The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

I picture it like Judgement Day,’ he says finally, his eyes on the water. ‘We’ll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We’ll meet in that new place,...

It’s finished. Everything went past, without me.

Oh we’ll know each other for forever’ Bix said. ‘The days of losing touch are almost gone.’ ‘What does that mean? ‘ Drew asks.’We’re going to meet again in a different place,’ Bix said. ‘Everyone...

outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I...

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it...

…our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

You can do it alone. But it’s going to be so much harder.

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.

The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE....

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?

Sasha’s green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. “In Naples,” she said, “there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they’d been,...

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.”Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic...

She was clean”: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps...

I guess it’s always romantic when two people fall in love…. Even if it turns out not to be real.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty...

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which,...

You said you were a fairy princessYou said you were a shooting starYou said we’d go to Bora BoraNow look at where the fuck we are

This is the music business. ‘Five years is five hundred years’ – your words.

I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and ragging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked...

Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase “meant to be”–usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.

That’s what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter’s treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts...

The Passenger”. Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.

It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I’d walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of...

The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm...

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn’t a myth belong to everyone?

Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half,...

I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.

Vinegar: that’s what fear smells like.

Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn’t stemmed the suspicion that people’s opinions weren’t really their own. “Who’s paying you?” was a retort that might follow any bout of...

Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for. Usually the girl is fat, but my problem is more rare, which is freckles: I look like someone...

I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I...

Jules turned to her, incredulous. ‘Do you socialize with Republicans?'”‘It happens, Jules.

Time’s a goon right? Isn’t that the expression?

Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.

…underneath that I’d said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no...

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was “digitization” which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. “An aesthetic holocaust!

A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn’t that a fairly accurate description of lust?

Das mine!’ protested Ava, Bennie’s daughter, affirming Alex’s recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring,...

See,” Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. “It’s mine.

I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as...

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged...

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.