Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Mom always told me not to pick my scabs. I never listened: faint, predictable pain was almost pleasure, was far better than feeling nothing. I miss the coppery taste and gummy mouthfeel of scab chunks peeled from my knees and elbows, miss watching my blood ooze from carefully preserved wounds, mix with summer sweat, and […]

Radios blare from stalls all over the market. Norteño music competes with banda, a fast-talking DJ promotes a livestock auction, and a mariachi trumpet offers a wordless lament that is nearly drowned out by the festive babble of families and friends chatting and laughing as they breakfast on quesadillas made with blue-corn tortillas, steaming tamales, […]

A signal or four got crossed and the driver dropped me at a party store in Hamtramck. I begged him to take me somewhere else, like where I was actually going, but he told me “Saint Uber don’t make mistakes,” pushed me out the door, and left rubber getting out of there. My phone beeped. […]

Molly fingered the green cube suspended from a strand of monofilament fishing line knotted to the branch of her lime tree. Hundreds of identical cubes dangled from her lemon tree. Hundreds more swung from the branches of her orange tree. Molly kept her tone light. “Kev, darling, the point was to wash the bugs off. […]

They’d started hiking early, in the predawn chill, expecting the day to warm. Now, midday, they stood on the ridge top in knit hats and windbreakers near the husk of the Ten 3 restaurant, charcoaled in a late-summer mega-fire, and watched rain and storm clouds erase the city on the plain five thousand feet below. […]

I didn’t much enjoy sitting in the piece-of-shit car that smelled like puke, smoking, and watching Dad push a mop around a diner floor, but it didn’t break my heart either. The way he shuffled, dragging his right leg, I could see his back was hurting him. His own damn fault trying to ride that […]

I guess you could call it an idea. Moody brought it to me. “It’s pissed,” he said, storming into my office. The door was open, and I don’t stand on ceremony, but a courtesy knock on the way would have been nice. I was in charge, after all. “What is?” “The moon.” He appeared to […]

I didn’t know what it was. The noise I mean. It woke me up. I thought it was car doors slamming, hooligan kids terrorizing the trailer park. Good thing I didn’t tell anybody but Horse that. Found out later, watching the news, a volcano exploded, erupted, whatever in Tonga. The shock wave took nine hours […]

Sharambali shook her head. Her vision doubled then doubled again. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply and clenched her body and will against the twin waves of pain and nausea. She dropped to one knee, her blood pounding in her ears.  After a few minutes, her heart slowed. She tried to slow it further […]

Esmerelda Lee planned her suicide with the meticulous attention to detail so many of her teachers and friends and parents of friends — along with her own parents, of course — had commented on so many times in the course of her eighteen years. Seemed to Esmerelda it was the only thing about her they had noticed. To make […]