Verisimilitude of What Ever Shall Be

Posted on October 18, 2025 by McPhedran

I was not of age, a year or so too young, and I had found a secret lonely lovely place, the corner of a bar on Yonge Street below Dundas, The Hard Rock before The Hard Rock was The Hard Rock, dark and empty, the street outside like that too, a Blue Diamond stubbie on a Blue Jays cardboard coaster, one other person here, the bartender, an old guy, probably in his 40s, in this magic lonely lovely place.

I was thinking about why I hated teachers, how they liked to yell and assert their bullshit because they could, the bully of bullies. “If you don’t listen, I will kill you.” It was supposed to be funny. It wasn’t. She had assigned a 300-word piece of verisimilitude, as much detail as possible conveying a thing or moment. I had chosen a tea kettle boiling, the click of the switch, the bubbling and steam, the anticipation. She said that I should try again. “You haven’t quite captured it, have you?”

It was my first rejection of many to come. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now. I’m not getting it apparently. “It just isn’t the project for me right now.” I think about, imagining the world on hold, back in the dark lonely lovely place, an old guy in his 40s, slumped at the end of the bar, and have another drink.

At the DMV

Posted on October 2, 2025 by McPhedran

I had all of my documents, passport, old driver’s license, social insurance, proof of residence, everything. I just needed to pop in for my picture and a signature.

“Do you have your appointment?” The security guatrd offered a friendly smile.

“Appointment?”

I waved me over to the window. “Scan the QR code.”

“Oh.” The website listed every DMV in the state, a litany of addresses and zip codes. I was fucked. I would have to come back. I scrolled down and found a slot in just 20 minutes. What miracle was this? I showed the security guard my screen.

“Check in over there.”

“Thank you.” I filled out the form and sat with my ticket, U0091.

Now serving U0091 at counter 11.

This was insane. I had slipped into some other dimension where the DMV was an easy, almost plesant experience. I gave the woman my ticket and signed the document.

“Please look at the camera. You can smile if you like.”

I was aghast. “You are so efficient!”

She gave me my ticket back. “Sit and they will call you.”

“What do you mean?”

“They will call you.”

Now serving U0062 at counter 19.

“Oh, okay.” I sat and looked at my ticket again. U0091. It was beginning to make sense. I looked around at the many others all waiting quietly, staring up at the screens.

Now serving U0063 at counter 4….Now serving WF0045 at counter 21

What was I thinking? Of course I would have to wait. I scrolled through the news, my mind glazing over at more Trump insanity, assembling the generals, telling them that the cities were training grounds. This fucking guy.

Now serving WL001 at counter 12…Now serving LR045 at counter 7…Now serving EN008 at counter 17…Now serving LE018 at counter 14…Now serving U0064 at counter 10.

This was going to to take a some time. I wouldn’t back to work on time.

Now serving EM009 at counter 21. Now serving U0071 at counter 12.

Very late. I texted. Sorry about that. The DMV, you know.

Now serving LR0047 at counter 11. Now serving U0072 at counter 4.

What did matter? I was in the queue. It would happen sometime. I scrolled and liked and posted retorts to the brazenly false images and data on the White House Instagram account and wondered when they would come after me. Crazy world. Interesting world. Whatever.

Now serving U0090 at counter 15.

I looked up. My time was almost up. I checked my papers. Did I have everything? Odds were low.

Now serving LE022 at counter 6. Now serving EN012 at counter 4. Now serving LE023 at counter 7.

Crazy fucking world. Why couldn’t we just make sensible decisions and get along? I had a friend in college that always said that. “Why can’t we all just get along?” He was a first-class moron.

Now serving U0091 at counter 14.

I stood sharply, stepped the wrong way, turned, and realized that that was the wrong way, that I had gone the right way the first time, and approached counter 14 and handed in my paperwork.

“Your slip.” She looked bored. At least she wasn’t angry.

“I’m sorry?”

“I need your slip.” A little irritable perhaps.

I gave her my U0091 slip.

“Okay.” She waved for my paperwork.

“Sorry about that.”

She highlighted my problems in green. “Your full name.”

“The signature too?”

“Just write out your full name.”

I returned the form.

She highlighted more. “And check the box.”

“Which one?”

“Just check yes.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

There were more highlights and fixes, and suddenly it seemed I was almost there.

“Follow the prompts on the panel.”

“Okay.” It was the voter registration stuff. I registered as a Democrat, even if I was only marginally so. I mean, it was obvious what had to be done. Get this guy out of there. But the boxes wouldn’t click. “Uh…”

“Tap. Don’t press.”

The screen worked half of the time, less than that. I kept at it, tapping not pressing, and eventually made it through. She gave me my old license back.

“I keep that?”

“Oh no.” She took it back.

I offered a smile. “At least I got that one right.”

“How are you paying? Credit?”

“Yes.”

“Follow the prompts.”

She gave me a slip of paper, my temporary license, and I was away. I had done something big. I had a renewal for eight years, the enahnced one. I was enhanced. And no one was chasing me down. I took a peak back around as I thought that. At least not yet.

The Less You Know, The More You Aren’t

Posted on August 20, 2025 by McPhedran

I’ve never understood how people know exactly who they are – not only the presentation of themselves but lying in bed with that awareness. I realize it is mostly a farce created to help us through birth to death, but I remain dumbfounded by their remarkable certainity in all of it.

My heads remains much the same as it was at Mia Frumhartz’s birthday party – I think it was her eighth – at the bowling alley where I decided to help her off with her coat. I didn’t know why I did that, aside from the fact that I like to be in the good graces of the fairer sex. I thought I would begin to know more about who I was as life went on. I was wrong.

My only consistent behavior has been to seek solitutude. The results are pending as is the impetus. In other words, I’m still just a kid trying to get away with stuff. My immediate desire when I have free time is to do things I’m not supposed to – smoke, drink, read trashy books – and get away with that as long as possible.

I do other things too, read stuff like Sartre, re-watch Tarkovsky films and have fine thoughts about important things. And I write too, my latest book focuses on an identity crisis, a person who revels in not only not knowing who he is but condemns those who pretend otherwise. And he blogs about that.

Advance Reviews for “The Vanishing Pill”

Posted on August 15, 2025 by McPhedran

Contrasting the dim of the city against the icy wilds of Greenland, The Vanishing Pill exposes the violent inner conflicts of our nature. As McPhedran’s liner notes state: “Dreams aren’t simple things; they’re the only fucking thing.”

The advanced reviews are unanimous…

Atlantic Tri-Monthly: “I ate it up like a rabid monkey. McPhedran stews his prose with a burning hot sauce that leaves you screaming for more.”

USA Tomorrow: “You have not lived until you have read this intoxicating yarn of lust and joy.”

NY1 Off-line: “New Yorker McPhedran’s latest explosion of prose lights up the city with a tower of anguish and delight.”

Foxy News on-line: “It’s a good book, even with all the big words.”

Crime in Mind

Posted on June 22, 2025 by McPhedran

The music was muted, not the way he remembered it. It had been loud not so long ago. He wanted to get off the plane and go nowhere, stay where he was and face whatever he had to face. The consequences, that’s what they were called. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was in him as much as it was in anyone.

Crime was an interesting word. He had never really thought about it. He had just thought that a crime was a crime, just that. There were necessary laws in civilization. That was how the world was made to work. But the world how? The world why? To propagate what? What system was being kept in place? He was justifying now. He knew that. But there was no crime, not according to the law now or ever. He would be cancelled, maybe that, lose his friends and family. That was the punishment, even if it wasn’t wrong.

Wrong. That was another word he wanted to understand. He felt like he had done something that he shouldn’t have done, something he would regret. Or was that just a thing in his head, convincing himself of that because of what he had been told by his parents and their parents to them? The world was a fucking mess, all of its laws and rights and wrongs being followed, institutions constructed like that, for the greater good, whatever that was supposed to be. He was justifying again.

There was something to all of this, following this path to wherever it was going, on this plane, away, even if that was all inside of him and he was just doing it to himself. He turned the music up until it was distorted. He liked it better like that.

17 Slices of Cheese

Posted on January 27, 2025 by McPhedran

The deli counter was in the back corner of Gristedes, a New York supermarket I had mistakenly pronounced as Gris-TEA-dees to my sister — and not Gris-TAY-dees. She had mocked me for that. “Ham and cheese sandwich please.”

The woman didn’t look up from her phone.” American, Swiss, Provolone, Cheddar, Swiss, Colby, Pepper Jack?”

“Cheddar, Medium, thanks.”

“Roll or hero?” She continued to scroll.

“Rye please.”

“Rye.” She turned off her phone and placed a block of cheese on the slicer.

“Thank you.” I looked around the great empty space, lit in the horrible bald light and thought about my childhood fears and trauma, being abandoned, alone, all of that amorphous stuff, fanged blobs out from between the walls, bursting out, and then saw the woman wrap the thick sandwich in wax paper. “Oh, I forgot to ask for lettuce and tomato.”

“Anything else? Pickles? Pepper, salt? Mayo?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

She opened the sandwich to reveal a teetering stack of cheese, ten slices, more than that, atop the ham, and added watery slices of tomato and a tough ribbed section of lettuce.

“Maybe not the pickle.”

“No pickle?”

“No pickle,” I reiterated.

“What about the salt, pepper and mayo?”

“Yes.”

She wedged the sandwich back together and gave it to me.

“Thank you.” I opened the sandwich outside and counted the slices, 17 ion all along with three slices of ham. It had to be pulled apart to be eaten. I thought that was just how it was in the city, massive sandwiches that you couldn’t get in your mouth.

Even though I was wrong and came to learn that 2-4 slices of cheese was the standard, I still think of that woman as the gatekeeper of sandwiches. And that Gristedes as the gatekeeper of delis. Gris-TAY-des.

Dopamine Time

Posted on August 18, 2024 by McPhedran

It was a spur of the moment thing, and she was excited to have me. She was an old friend, a successful writer, and lived on a farm north of Kingston. The conversation was animated, remembering times past.

“You were always someone I knew I could turn to.”

“Really?”

“You looked out for me.”

Dopamine was a go-to topic. “Gotta get our shot of dopamine. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Swipe left, swipe left!”

“That’s what we do.”

I drove across the bridge later that day and thought about how we only spend time with one another to be disappointed. That is what we do. That’s what she would have said too.