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alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Always Crashing
@alwayscrashing.bsky.social
1.6K followers 680 following 290 posts
A magazine of fiction, poetry, & nameless things around and in-between. // alwayscrashing.com // https://alwayscrashingmagazine.substack.com/
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alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Psst, coming soon
Flyer for Always Crashing Reading and Performance Series at Comfort Station, 2579 N Milwaukee Ave. Event on 12/13/25, 7-9 PM. Readers: Moni Garcia, Anne K. Yoder, Benjamin Niespodziany. Performers: Twilight Furniture, Jacob Stovall, Wolf3000. Free, all ages.
November 7, 2025 at 1:15 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC // www.alwayscrashing.com/current
italicized text in four columns asking a series of questions
October 2, 2025 at 3:53 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Chicago! New live show announcement, featuring AC ed Josh Watkins! We have been assured this is not standup or improv. Repeat: not standup or improv.
GENIUS NIGHT: A Night for Geniuses, on Monday, September 29th at 7pm at Cafe Mustache / TOM McHENRY SARA McHENRY MIKE MIGDALL DEVON PRICE erica dreisbach JOSH WATKINS and KEVIN JOHNSON doing the news quiz from the Skewer
September 23, 2025 at 10:20 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC // www.alwayscrashing.com/current
Lyko likes to fool her mother—tonight, on her way home, she will recapture the pardoned frog at the base of the lake, cut through her iliac arteries, the crooks of the thigh. While Dela and the mother sleep, Lyko skulks through the kitchen and smuggles the girl in with the rest. Tomorrow, she will watch her mother gnaw at every anonymous thigh, even the frog that lived but died anyway. Before Dela, Lyko and her mother practiced monkey-see monkey-do: the mother eases the stone out of a plum with a fruit knife and younger Lyko mimics the cupping of the plum empty handed. Lyko laces up one boot and her mother its twin. But the game has finished. When Lyko leaves the house some nights she can sense her mother’s peevish ear on the other side of a wall. The mother refuses to monkey-do. She is brazen, industrious in this refusal. The older woman sits on a rickety swing chair chewing her lower lip. Spare strands of hair go into their quilt for winter. One hand pierces the ventilating needle through the lace cap, the other pulls the hair taut. Pierce, pull, pierce, pull.
September 18, 2025 at 10:21 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
New work at the site tomorrow // which means tonight's the night for visiting or revisiting Jack Lennon's two blistering dropkicks of fiction, now--yes, now--at AC

www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2025...
Jason’s tiny bones are splintering and cracking under Chad’s jaw; Jason obviously doesn’t get enough calcium. Jason should go on a calcium bulk. Strengthen up these weak, effeminate bones. Chad’s bones are strong, they’re like metal. How else could Chad be biting down on so many things and making them die. Chad releases Jason’s arm and turns to look at the woman. Maybe she’ll have Chad now. No, she definitely will. She needs a strong man to protect her. She’s probably turned on by all this. But Chad thinks she looks… scared, maybe? She’s screaming and cowering on the floor, with her arms up over her face. Women are so hard to read. So maybe she’s horny. Or on her period. Or a lesbian. It’s hard for Chad to tell.
September 16, 2025 at 12:22 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC >>> www.alwayscrashing.com/current
"The last rose is presented to Chris. Chad has never seen this man before in Chad’s life. He slaps Chad a few times on the back, immediately pulling his hand away from Chad’s slowly spreading sweat. “Better luck next time, champ.” Chad lunges at Chris, locking Chad’s jaws around his throat, feeling Chris’ jugular slide around beneath them. Chris is screaming, the contestants are screaming. Chad is unaware of everything. Chad is living in the body. Chad feels so right. This is the way they should have settled everything from the beginning. Chad releases Chris, who drops to the ground, convulsing and bleeding out in an extremely beta way. Chad immediately sets Chad’s sights on Jason, who lifts his arm to cover his face like some kind of milk boy. Like some kind of coward. Chad opens Chad’s jaw wide enough to completely encase Jason’s intimidatingly wide forearm. Chad also makes a note to focus on forearms more next time Chad is at the gym. Why the hell hasn’t Chad been doing forearm day?"
September 7, 2025 at 8:10 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
psst / hey chicago
August 27, 2025 at 1:12 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Our most recent AC email edition perhaps unwisely includes some thoughts, not exactly on AI, but like, not *not* on AI

alwayscrashingmagazine.substack.com/p/depart-and...
You’re getting impatient. You hate the way AI is being shoved into everything, you hate the undead and undying venture capitalists who tried to shove crypto into everything and then tried to convince you NFTs were anything other than dumb .gifs and who are now trying to convince you AI can somehow think for you. You hate the fact that Microsoft is trying to upcharge you for an even more annoying Clippy.1 Fair enough. Me too. I’ll get to the point: there is something in language itself that thinks. There is something in the structure of language itself which contains a representation of the world, independent of our own understanding of the world.
August 26, 2025 at 3:33 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC >> www.alwayscrashing.com/current
"observation. Typing. The sentience of the interface. Thinking annotated critical editions. Outside, smoke from afar, granular detail from which to glean distantly subsequent monographs, wildly speculative articles with quotations as titles, climate chronicles. We’ll see. The speakers, like the athlete and sculptor and everyone else, are workers. And are not themselves. But you: the addressee. The visible spectrum at once desires judgment, value, rank. The black t-shirts of the senior lecturer crew certainly do. To rebrand the avant-garde. A shelf with every style guide ordered by some unintelligible provision. Your complete works. We’re getting closer to the register’s exhaustion. Surely some lachesism approaches on the other side of this or that particular act of totalization. We should check the interview’s transcription. The split EPs. Cormorants of aftersome light. The putting together of questions about forms and idylls attempts to resist all these linguistic compulsions. Donate. The inescapability of influence, the first space in which you saw something, read something, listened to caterwauling immediacy unimaginable before breaking across the action lines of your brow. Remixes might sound exactly like the original. To review each individual issue in a journal’s run. To keep going, to let the discography accumulate with purpose, a catalogue someone might put in a box and ship for a reasonable price and finally experience fulfillment. But is this not a question asked in the style of certain thinkers about how things are in fact precisely the opposite of the "
August 22, 2025 at 1:32 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
A sort of reptile guy in front of seahorses, text reads: "Joy Williams / 4 Ever"
August 8, 2025 at 12:58 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC // www.alwayscrashing.com/current
Call Sign Logic (V2) To come across as call sign logic, as the measure of the star Wound up in the adumbrate, carceral atmosphere Whisper on the regent’s choice and keep irregular No, you know the way know the keel and crest The owlist versions wide omened, oh Mary, oh many If ever I might lay on the ground, splay myself atop a rock Then laugh, I suppose It never comes out right, can’t you see? The vision the flanking, the titan, the iris, an aggregate
July 25, 2025 at 3:34 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC // "Some Column Poems" by @perfidiousscript.bsky.social
"To come across another language caught within its own lease an outrage of the mathless class a keening bough grabbed toward that grassy spot a dust less traveled by"
July 23, 2025 at 12:54 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
>>> NEW TODAY AT AC

>>> "Guardians of the Cactus Quo," an incredible work of irrealist animation from award-winning animator Dalibor Barić

>>> Watch it here:

www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2025...
Dark suited figure, holding a fruit, a shape like a lampshade around his (?) head, text: "Your number said if I want to leave this one"
July 8, 2025 at 6:16 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
text / adaptation
the cover of Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel Blu-ray cover for Gary Sherman's Dead & Buried (1981)
July 8, 2025 at 1:21 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
New work at the site tomorrow / But tonight there's still plenty of time to evolve the paradigm / "Jakob as Messiah" by @raviddice.bsky.social, up now

www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2025...
These people are not waiting to be saved, Jakob thinks. He knows that he’s really thinking these people are not waiting for me to save them, but, aware that his thoughts are not truly his own—that they neither come from nor are they meant for whoever he happens to be, here on this bus—he pretends not to be aware of how intimately involved with the Jakob as Messiah paradigm he really is. This is one of the few forms of solace that the bus journey, now that he knows it won’t take him to New York to begin his art career, still provides. He embraces the possibility that he isn’t Jakob at all and that whoever will or won’t do whatever the Messiah has been created for won’t have to be him.
July 8, 2025 at 1:00 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
www.alwayscrashing.com/current
Get in, loser. We're publishing another absolute banger from David Leo Rice
June 24, 2025 at 4:06 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC >>> www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2025...
“The ultimate goal, of course,” I said in a bored voice as the butterflies did nothing but fuzz the lines of my shoulders, “is for people to want to drown in it. I suppose in that way I’m quite like an angel. Have you ever seen one out in the fields, doctor, spinning its little web?”
June 13, 2025 at 10:11 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
>>> Our newest email edition is out, featuring an interview with new AC editor Meghan Lamb & work by Minseo Kang >>>

alwayscrashingmagazine.substack.com/p/fearless-i...
Screenshot of title: "Now at AC: 2 Prose Works by Minseo Kang" and an overexposed picture of pinned butterflies Q. We were talking earlier about certain trends or common moves in contemporary experimental writing, at least as they revealed themselves in our submissions. What are your thoughts on how contemporary writing might avoid or perhaps successfully negotiate with claims of gimmickness, and how might an experimental or formally aware work succeed beyond simple novelty? A. The writer needs to mean it. If they don’t mean it, I can tell.
June 11, 2025 at 6:17 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
New work coming tomorrow / which is a particularly good reason to check out or recheck out Kristin Lueke's "There's the Body & the Body It's True" + 4 more, now at AC

www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2025...
"i’ve been unkind. despite what i love i have been graceless,"
June 9, 2025 at 9:46 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
What are we looking for? Here's how we try to explain ourselves when asked:
Always Crashing is looking for submissions of fiction, poetry, collage text, visual collage, video, labyrinths, manifestos, the generically transgressive, and nonfiction (though we prefer not to be told if it’s nonfiction). We are interested in surfaces and form. We are interested in discontinuity and want to watch you break things. We want to read works that seek something via untruth, fantasy, artificiality, the plastic, deep superficiality, and attention to their own construction. We are interested in work that strikes curious poses; in the “experimental,” not as an avant-garde, but as a furthering of a subterranean literary tradition. We are interested, ultimately, in the aesthetic: the beautiful and the sublime, sure, but also the boring, the dumb, the merely interesting, the zany, the disgusting, the cute—particularly when pushed into strange and unfamiliar territories.
June 2, 2025 at 2:26 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Now at AC // www.alwayscrashing.com/current
deaths by bear (incomplete) january 19, 2015 / female, 67 years / wild “…by one of the animals she loved…” october 17, 1837 / male, age unknown / wild a well-placed shot is not a victory. april 30, 2021 / female, 39 years / wild a mother’s first job is feeding her young. august 19, 2010 / male, 24 years / captive mistakes were made.
May 29, 2025 at 10:02 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
6 Unbodied Poems, new today at AC

www.alwayscrashing.com/current
"unbodied poem in which it’s obvious there’s no body, no one questions a negative space, its ripeness and crackling potential, the vacuum it represents and calls you to fill, but when we are told that the empty room is nameless, untitled, unendowed, we begin to gather at the threshold, or rather a threshold begins to form as we gather around what we take to be the limits of the nonbody, for what is actually controversial is the status of the name, the title, the appellation, the function of designation, because we are unsettled by a body without a name,"
December 4, 2024 at 2:30 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
New work at the site tomorrow / which means tonight's a good time to reacquaint yourself with @addisonzeller.bsky.social's 3 paleolithic stories

(you ... are acquainted ... aren't you??)

www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2024...
Screenshot of the first several sentences of "THE CAVE OF THE EXCELLENT HORSES," full text available at the link above
December 3, 2024 at 1:22 AM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
GOT IT
666 followers
November 15, 2024 at 2:48 PM
alwayscrashing.bsky.social
Joe Sacksteder, "Ex-Hotel to Exhibition: Walking Backwards Through The Ghosts of Orsay"

www.alwayscrashing.com/current/2024...
"There are different and self-contradictory layers of defamiliarization occurring in Ghosts, as it seems that the just-quoted voice could not be the same one that describes the finding of the artist’s book, The Elevator Resides in 501, despite a strong resemblance, as the former is contained within that discovered book. The latter voice seems thoroughly ignorant of ancient cultures, while the former possesses strangely robust niche knowledge. Demoule’s persona compares the “ancient weapon” of a doorknob to “hammer throwing in athletics or the bolas of the native peoples of Patagonia and of the Gauchos, an object also found among the Inuit and Japan.” Messy comparisons, for sure, but one that comes from a place of some possessed knowledge, this speaker suffering from a lacuna of worldliness the shape of the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay and every object it ever contained. The decontextualization and the display of such items reveal what philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” would describe as each object’s Zeugsein, “the equipmental being of the equipment.” Also its aletheia, “the unconcealedness of its being.” Or, to adapt Shklovsky’s most famous quote, this art “makes the knob knobby.” Of course, Heidegger is describing Vincent van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes—and Calle elsewhere in the exhibition photographs van Gogh paintings in darkness, a reconcealing that perhaps unconceals something more than the truth of a man’s face." Gallery: photographs of an exhibition
November 14, 2024 at 3:15 AM