fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
I. There was a time when Third Eye Blind's self-titled debut was the only album I listened to for an entire calendar year. Literally. That seems like an exaggeration, an overreach of the figurative use of “literally.” It’s not. I was ten during the summer of 1997, when 'Semi-Charmed Life' took over every radio station [...]
Let's just get this out in the open: Part of the reason that I write is that I want to live forever. I am not alone in that feeling. Surveying the members of any creative field will turn up an awful lot of similar sentiment. A brief (and highly unscientific) survey of some of the creative types [...]
In a critical scene of the film Memento, recall-challenged anti-hero Leonard Shelby laments the failings of memory. “Memory's unreliable,” he says. “Memory's not perfect, it's not even that good...[it] can change the shape of a room, it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not [...]
I'm mad at myself about something that I missed. This post is my attempt to make up for it. Like a lot of people, I get a lot of emails. Like a lot of people, I forget about a lot of emails. So when I got an email from HeForShe - an organization fighting for [...]
Several years ago a lunatic named Felix Baumgartner rode a balloon into outer space and then jumped out of it and fell back to earth. By choice. Because why the hell not, I guess. Oh, and since we live in the future, the whole thing was broadcast live on the internet so that people from around [...]
It was once suggested to me that we will spend the rest of our lives loving the music we listened to in our youths more than anything else that we will ever hear. And that may be true. But I disagree with the presented rationale. The presenter of this argument, let's call him Tim, claimed [...]
Halloween is a strange time when people wear crazy outfits, drink like the key to life is hidden at the bottom of a bottle of cheap vodka, and desperately try to seem attractive. So it's college, basically. Fitting, then, that ten years ago I got to enjoy my first college Halloween. For the record, I failed [...]
When I was in high school, students in the state of Michigan were required to spend a couple of days each year taking the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) test. Though the exact details elude me, I recall that one or two high school grade levels were not obligated to take the test each year. So on [...]
I have been defeated. Capitalism has won. I bought a Kindle. All hail technology.
It's always something. There's always some new gizmo or updated gadget or impeccable piece of software begging to be purchased and fawned over in all its shiny, fleeting glory. But even if I succumb to the lure of buying a Kindle or updating my iPhone or taking the plunge and buying a PS4 (so that [...]
Songs & Stories 