★★★ The trip to the supermarket for milk and breakfast ingredients was chilly but only chilly, the sun glowing through fissures in the sheet of clouds. Then the clouds separated further and were overlaid with contrails, collage-work in the west. Haze shone downriver. The afternoon’s mildness made a promise that the early sunset threatened to revoke. There was a rustic smell of fallen leaves on the air, and now some trees were wholly bare — one strung with holiday lights, one dangling with lumpy blue-black seed pods. Children stayed on the playground late into the twilight, though it was still early in the evening.

David Baldacci, who signed several thousand copies of his new book, “The Escape,” said he hoped the effort would help the last big bookstore chain standing to better compete against Amazon. “You can go online and buy any book you want, but there’s not a lot of excitement with clicking the buy button,” he said.

The uncanny quality of this statement is explained not by the fact that Barnes & Noble, the entity that Baldacci and a hundred other authors are partnering with to sell more books on Black Friday, is the biggest bookseller in the country, with over six hundred and fifty retail stores, and is a Fortune 500 company and billions of dollars in annual revenue, but by the fact that it, as the last national chain of bookstores, desperately needs their charity.

Perhaps it could adopt the Strand’s twin strategies for staying alive as an independent book store in this, the year of our Lord Bezos two thousand and fourteen: #branding and New York real estate. Or something else that people love, which has nothing to do with actual books! Tacos, maybe. Or Cronut knockoffs. People love those.

“Most work emails are purely defensive missives. They seek to shift effort, hide omissions, or provide cover against future blame. Emails simulate work: Rather than getting something done, you create a futures market for excuses and rationales for not getting them done. Thanks to precarity, the modern workplace demands the construction of layers of protective virtual ramparts to shield the worker from possible future reproach. Email has become the primary brick out of which such fortresses are fashioned. An email is a one-sided agreement made in secret. Once sent, it takes on the air of accord. This is why “Didn’t you get my email?” is a workplace trump card. ‘Hey, I did my part. It’s not my fault if you dropped the ball.’”

by Adrianne Jeffries

These are real text messages to Alex, the super of my totally normal building. He’s great.

Hey Alex, we have a small leak under the sink! Can you come check it out when you get a chance?

— September 29, 2013

Hey Alex there is a REALLY weird chemical smell in the apt… Not gas, more like paint or plastic? It is too strong to stay here. Can you check it out tomorrow??

— December 4, 2013

Did you get a chance to check out that weird smell yet? I have not been back yet and I am worried about the apt exploding

— December 5, 2013

Hey Alex our bathroom bulb burned out but it is one of those special ones, can you fix it when you get a chance? Also the drains are backed up again I think.

— January 15, 2014

Never mind the drains are good but the bulb is burned out.

— January 15, 2014

Also the radiator started leaking a ton and it started warping the floor

— January 20, 2014

The radiator appears to still be leaking even though I turned the valve all the way closed

— January 22, 2014

Hey Alex I just wanted to remind you about the radiator. It is still leaking even when it is shut all the way. The floor is changing color and getting warped. If I put a towel down it gets soaked right away

— January 26, 2014

Hey Alex it’s Adrianne. Our bathtub is clogged up again. The sink is okay. Can someone check it out soon? Thank you!

— May 2, 2014

That crazy woman is downstairs screaming her face off again

— October 26, 2014

I just left you a really long message… Some guy on our floor is writing on the walls and freaking me out

— November 22, 2014

Oh yeah and they took Aric’s rug

— November 22, 2014

I took this thursday morning, it says if you touch my stuff again you will die try me asshole with an arrow pointing toward our side of the floor

— November 22, 2014

This is what is on my door that I just noticed today

— November 22, 2014

Thanks Alex!

— November 22, 2014

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, photojournalist Daniella Zalcman tells us more about what it’s like to drive your car into a moose.

Daniella! So what happened here?

So I’m driving north on Highway 11 in Ontario, about four hours into my trip from Toronto, and it’s around 7 p.m. I was on my way to North Bay for a story I’d been working on for the past month that had taken me all over Canada, and this was my last week of travel. I was pretty exhausted, and a little burned out, and not super happy to be driving — I’ve only had my license for about two years, and between living in New York City and London for nearly a decade let’s just say I’m not the most experienced motorist.

Anyway, it’s 7 p.m. in November in Ontario, which means that it’s completely dark out, and Canada is not great about putting in lights on its highways, so outside of the twenty-foot circumference of my brights I can’t see a damn thing. I’d just had to pass this truck in the right lane that was spewing some really disgusting dense black smoke and was speeding slightly, about 110 km/hr or so, when I see this THING in the middle of my lane. For a split second, I think it’s a person, and then as I get closer I realize just how fantastically large it is and HOLY SHIT THERE IS A MOOSE IN FRONT OF ME WHAT DO I DO AND WHY ISN’T IT MOVING AND GODDAMNIT CANADA, is more or less what went through my head. I have just enough time to look in my rearview mirror and realize there’s a little time to brake before I make contact with the black hole of animal matter in front of me.

So I brake, and then I hit the moose.

Moose are a) VERY BIG and b) very top-heavy, so, for lack of a better word, his butt was thrown into the passenger side of the windshield and briefly entered my car before he fell over. My windshield immediately fractured into a billion tiny pieces (I was under the impression that windshield glass was tempered and designed to crumble with nicely rounded edges, not break into tiny daggers, but it broke into tiny daggers), basically leaving me unable to see anything outside of my car. I am very, very embarrassed and shamed to admit this, but at that point I was only focused on staying in my lane and continuing to move forward to avoid another collision with the car behind me, so I’m pretty sure I drove over his hind legs as I tried to get over onto the shoulder. I am so sorry, buddy.

Somehow, he got up and walked off, probably muttering moose invective under his breath.

Most importantly: Are you OK? Second most importantly: Wow!?!?!?!

I want to be very clear that I am totally, TOTALLY okay. It was not super traumatic, I am alive, and hopefully the moose is alive, and really everything was okay except for my rental car, which was very not okay. But thankfully Hertz drove a replacement up to me the next day, so it all worked out in the end. I just had to spend the next 48 hours brushing my hair very gingerly, because I’d inevitably find another cache of windshield glass fragments.

I was extremely lucky to have an incredibly sweet pair of Canadians driving behind me — they pulled over immediately when they saw me hit the moose, called the police for me while I sat in my car blankly staring into space, unpacked my trunk, waited with me until the tow truck came, and then drove me to my destination. If it hadn’t been for them, I would at the very best have frozen to death waiting for a tow truck to come, and at the very worst been revenge-gored by an angry moose. I am seriously indebted to them.

Pretty much every person I encountered afterwards told me that I was insanely lucky — moose-related accidents frequently result in pretty critical injuries and sometimes death. Then they asked me what I did with the moose steaks.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I grew up in Maryland, in an area badly overpopulated by deer. They’re unfortunately not very intelligent animals. They routinely wandered onto busy roads and were constantly being hit by drivers. I remember being warned by multiple sources that if you were ever on a collision course with a deer, don’t take evasive action, don’t brake suddenly, but maintain speed or even accelerate into the animal. I’ve looked this up online, and it turns out it might not be right, but the logic was that braking suddenly could actually force the deer through the windshield, which would almost certainly result in serious injury. Regardless of whether or not that advice is relevant for deer collisions, it is DEFINITELY not true for moose. Accelerating into an animal that weighs on average 1,000 pounds means certain death. Don’t do it, kids.

Just one more thing.

On my drive back to Toronto (which I completed, white-knuckled, shoulders clenched, glaring over the steering wheel for all five hours), I kept an eye out for the place where I’d had my accident. On the southbound side of the highway was a GIANT moose warning sign, complete with flashing lights and a label that said “NIGHT DANGER.” So . . . now I know.

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column? Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

One more entry in the ongoing 90s alt renaissance — a warm, gently harmonized track with the sturdy bones of a Dinosaur Jr. song.

The primarily physical symbols of the tech boom are: huge sprawling campuses that you can only really get a sense of from the air; weird anonymous towers overwhelming an iconic city skyline; conference centers viewed from the inside. I would add to the list “anonymous three-bedroom ranch houses built in the 50s that cost two or more million dollars and are located in one of the following California towns.”

These are the most expensive real estate markets in the United States, according to Coldwell Banker, excluding New York City. The ones in Northern California are unremarkable in housing terms except for their proximity to large tech companies — they are strange physically contingent resource-driven boom towns built around data instead of oil, and Chinese manufacturing contracts instead of natural gas.

Anyway, here is probably the most surreal and affirming page on Zillow.

★★★ Blue patches moved fast among the morning clouds. There were wilted plants in the raised bed, collapsed and stringy. The cold was less definitive, the wind strong but not freezing. The blue took over the sky, and the more clouds blew in — round puffs, then some that the three-year-old maintained looked like spaceships. The sun descended, round and red, and bars of color shone through the blinds onto the wall, as solid and saturated as something from the middle of a paint chip. Floating garbage wended its way among the balconies a third of the way up a tower. Sunset left a smooth spectrum on the sky, with the first band flipped: a bottommost layer of violet giving way to red, and thence up in order to deep indigo.

by Aimee Cliff

“Are you ready to experience this unlimited experience?” asks Miss 2.0, a PC Music avatar, as she stares out from a chat window, an unblinking green-lit icon declaring that she is eternally online. She is the promise of the infinite scroll and unlimited data personified: hit “x” and she does not die.

Like the very first pop song I ever owned on cassette, most of the online underground label PC Music’s “hits” are based around the idea of an unspecified yet definitely totally blissful “forever.” For the past year, the label has had London club-goers raising their collective WKDs at sweaty basement parties, and filling their social timelines with its accelerated pop sound. It feels like an allergic reaction to the gloomy head-nodding that has dominated London’s electronic music scene in the last few years, which itself provided a counterpoint to the glossy, hyperreal feeling of chart pop. It instead wields hyperreality as an ethos: online, it’s a cast of airbrush-skinned characters reciting all-you-can-download excess; at intimate and rowdy club nights, it’s a bunch of young, uber-enthusiastic DJs who entrance equally young crowds with banger after banger after banger.

The most common critical narrative about PC Music has been that it’s “divisive.” The superlative nature of the label’s output — spanning everything from this alien instrumental from Lil Data to the A. G. Cook and SOPHIE-produced pop song ‘Hey QT’ — is consciously intense, testing new listeners with helium voices and overstuffed candy-rave production. It’s enough to drown out what might be the clearest and most vivid expression of what PC Music is attempting to perform: its lyrics.

On the collective’s showcase mix for DIS magazine earlier this year, ringleader A. G. Cook opened with a track that riffs on the words “money,” “music” and “melody” as lyrical stand-ins, seemingly mocking the way in which tropes of pop lyricism are rolled out so easily as to constitute verbal melody — easy, associative word groups to be yelled noiselessly in the club at two in the morning, or memorized like advertising jingles. In the first five minutes of the same mix, the phrase “Red Bull” is used as a beat, its corporate stamp becoming literally inextricable from the music.

In a rare interview given to Tank magazine early last year, Cook described the “manic” craftsmanship that goes into the “slick collage” he’s built with his label. “It’s sort of communicating something,” he explained, “but there’s all this extra stuff going on. By the time you try to figure out what it’s about, you’ve entered a sort of immersive world of ideas and references.”

Taken in isolation, one at a time, the sickly sonics of the tracks can feel alienating; accept the label’s spirit of excess, however, and knock them back all at once, and you find yourself in the middle of a world that’s too emotionally loaded to be purely a joke, too intricate and seamless to be throwaway. The top three tracks currently on the PC Music Soundcloud page are Hannah Diamond’s squelchy cyber-ballad “Attachment,” Cook’s bright pink rave romance “Beautiful,” and Danny L Harle’s hyperbolically amazing “In My Dreams.” All three tracks are pinned to the concept of “forever”: The boy Diamond is singing to is long gone, but she’s clinging to a memory of being told they’d be “together forever,” the same way she’s clinging to his photo she has saved in her phone; the canned vocalist on “Beautiful” rhymes “forever” and “together” twelve times, with an urgency that borders on terrifying; and “In My Dreams” sighs, “that’s the feeling, I want it forever / all the birds sing, they all sing together.”

Listen to the songs one after another, and the interchangeability of their tropes seems less accidental, more forceful. Eternity isn’t just an easy rhyme scheme for PC Music, it’s part of the fabric of its universe. The waveform isn’t enough to contain it.

“Forever” is detached from the physical world, where decay and other icky processes would just get in its way, and fittingly, PC Music’s lyrics scarcely speak to the body. “I guess I’ll see you in my dreams,” Danny L Harle’s banger repeats ad infinitum, while Hannah Diamond recalls how it felt to fall asleep next to her BF, only to see him “in [her] dreams.” “Tell me if you want to see me / play with my hair on a TV,” she flirts on another 2014 track, “Keri Baby,” because nothing’s sexier than a person on the other side of a screen, a person that you can never touch.

These songs don’t feel out of place when they’re blasted at PC Music nights alongside real-world money-makers like “Pretty Green Eyes,” Usher’s “Yeah,” or Dizzee Rascal’s cheesy “Holiday,” where they’re met with equal sugar-fueled rapture. In that context, it’s obvious that the work of Cook and co. shouldn’t be reduced to an acid take-down of commercial pop — there’s way too much love in the room for that. Hannah Diamond’s “Attachment” reminds me of Britney Spears’ 2003 single “Everytime,” — fragile starlet voices tiptoeing over sparse, twinkling productions. Britney sings, “I make believe that you are here, / it’s the only way I see you clear” for Hannah’s 2.0 version of the same feeling: “I can see you clearly / now I’ve saved a picture of you on my phone.”

The construction of the PC Music lab was clearly inspired in part by crossover post-rave dance hits that flooded the UK charts in the early aughts: Rui Da Silva’s 2001 single “Touch Me” was written around the same repetitive “I’m always thinking of you baby”; 3 of a Kind’s candied two-step, which went to number one in the UK in 2004, shares PC Music’s flat-speaking and bratty vocal style, and shares consciously silly repetitive tics. “Pretty Green Eyes” promised you would “never have to be alone.” A personal favorite, Vengaboys’ 1999 “Boom Boom Boom Boom!!” centered around a promise: “let’s spend the night together, from now until forever.”

PC Music’s infinite moment is the nightmarish fulfillment of promises made to a certain generation: A generation whose pop cassettes drummed into them that “forever” was an option, who remember the day the first personal computer was brought into their childhood homes. It’s a generation whose pop songs carried echoes of the ecstasy boom of the nineties, using repetitive hooks, rave-y stabs and pulse-racing BPMs to convey its spirit in something much more marketable. It’s a generation whose own ecstasy boom never came, who were only ever sold the experience second-hand — a generation whose club culture has always been over-priced and heavily policed, whose musical epiphanies happen on YouTube behind pre-roll ads, whose nostalgia doesn’t stop at the boundaries of their own experience, but gives them FOMO for every and any cultural moment they are able to see documented online.

“My work’s constant use of instantly gratifying elements such as kitsch imagery, catchy hooks, synthetic colours and fun sound effects feels inevitable,” Cook told Tank last year. “It’s almost a compulsion rather than a choice.” These compulsions are perfectly familiar: we are compelled to keep scrolling, compelled to Add To Basket, compelled to keep hitting Refresh. “Attachment,” “Beautiful” and “In My Dreams” are anthems for a generation that sits restlessly cropping Instagrams and drafting tweets, desperately striving to become immortal brands themselves. They might even be going so far as to sign up to one of the many services that now exist to properly preserve (or even update) your online social media presence after your very real death.

These artists crave forever: They’re terrified of loneliness, fundamentally narcissistic, obsessed with images and products and anything else that they think might help preserve them. And that’s why, despite being advertised with lifelessly photoshopped faces like those of Lipgloss Twins or GFOTY, there’s more humanity to PC Music than most listeners would like to admit.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

in the underside

eternally midgety soul –

insertable — duct-
taped to my arteries (mon semblance — 
mon squeeze) little shade
who called shotgun
on our dirty ride through this too-
too flesh — better grow a home because
this one’s leaving you
(bland) immortal vegetable / left to rot
out in the sun ::
now watch me drive my spirit–mule –
old bones I beat
and hide inside — over yon hill
where I’ll scrape you off on the singing soil /
then they’ll force me down
the trail of dried-out eyes

Mark Conway’s poem is from a new manuscript with the working title Fuse. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Field.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.