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[Fiction] A philandering husband’s next phase in life:

Horace and Loneese Perkins—one child, one grandchild—lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Sunset House, a building for senior citizens at 1202 Thirteenth Street NW. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they made love for the last time—Loneese kept a diary of sorts, and that fact was noted on one day of a week when she noted nothing else. ‘He touched me,’ she wrote, which had always been her diary euphemism for sex. That was also the year they retired, she as a pool secretary at the Commerce Department, where she had known one lover, and he as a civilian employee at the Pentagon, as the head of veteran records. He had been an Army sergeant for ten years before becoming head of records; the Secretary of Defense gave him a plaque as big as his chest on the day he retired, and he and the Secretary of Defense and Loneese had their picture taken, a picture that hung for all those twelve years in the living room of Apartment 230, on the wall just to the right of the heating-and-air-conditioning unit.

“A Rich Man.” — Edward P. Jones, New Yorker

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A writer, out of money, is forced to part ways with his dream guitar:

The first hospital bill arrived in late June. My eyes roamed its surface: “If paying by check…” “YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR BILL. PLEASE PAY THE BALANCE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.” “Please pay this amount…” Along came the dizzying despondency of the Amount Due, four figures comprising the deductibles left over from a six-day stay and ER consultations and minor surgery and X-rays and everything else a troop of professionals provides to keep patients alive and well at Lenox Hill Hospital. More bills followed—consultations here, outpatient follow-ups there. As sure as I felt my preexisting vortex of personal financial ruin gather strength around me, its waves tickling and willing the bills into whispering tremors in my hand, I knew how all of this would end: I would sell the Bean.

“The Past 14 Years: Bought Dream Guitar, Checked Into Psych Ward, Sold Dream Guitar.” — S.T. VanAirsdale, The Billfold

In 1972, Uganda’s President Idi Amin exiled Ugandan Asians from the country, who left behind most of their belongings and lives for new ones in other countries—particularly Great Britain:

Dr. Mumtaz Kassam was only 16 when, stateless, she arrived at a reception centre in Leamington Spa – one of several across the country. Her parents and siblings were shunted elsewhere before being admitted to Britain. Yugoslavia, Norway, Malta and South Carolina were some of the stopovers for such ‘shuttlecock Asians’. Kassam became a lawyer in the early 1980s and in 1998, with Museveni’s blessing, set up a practice in Uganda to work for repossession of assets and compensation for the departed Asians. As deputy high commissioner for Uganda, she now represents the nation that rejected her.

Broken lives were restored with extraordinary determination, says Kassam: ‘They worked hard, maintained their dignity, educated their children, never gave up.’ The Tory MP Shailesh Vara, whose father migrated from Uganda in the early 1960s, concurs: ‘Rather than looking at their expulsion as life-destroying, they saw it as a setback. They didn’t stay downcast, got up, and started over again.’ I remember Ugandan Asian men laughing because English businesses closed at 5pm, had weekends off even. They opened shops that never shut and transformed consumer expectations across Britain.

“Starting Over.” — Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Financial Times

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The Great Heights of Venus and Serena Williams

Photo: Ian Gampon

Venus and Serena Williams, living as adults, free of their parents, and still America’s biggest tennis superstars:

I asked Oracene what she felt, watching her daughters reclaim the heights after what they’d been through. “Honestly?” she said. “I reflected on the fact that in the United States, you don’t have many players that are doing well. And then you have these two old, black girls, up in age now, and they’re still holding up America. That to me was remarkable.” I thought about it. She was right. There isn’t another American right now who’s capable of really penetrating at a major. Or maybe, in fairness to Andy Roddick and a couple of other people, it’s better to say that there isn’t another player whose penetration at a Slam would not make your eyebrows jump. It’s just these two girls, these two sisters. They’re what America has right now.

“Venus and Serena Against the World.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine

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An oral history of Burning Man, which started as an effigy burning in 1986 on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, and moved to the Black Rock Desert in 1990 to become one of the largest annual gatherings of inventors, artists and free spirits:

ALAN “REVEREND AL” RIDENOUR (head of Los Angeles Cacophony): In ’96, Burning Man was at its peak. We did the Damnation of Tinseltown and the flaming Helco tower. Burn Night felt like a scary, transformative ritual. Flash played Satan, and he came through with a gas can and doused Doris Day and John Wayne. I was on acid when I heard Flash’s booming laugh. He was Satan.

ELIZABETH GILBERT (author of Eat, Pray, Love who wrote about Burning Man ’96 for Spin): Honestly, I was scared of it. I remember the way the camp turned from this playful thing by day—beautiful and fanciful and Narnia-like—to this menacing thing at night. Being around all that fire, people with guns, and a lot of people on drugs, I was like, “They’ll be eating each other soon!” And in some ways they were—more sexually than anything else. I understood that Burning Man was waking something up. That awakening might lead to transcendent creativity—or it might be savage and ungovernable once it’s released.

“Hot Mess.” — Brad Wieners, Outside magazine

More from Outside Magazine

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The Stranger, Esquire, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Jane Friedman.

Four advice columnists, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, Salon’s Cary Tennis, Slate’s Emily Yoffe, and The Globe and Mail’s Lynn Coady, discuss what it’s like to give advice to people online:

Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?

Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.

Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, ‘Move forward.’ The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of ‘My husband looks at porn.’

“My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin.” — Britt Harvey, Hazlitt Magazine

An inquiry into a neighbor’s suicide leads a man to discover links between heavy marijuana use and psychosis among people who suffer from mental illnesses:

One afternoon recently, I met Dr. Roger Roffman, professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work, in his office up on Roosevelt Way. He has a calm demeanor and a cozy office set up for counseling sessions: He has been studying marijuana dependence for nearly 30 years. I had sent him the police report about Rosado in advance. He offered me some tea and then sat on the couch under his third-floor window and said, ‘The research would tend to indicate that she was loaded for an explosion.’

The moment he began to speak, it began to rain.

He said what loaded her for an explosion was being sexually abused as a child and then using marijuana heavily and then experiencing psychosis. Citing data from UK researchers published in Psychological Medicine in 2011, he said, ‘In some case examples where forced nonconsensual sex occurred during childhood, there was a risk from that experience for later psychotic illness, and that risk was exaggerated, made even greater, if the individual used marijuana.’ In the data, researchers found that if an individual’s sexual trauma and marijuana use both began before the age of 16, their chances of being diagnosed with psychosis later on was ‘over seven times’ greater. The researchers wrote that among other stress factors thought to contribute to psychosis—like ethnicity, employment, drug use, and family history of mental illness—sexual trauma was one ‘few researchers had acknowledged.’

“The Woman in 606.” — Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger

More from The Stranger

In the first four years as the first black president, Obama has largely avoided addressing race directly. Some historical context:

Thus the myth of ‘twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. ‘Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,’ he said in his ‘More Perfect Union’ speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s ‘God Damn America’ remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race.

Whatever the political intelligence of this calculus, it has broad and deep consequences. The most obvious result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America’s racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand for legalization himself. Indeed, there is no small amount of in­consistency in our black president’s either ignoring or upholding harsh drug laws that every day injure the prospects of young black men—laws that could have ended his own, had he been of another social class and arrested for the marijuana use he openly discusses. But the intellectual argument doubles as the counterargument. If the fact of a black president is enough to racialize the wonkish world of health-care reform, what havoc would the Obama touch wreak upon the already racialized world of drug policy?

“Fear of a Black President.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

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A man travels to the Dhamma Giri meditation center in western India to learn the meditation style known as Vipassana—the same meditation used by the Buddha to reach enlightenment 25 centuries ago. Enlightenment doesn’t come easy:

There are no further instructions. And I can’t ask anyone what I’m supposed to do. So I sit, striving to keep my mind free of distractions. I detect the tide of my respiration flowing over my upper lip – cooler entering my nose, warmer exiting. Still favoring my right nostril.

A line from The Big Lebowski jumps to mind. You want a toe? I can get you a toe. Then a song refrain. A dozen of them, as if I’ve pressed scan on my car radio. This is Ground Control to Major Tom. Snippets of sitcom dialogue, a phrase from a Richard Brautigan poem, famous opening lines – A screaming comes across the sky – old phone numbers. I try to decide whether I prefer chunky peanut butter over creamy. Chunky, I conclude. Commercial jingles, yearbook quotes, I got the horse right here the name is Paul Revere, math equations, crossword-puzzle clues, Hotel-Motel Holiday Inn, anything, everything, a deluge of internal prattle.

This doesn’t bother me. Before coming, we had been instructed to discard any mantras we might have used in the past – not a problem, as I’ve always been mantra-free – but I actually have brought with me something of one. Really more of a slogan. It is this: ‘waterfall, river, lake.’ I find myself repeating it, frequently, as I try to meditate. ‘Waterfall, river, lake. Waterfall, river, lake.’

“The Quiet Hell of Extreme Meditation.” — Michael Finkel, Men’s Journal

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