The short fiction of j hardy carroll
A once heard it said that a good diary entry is a letter written to your future self. Using this maxim as a pole star, your can address daily happenings and the emotions they engender with a frankness impossible in, say, a letter to your mom. I keep it in mind when I write in my diary…
In the late 90s. Portland experienced a “heroin renaissance” when a lot of cheap junk saturated the city. It took a toll. I would see junkies nodding in doorways, or sometimes doing the “junkie lean” in the middle of the sidewalk. When high they were ethereal beings. They seemed to dwell on a different plane. Their edges…
In the late nineties, I had the good fortune to be the director of Überhaus, the last bandit loft in southwest Portland. We had an anti-art event called Last Thursday that started as a protest against Portland’s famous First Thursday gallery walk and soon became its own thing. We would feature a show of work curated by Sugar from the Bone, an east…
Ever since I was hip-high to my father I have had a thing about vintage aircraft, especially planes from the wild experimental age between the wars. I loved the stories of Jimmy Doolittle winning the Schneider Cup, flying on instruments and generally doing insane things in the air. I loved the biplanes and sleek monoplanes.…
This is a shorter vignette, almost a poem. It dates from October, 1999. The rainy city poised on the brink of a new millennium, floodlit cranes in sharp relief against the blooms of gray mist. The world was full of possibilities for a man just past thirty, full of longing. This little piece brims with some…
One of the benefits of city living is that you generally don’t need a car–f you are willing to make certain compromises. Cargo carrying is one of them. Groceries, laundry and other bulky errands require ingenuity and planning. Groceries especially, since laundry can be put off ad infinitum. I grew up in the supermarket era.…
Procrastination is a positive experience for me. I get a lot accomplished. In fact, I would wager that I get more done by putting things off for a day than most people do putting things off for a week. But before you close this window and opt to read this later, I want to assure…
Here is an Überhaus Diary entry from 1998 where I talk about a show and then bitch about rich people. Ever the trendsetter. I remember this Headhunters show well. Paul Jackson, the bassist, broke a string on his bass in the middle of a solo. Rather than abandoning it, he motioned his bass tech over. The guy knelt…
It’s pretty fun (an a little embarrassing) to look back on my first forays into the impenetrable jungle of fiction writing. I was like a guy on vacation in the tropics who wanders off the path from the hotel to the beach, takes a wrong turn and finds himself in a stew pot surrounded by…
In the early days of the Überhaus site I liked to experiment with format. I came across a post I did sometime in 1998 that was constructed of framesets that randomly linked to one another. For those who don’t remember, a frameset was an HTML hack that allowed multiple web pages to display on the…