I’m just a big liar.

It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something’s said by a stranger I’ve been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, “Listen. I’m with you on...

I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating...

Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages.”I hate you,” she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless....

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few...

My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. ‘I think it was very...

It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they...

Hugh consoled me, saying, “Don’t let it get to you. There are plenty of things you’re good at.”When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come...

The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or...

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

‘¦ [I] recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call me na ”,ve, but I seemed to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and...

After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination...

between the disfigurement and the muzzle, it’s nearly impossible to catch what she’s saying. Always, though, while tripping and stumbling to the music, she looks out into her audience and tells the story about her...

There was my life before I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be my life after, two chapters so dissimilar in style and content that...

I’m the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I’ve never even met.

I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family

I love things made out of animals. It’s just so funny to think of someone saying, “I need a letter opener. I guess I’ll have to kill a deer.

I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in “How tall was”...

Owl love you forever

In Japanese and Italian, the response to [“How are you?”] is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by “Not so good.

My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there’s a short in the system and I break out over things I didn’t do, which only makes me look more suspect.

A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys....

I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the...

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down...

I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless – that’s what hell must be like.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I...

The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I’ve discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, “I want to love, I want to live…

One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It’s a word you don’t hear anymore. Along with ‘tramp,’ it’s been replaced by ‘homeless person,’ which isn’t the...

They’re hungry for something they know nothing about, but we, we know all too well that the price of fame is the loss of privacy.

It was all luck and it all started with that radio piece. If it wasn’t for that, I’d probably still be cleaning apartments as a maid in New York.’

I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof....

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. “That’s what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.

Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?

The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin “Tubby” Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his...

The things I’ve bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ I hear. ‘Can we please just try to have a good time?’ This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

But instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn’t even find work as an elf....

For the first time in memory, I was unable to sleep not because I was anxious but because I was excited. To live in a damp crowded asshole and sing–if these guys don’t know the...

One thing about English-language bookstores in the age of Amazon is that it assumes that everybody has the Internet, … I don’t. I’ve never seen the Internet. I’ve never ordered a book on it, and...

Sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have left to hold onto.

If you are any kind of an artist, then validation … can be a result, but you’re going to do the work anyway. Because you’re just wired that way. It’s so engrained, it’s such a...

My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a...

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. “A...

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for...

I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying, he could stand, but group laughing was asking for it, especially at the...