

Fight it, I urged my mom silently as hot “It’s okay,” Hart said. Mom put her hand talking. I recounted my flight and the last days tears stung my eyes, but I knew she was unover mine. Conversation lulled and Dad came in Iran, funny anecdotes about people in my raveling because she was like me, or I was home, calling for his jewel like no time had unit, people who became my family for a year like her. passed at all. We hugged in the doorway. He and who must have seemed like only action I had only seen Hart cry once, out of squeezed my bicep, visibly impressed. figures. I didn’t try to correct this impression. frustration. It was during the second half My family sat in the living room toHart discreetly checked her phone while I talkof a soccer game her varsity team was losed, her mouth pulling up in tight smiles at the gether for hours. The table was covered with ing. Her muscles coiled like when you twist Superbowl-fare snacks, but the TV stayed off. right times during my stories. the ropes on a swing set until you can’t “What’s new around here?” I asked before Mom told us a story about an old woman who

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anymore. She had pulled every breath in tightly when she started to cry, holding it in and not letting go.

I peeked into the kitchen and saw my sister leading Mom by the elbow, into the back bedroom. There was a look of resignation on Mom’s face. Soon, I slunk to my room and fell soundlessly onto my bed.

I hid under the covers until seven, when my dad trudged past my door to the coffee maker. I crept out and watched him rinse the glass pot.

“You never got up this early in high school,” he teased. “It was like pulling teeth every morning. Hart! Are you getting up?” He pounded on Hart’s bedroom door.

“Over there, I would have had breakfast hours ago, and been halfway through morning cleaning,” I said as I popped bread in the toaster.

“Cleaning? You really are a changed woman.”

“Watch it,” I said, holding up my butter knife with a yellow square jabbed to the end of it. “I have a license to kill now, you know.”

I watched my father’s eyes widen, hurt somehow, and wished I had said nothing.

Hart burst from her room, balled up socks in one hand and a hairbrush in the other. “You should pick me up for lunch,” Hart said, waving her hairbrush at me.

“Since when did the high school have an open campus?”

“It doesn’t.” Hart grinned. “Will you?”

My parents had bought me the Ford Explorer on my seventeenth birthday. Used. I felt tiny inside of it. The old thing was dented over and over while I learned how to park and maneuver in the snow. About to drive away, I sat still in the driver’s seat without the key in the ignition. Of all the stupid things to miss in the warzone, for me it was driving. The Ford’s

seat hadn’t been adjusted since I left. I rolled down all the windows.

I drove along the backshore. The road pressed itself to the line of the coast, moving with the same fluidity of the ocean beyond the big rocks puddled with tide pools. Though beautiful on a sunny day, the drive was better during coastal storms. The violent sea would foam at the rocks and spill onto the road.

Hart was leaning against the back door to the science wing when I pulled up to the high school. Once inside the Ford, she twirled the radio knobs impatiently. Her dark hair stuck against her forehead. After settling on a station, she reached down and worked her sweaty tee shirt up over her head, exposing a frayed black tank top that I used to wear. She was skinnier than I remembered. Razor-like.

“I didn’t have the balls to do this in high school. Rebel,” I said.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Hart prodded.

In May the ocean was still cold. We laid on our backs in the soft sand, beyond the washing tide. Dog walkers and elderly runners passed and we would look at each other and laugh, but mostly we just listened to the water breaking on the wet sand. Hart and I started the summer early with this ritual and others. There was also a standing summer-long competition to see who could consume the most Italian ice.

The only letter Hart sent me herself in twelve months overseas was to inform me she had broken my last record.

“There was this girl over there, named Natalie,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” Hart said. She lazily unwrapped a to-go burrito from her cafeteria.

“I mean she was in my squad. She kept a notebook where she wrote what every new type of candy was that she ate. So there’s this candy they call gaz, which is basically a candy filling with nuts—” “Nougat. Hey, check this out.” Hart

“I have a license to kill now, you know.”

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extracted a bean from her burrito and tossed it up into the air. A seagull saw it and plunged, catching the morsel in its mouth.

“Listen, Jule.”

Hart put her burrito down in the sand. She ran her hands down the length of her legs and then through her hair starting at the temples.

I was always puzzled at how much she loved sand. Underneath her fingernails and in her shoes and in her hair. She raked the sand with her fingertips and her nervousness formed a hard pit of anxiety in me as well.

“What?” I said, unsettled.

“It’s just that there’s this thing I want to go to on Saturday.”

“Oh. Like a party?”

“Like a protest.”

I looked up at the sky, focusing on the sand pressing into my hair and back and bare feet. I could feel her eyes pressing into me.

“It’s in Boston, in a park. It’s a nonviolent protest, some people marching with signs. Jule.” Hart’s voice had a hard edge.

Hart wanted to study political science or photojournalism in college, and my family was overwhelmingly supportive of her passion.

I suspected they thought it would affect my decision, but it didn’t. The army wasn’t about politics to me, something I knew my family could barely stomach.

“What do you want me to say?”

“That it’s okay.”

Hart didn’t usually care about asking permission the way I did. I cared habitually.

Obedience was valued above all else in Iran.

Hart had trouble with as much as waiting for permission to use the restroom when she was in class.

Hart waited for me, caring but somehow defiant. I felt a stinging desire to tell her that whether it’s the protest or the war, there’s something unhealed there. But I couldn’t.

“It’s okay.”

“And that you’ll pick me up.”

Hart couldn’t park near a sidewalk without hitting the curb. I had always been the better driver. Mom worried anyway. She

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hugged me as I hung on the Ford’s open driver side door, laughing like she was apologizing when I tried comforting her, and lightly pulled on my ponytail.

Air conditioning chilled the enclosed cab.

The blue raspberry flavored Italian ice I bought before leaving town stayed crystallized. When I had the chance in high school, I drove friends into the city to the late-night bakeries in the North End. I slid from lane to lane gracefully.

A crowd stood on the tramped grass at the park. They held picket signs and were chanting. The sun was beginning to set and the tightly packed group of bodies cast one shadow on the ground. I stepped out of my car and leaned against the hood, searching for Hart’s face. My thoughts drifted with the wavelike motions of the crowd.

“You missed the main event.” A boy with a cigarette clenched between two fingers sidled over from the street. His picket sign was turned away from me. I flinched at his voice.

He didn’t look much older than me. His sweatsoaked tee shirt read in big black letters, GO SOLAR, NOT BALLISTIC. It was a home job.

“I’m just here to pick someone up,” I said, crossing my arms and feeling the metal of the dog tags hot from the sun against my skin.

The boy looked fixedly at me and I stared straight ahead. “I guess some people don’t have the stomach for this kind of action,” he said. I shrugged, squinting toward the crowd in the field. “I mean,” he continued, “some people don’t have the stomach for the terror going on in Iran, but you know, to each his own I guess.”

“Terror,” I said. “It terrorizes everybody, I think.”

He didn’t seem to be listening. “Do you want a pamphlet? Great reading material here.” The boy pulled a wad of glossy paper from his back pocket and thrust it at me, stepping closer, so I could sniff the rankness of sweat and smoke.

“No, thanks.” My posture compressed militantly.

“Aw, that’s alright. Reading, I guess that’s not for everybody, either.” The boy wiped at

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his forehead with the inner elbow of his sleeve. chest like a balloon. The muscles in my arms unaware. Hart dropped the picket sign, standHe shifted the sign on his shoulder and his eyes strained as I pushed back, but his weight was ing above the crumpled boy. Shoulders hunchtrailed down my rigid front. He leered. “So, are on top of me. I thudded into the side panel of ing forward, she wrapped her arms around my Ford, and was pinned against him. Months herself and could not stop staring. A warrior, I those your dog tags, soldier?”

Reflexively, my fingers trailed across the and months of physical conditioning left me realized, is different from a soldier.

“Let’s go,” I said, pulling her away. The and I writhed beneath him. He pushed one extra tag before I looked up at him again. hand over my face, a forearm pressed against boy was cursing through the blood in his “Look,” I said. mouth.

“No, you look. We’ve got as much right my throat.

We sped for home. Hart pulled her feet “Jule?” It was Hart’s voice. to be out here yelling as you’ve got to fight.

The boy’s fingers pressed on my eyes, up onto the seat, switched off the radio, and Waiting for somebody, my ass. Every once in a while we get one of you. Looking for a but I braced and pushed with my whole body cried. Big despairing sobs that shook her body. fight. I guess that’s all you’re good for.” He against him. His breath roared above me and She fished a napkin from the floor mat and shifted his weight toward me in a way that behind him the crowd was loud and oblivi- wiped her nose. I watched the road.

“I’m so sorry, Jule,” she hyperventilated. made my body want to shudder. He turned ous. Then his weight was lifted, suddenly, “Breathe,” I said. I listened to Hart cry his picket sign around and leaned against it. and I scrambled away from the car, hands at harder than I had ever heard anyone cry.

It read, HOW MANY LIVES PER GALLON? my throat.

It had been total war in Iran. No one Every time she tried to stifle the spasms in her “You really went over there, or you still waitasked, no one wanted to know, but I did my breath, they came back stronger. ing your turn?”

“I didn’t know,” she stammered, and then job. The infantryman’s creed says, Always I “I was stationed in Tehran,” I said.

His eyes were unfocused with frustration. fight on—through the foe, to the objective, to groaned in frustration. “When I saw him—I couldn’t just,” she groaned again “Do you know what Tehran was like and gave up. before the war? You probably think In this quiet moment, I every Muslim is a terrorist—or do The infantryman’s creed says, Always I fight on—through the foe, to the objective, to thought for the first time, I would you think every Iranian citizen supports Hezbollah?” triumph over all. I understood the competence do absolutely anything for you. I No. I glared at him, at his thick, of being a soldier, the duty, the obedience. must have always felt it but the words were suddenly in my head. sweat-greased cheeks.

But that’s not what Hart looked like in that I think Hart knew she would, too.

“It really gets me. People say, moment. She was a warrior.

Then I found myself beginning you know, support the troops, not something. “I wanted to tell you, the war. But without you, there wouldn’t be any fucking war! Would there! triumph over all. I understood the competence yesterday, about this girl in Iran. Natalie. She Please, please, explain this to me. How can of being a soldier, the duty, the obedience. But used to ask me to braid her hair, but I could you justify this? How can you even sleep at that’s not what Hart looked like in that mo- never get it perfect.”

“You don’t make even—” Hart tried, but night? How many lives did you take over ment. She was a warrior.

She held the boy by his shoulders, her could not form the words. there, soldier?”

“I know, even sections. It didn’t really body straining, then let him go long enough “Enough,” I said.

“Enough war! Enough killing!” The pitch for her to wind up and punch him in the teeth. matter. None of that really did. I told her so of his voice changed and he leaned in close. When she pulled back he was drooling blood. much about you guys. All of the details. About “Enough. Why don’t you get the fuck out of She picked his picket sign off the pavement how Mom used to sell those ginger beers and walloped his ribcage with a Little Leaguer with ‘Free Tibet’ on them at church events. here,” he said.

“I really am waiting for someone,” I said home run. It was one long stroke; she did not And what you guys did when I told you about hesitate. As the boy buckled, Hart made a soft, joining the reserve. And what you guys did quietly.

“Just stop! Get—” A word hitched in his painful sound. I recognized it, almost a sigh, when I went active. And I told her about how that newspaper sports guy called you a Swiss throat and he threw his weight toward me. As but broken. It was my sound, too.

Behind us the rally was rustling and Army Knife.” he lunged I grabbed him. Heat swelled in my

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“Okay,” Hart said unevenly.

“It’s kind of like, I don’t know, like collecting all of the details. That’s what we did for each other. She was killed. All that I’ve really got are little details of her life.”

We were quiet except for the sound of Hart’s uneven breathing. I glanced at her, sitting cross-legged, no seat belt, the way she did in the summer on the way home from the beach, sand everywhere on the seat cushions, and I thought about how I had lost a summer with her, and how summers were sacred to her and sacred for us.

“Please, say something now,” I said, throat constricting.

Hart pulled in a deep breath. “A lot of people die in war,” she said.

I waited until it was painfully clear she had said all she planned to. “Oh,” I whispered, pushing the air out of my lungs. “You, all of you really don’t care.”

“Jule, what do you want from me?” Hart said.

“You don’t want to know anything that happened there!” I said.

“We know what you did over there. The details aren’t really important.”

“Yes, they are!” Something sprung out of me, mostly tears, but something else too, and I hit the steering wheel hard with my fists. “You guys think you know, but you really don’t. If it was me that died, I think you’d want to know, wouldn’t you?” I asked helplessly.

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“No.” The single sound hollowed out my body. We were nearing our neighborhood, but I turned toward the backshore. “I wouldn’t,” Hart continued. “I wouldn’t want to know. I think, well, we’d need to know, have to know— but I wouldn’t want to.” The pain in her voice was familiar.

The shoreline was calm, the sea heavy like black ink. Slowly, we picked up our Italian ice, puddles by now in their paper cups. We were quiet for a long time.

“You shouldn’t have left, Jule,” Hart finally said.

“I’m sorry.” It’s all I had left to say. I was going to have to tell her I was waiting for a letter from the government telling me to put back on my uniform. The letter would come before I could prepare her for it. An apology was all I could do for a family that would be broken over and over again.

Hart leaned her head out the rolled down window and looked up at the pale sky. “So, she’s why you have the extra dog tag?” Hart asked.

“Yes,” I said.

We went home later and I tucked myself into bed and didn’t sleep. I waited for the sound of pouring ice, and found it, and then I waited for the sound of crying, and found that, too. I listened for a moment, afraid that it was too impenetrable. Then I got up, and went to sit with her. ^

you should

words by clara everhart illustrations by hanna edizel

you should you should you should you should you should

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Light Something on Fire

Do you know what’s flammable? A true, gut knowledge of what will burst into flames and what will sit and smolder? Any pyromaniac knows that birch bark goes up in a shower of sparks, the perfect fire starter.

Newspaper disintegrates into powdery ash, on top of which the letters sit longer. They could be caught by the wind, f’s and i’s and r’s ready to fly away at any moment.

Fritos burn hot and blue. Halved apples just sit there, wetly, and taste weird once you bite into them, all shriveled up and dirty. All the oil of peanut butter rises to the top and turns into violet smoke. Use a long stick to stir up the flames, make them hotter. Expand your destructive vocabulary. See what catches fire.

Be a vagrant writer

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet knee-deep in horse excrement. You’re trying to write a thesis on a down comforter? Trying to work in bed goes hand in hand with watching videos of cute cats, tolololololo, and four-hour naps. Your Facebook has more status updates than your Twitter feed can handle, but your paper remains blank. Go sit somewhere uncomfortable. Curl up on the Red Line. Look the guy who smells like vomit in the eye and shoo away the kids on a field trip. Fight for a seat, only to stand when a grandmother in a babushka hobbles on board. Ride to one end and back. Your hands will cramp, your back will ache, and your prose will be flawless.

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Kiss

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Don’t think. If you do, you’ll imagine apes mouth-feeding, or pair-bonding saliva exchange. The evolutionary reasons for kissing aren’t sexy, but how could something so weird and wet be a favorite pastime of so many? It isn’t hard, but it isn’t easy, all this how-puckered, how-soft, how-moist, how-long, open, shut business. Practice makes perfect, so close your eyes and press your face to mine, baby, until you’ve figured out the evolutionary imperative.

Break a bone

I imagine if you broke a bone just right—white shards poking through innards and outards— the fatty yellow marrow would spill out like caviar from a bumbling butler’s warming dish.

Some people throw themselves at walls and corners and situations like their sole hope is to hear that satisfying crack of defeated calcium and phosphorus. They try to land funny on that trampoline. Fall deliberately from trees.

Some smack their lips. CRUNCH.

Go hunting

To do this, you’ll need your hands, a dark night, grass, a flashlight, and bare feet. Wiggle your toes in the damp dark. Put the flashlight against your forehead like the fate’s third eye and sweep the beam over the ground.

Pretend you are painting a wall or vacuuming. Scratch the back of your neck where the sticky sweat crawls down your collar. Look for what you think are droplets of dew, caught and reflected in the beam’s bright blaze.

Approach the tiny glints, and scoop them up in two hands. You’ve caught a grass spider.

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Fuck

“The monks are not in heaven / Because they fuck the wives of Ely.” That’s a fifteenth year (not century, year) couplet about infidelity using the word fuccan. One of the earliest traces of fuck was poetic, albeit in “bastard Latin” (def: the Latin your boyfriend uses when he fucks the wives of Ely), and who knows, written by a teenaged Jesus. But fuck didn’t enter our daily lexicon in its present form until World War I, when hopeless soldiers needed something brutal to ram into the middle of their sentences like a jagged, bleeding fist. “Pass the fuckin’ whiskey,” they rasped, staggering off to battle. T. S. Eliot was eloquent, but those mud-covered men in the trenches were savage and succinct.

Catamount

“Cat of the mountain” was the fifteenth century forebear to this slang mountain lion term. Then somebody tried to say, “Hark, cat of the mountain!” and saw his buddy’s face ripped off just before the poor guy’s lips could pucker with, “Why are you screaming about cats all the time? They’re just little furry babies.

What’s the dealeth?” The cats that you have to worry about, deceased hiker from before the 1660s (when this word was abbreviated), are so big that you might not have enough time to say all five syllables. Cometh to thinketh of it, most vocab from that era tooketh forever.

Lucid decapitation

The blade drops and there you are: staring at the sky, thinking, Shit I wish I had a cigarette. Lucid decapitation: the 20 or so seconds of consciousness following head removal. Medical science doesn’t exactly back this one up, but anecdotal evidence from the French Revolution says that severed heads blinked, frowned, opened and closed their mouths, and responded to their own names. One particularly inquisitive fellow, Antoine Lavoisier, is said to have made his own death into an experiment—he managed to blink for 15-20 seconds post-chop. Running around like a French Revolutionary with its head cut off?

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etymology

words by matthew haviland and evan allen illustrations by rae bourque

etymology etymology etymology etymology etymology

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Tarantella

Panic at the disco in seventeenth-century Italy! Way back when, the Tarantella was an epidemic: a “hysterical malady characterized by extreme impulse to dance.” One minute you’re a simple peasant minding your own business, picking grapes or plowing a field, and then the tarantula (a wolf spider) bites you and you’re a berserk Elvis, hips gyrating so wildly your pelvis shatters and your brain explodes. By 1782 the lunatic desperation of the Tarantella had been replaced by a seemlier fastpaced polka, but somewhere out there, some Italian farmer has dropped his hoe and is tripping the light fantastic to the frenzied beat of his heart.

Phobia

Cachinnation

This five-dollar word for convulsive laughter began with cachinnare: “to laugh immoderately or loudly.” Of course, now that “loud” isn’t loud enough and “moderation” looks like the loser cousin to “excess,” cachinnation no longer sports the implied salary cap.

Now you can laugh just as hard as you want. Psychiatrists will call you a “schizophrenic” and tell you that this word means “inappropriate laughter,” but that’s only because they never get out.

Cachinnate it up. Webster’s got the beer.

Once upon a time, phobos meant “flight.” (Wings, right?) Then our great-to-the-whatever-power Greek grandfather decided that flight was best used to run away, hence phobos’s later second meaning (“fear”).

Grandwaaah’s legacy of cowardice sent this root term forever down the highway of irrational bitchery. 1785 brought us phobia as “aversion,” and then psychologists in 1895 opened the young word’s chest and began stuffing it with neuroses—now we’re afraid of everything from vegetables (lachanophobia) to beards (pogonophobia) to the great mole rat (zemmiphobia). Figures. Psychological excuse-making would be the realm of doctors who can’t hold a knife.

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cover photography by sarah jacobs

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