James Eidson

I went once to see whoever at I forget where. They put on a good show. So and so has lost a lot of weight. The past has been growing into itself well for her. I think anyways – I’d love to be a minor rock star. Sometimes it might get redundant –you might feel like you’re kidding yourself, once you’ve said your best things and nothing more. I have problems explaining myself to everyone. I grew up weird in a Baptist suburb, and now I find out, so did everyone. Thus, I have a need to explain to everyone that sometimes to know one beautiful person is dangerous – there she goes, spreading her warts for pay throughout the isolate hamlets of Appalachia’s gas-station’s poker-dens, where intelligence, underexposed, hardly precious, throws itself in any Confederate tent, before it goes to jail, where the only decent book is Ivanhoe, and writes you these wonderful ethnographic notes on barbarian humors in the far-reaches of empire. But I’m the one more cultured. I can take pride in being dull. I went to the movies last night, and Tarantino shocked me.

James Eidson's work has appeared in Sixth Finch, H_NGM_N, Forklift Ohio, Whiskey Island, ILK, Ampersand Review, and Inter/rupture, among others. He also reviews books for MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, and lives in Chicago.