Second Annual Mikeys

The best music and literature consumed by Ourland’s editor over the past year.

Coffee Shop

You take a couple sips of the hot, earthy liquid, and off goes your mind. Now you’re floating. Near the ceiling, mingling with the smoky coffee bean scent. You’re settling into your body again.

Fiction: ‘Kanye’s Secret’

I met Kanye in a Buffalo coffee shop shortly after he started frequenting Wyoming.

Some Days it Really is Like This

Small things can still wonder. Gods don’t have that luxury. I don’t think it’d be all that fun to be a God.

Fiction: ‘Dispatch from the Great Castration’

So here I am, standing in front of another drab office building, waiting to die.

Fiction: ‘Happy Death on the Beach’

So he went down to the bar and got drunk. He hadn’t done that in a couple years, since the last time he stopped drinking, but it was one of those things where he had to have a drink right away.

Ghosts Without Faces

Reflections on fatherhood and family history.

Fiction: ‘Forever in Youth’

We spent a lot of our free time throwing rocks at cars. That’s just sort of what you did growing up in the sticks with not a lot of stuff to keep you entertained.

Like a Dog in the Woods in the Nighttime

When I was in my early 20s, I took a bus to New York City for no reason other than to do it.

Movement is for the Living

I could wake up tomorrow, walk into my front yard and be attacked by a rabid bobcat.