Robin Whetstone

If you think my hobbies are limited to reading about 1930s world history, writing poems to trade magazines, and thinking about maritime disasters, think again. I also enjoy cross stitching. Here are some of my favorites. This is the first in what I hope will become a series of safety-icon cross stitches. I call it "Corrosive."  This one is called "Abu Ghraib." I did it back in 2003, when the story about torture at the notorious prison, where people were kept for years without charges, broke. Maybe I was thinking something deep about persecution based on religion, but I think I was just struck by the form of the image of the man on the box, wires attached to his outstretched arms. It seemed archetypal to me back then, like it referenced something more than what it was. This one is called "Jesus," because it's an image of Jesus. I'm very sad that I can't find the finished cross-stitch ...

"Your receptionist tells me you don't experiment on any of the meat you sell to the public." "Well, sometimes we do," he replies. Read more >

Let's say you manage a McDonald's across the street from the bus station, on the rough side of town. You show up one morning to learn that the CEO of the company -- that's right, the whole international corporation -- is coming to visit your McDonald's in just a few days. On a "fact-finding" tour, it says. "Fact-finding my eye," you think. You know the real reason the big boss is dropping in for a visit. It's because, somehow, you, General Manager #5308429, and the leader of this iconic company had a hot, torrid romance a few years back. Yes, it's true. It was doomed to end, obviously, and it did. Badly. And that's why your boss' boss' boss' boss is coming to see your store. To wallow in your embarrassment. In your obvious lack of achievement. You look around at the smears on the windows. Some of them must be ketchup, but you can't be sure. There's Dwayne, the homeless guy, over in the corner with his newspapers ...

This is a picture of my first alternative boyfriend. I will call him Jay, because that was his name. I was 15 when I met him on August 15, 1986. It was a Friday. I know precisely when I started dating him because I stopped dating him exactly one week later. We broke up forever right before Henry Rollins took the stage at Einstein-A-Go-Go, a legendary   club  in Jacksonville Beach. Even though we’d not gone out anywhere or even spoken to each other during the 7 days of our courtship, the breakup still stung. I was so excited to finally have a boyfriend who understood me – the real me that most guys my age thought was weird, and ugly. But not Jay. He also loved that Nemesis song by Shriekback, and not only could but actually would cut quite a step when the DJ put on Love and Rockets’ Ball of Confusion . At last, I had an actual boy to dance with instead of the cloud of shuffling girls I was usually a part of. And that was what we did the first night we met; the first an...

From 1993 Every morning the cat comes in through the window and wakes me up licking my face. I greet the day with superstitious dread, remembering old wives' tales of breath-snatching cats and smothered sleepers. The smell of her breath as her pink tongue exfoliates my face unnerves me. Sour milk, Tender Vittles, mouse; her breath smells like none of these things because she eats like we do: badly and infrequently. She smells like ant bites and the heat of the middle of the day, and that's it. She is skinny and parched like the asphalt my car is parked on. My roommate Susan and I are both recent recipients of Russian degrees, and in the small Florida town we're currently exiled in, jobs requiring Russian-language skills are scarce. We are forced to be resourceful for our income. And the closer it gets to rent day, the more resourceful we become. Susan starts talking again about Chris, that guy we know who has a Chinese automatic weapon disassembled in his closet. I tr...

From 2012 "If I'm hanging out in that bathroom to get my jollies, I'm going to be disappointed. All you can see are shoes." WTH? Athens: When You Gotta Go .

There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realize that their only recourse is to stow away on the tour bus of a moderately famous thrash-rock/hip hop band and see what happens next. For me, that moment came weeks after I’d been let go from the Guardian and was at the leading edge of what would turn out to be one of the darkest periods of my life. Looking back on it now, with a better understanding of the unreliable chemistry that governs my moods and impulses, I realize that the lethargy and creeping hopelessness I was starting to feel are the classic heralds of depression. But back then, I thought that the problem was simply that I was out of a job. I was still writing and intended to keep writing. But to whom? That was the problem. Our plan to start our own magazine had met with some initial success. It looked like Margot Kidder, who had come to Russia to film an adaptation of Crime and Punishment, would turn out to be our superwoman. Our intern at the Guardian had in...

In 2009 I was living in a very small town on the outskirts of a slightly bigger town. About a mile from my house was a failed subdivision that I will call Morton Mills. Someone had spent a lot of money on the entryway to Morton Mills. On either side of the drive into the subdivision were big brick terraced structures that had beds in them for flowers (and which were now just filled with pokeberry bushes and reedy grass); a black wrought-iron gate leaning open; matching black wrought-iron letters that were attached to one of the brick structures and that spelled out Morton Mills in a hopeful kind of font. Once you’re through the gate and into the place, though, you realize how desolate it is. It’s hilly, unusually so for this part of Georgia, and so you can look down and see acre after acre – 100 acres in all -- of empty lots marked off, the pvc pipes for the plumbing sticking up through the dirt like bones. The roads wind through these abandoned lots, each with a little sign optimis...

To get Hill City, you’ve got to get 2020. That was 5 years ago, the year everybody stopped pretending. The year we lost Miami. It was the first in a string of really big American cities to become unlivable. And the hilarious thing was, the ice caps didn’t even have to melt to sink the place. We’d all been sitting around waiting for that big catastrophe for years, for the not-so-far-off future of 4-plus degrees people were always carrying on about. But while we waited for the real show to start, a creeping, un-sexy disaster got Miami, a daily tide that was consistently a foot-and-a-half higher than normal. That’s all it took, and suddenly? Not a single Kardashian could be found on South Beach. Miami Beach Prepares for Extreme High Tides Just a foot and a half, and you couldn’t get to the restaurants and nightclubs and art galleries anymore, couldn’t wear your fabulous strappy sandals because the sewer pumps were backed up and leaking all the time. And nobody from Fort Lauderdal...

I stood on the porch with my mother that January of 2020 and watched the line of Red Cross buses idle on the hard road in front of our house, waiting for their turn to pull in to the Portico and discharge their passengers. The people sitting next to the windows on our side of the road looked at us as we stood there watching them, their dark faces blank. I raised my hand and waved to them. Nobody waved back. “I’ve seen this before,” said my mother, turning on her heel and striding across the porch towards our house’s open screen door. “This is not going to end well.” I followed her inside, trailing her into the kitchen. “Are you talking about the Haitians?” My mother was from North Florida and had lived in Miami a long time ago, back in the last century. She’d told me a lot about the place, about how, even back then, her apartment on Alton Road would flood with raw sewage every time it rained. About how someone had paid to have billboards put up in Little Havana and Overtown that ...