The fireworks went on for nearly half an hour, great pulsing strobes, fiery dandelions and starbursts of light brightening both sky and water. It was hard to tell which was reality and which was reflection, as if there were two displays, above and below, going on simultaneously—one in space-time, mused Max, and the other in...

All You Need Is Love” in homage to their memory.

I wouldn’t be caught dead sacrificing myself for this country.

Have you ever noticed how good things go to those who hate?

zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America. Until Blue came along I’d never even spent time around a man. Hell, I’d never even seen one. Where were all the men in this once great land?

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut … We always...

I’m arguably the least real of all my characters, a state of affairs for which I make no apologies, being, indeed, altogether proud of the fact.

spirit,” however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences—which, though he might suppress them, he couldn’t altogether erase from memory.

Max never intended to be messy with his writing, which he could read just fine, years later if necessary, even if his teachers couldn’t. He merely found that his active mind tended to move too fast for his hand to keep up with.

Flying in his dreams was an exhilarating, breathtaking experience, sometimes literally, that tended to leave reality wanting, like riding a roller coaster compared to mowing the lawn.

I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was … but my gut told me something was terribly wrong.

When it rains it pours and when it shines you get melanoma.

Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health.

Spanish—how shall I say this?—is likePortuguese spoken with a speech impediment.

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.

Well, enough of this introspection. It’s depressing, quite frankly.

I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in...

Life is too short to waste being a productive member of society.

Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn’t it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do...

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.

The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.

I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I’d just been born?

What character with any sense of aesthetics desires a cradle-to-grave account of himself? That’s so passé, so nineteenth-century.

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.

The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes true it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality.

The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.

Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.

I just want to live my own life instead of everyone else’s version of it.

The feeling was less like chemical intoxication than being drunk on life. Spinning round and round, he experienced absolute bliss— unadulterated and unconfined—in which he transcended his own personality and became one with everything he perceived.

fashionable stupidity” of ignoring things he didn’t understand, Max performed a brave act of nonconformity by accepting the possibility that his dreams might be exactly what they seemed: real.

Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.

Worry wasn’t an emotion to which he was particularly accustomed—and it worried him.

Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.

The biggest question, transcending physics and the realm of how he was able to do the extraordinary things he did, remained firmly rooted in the realm of metaphysics and begged an answer to why he could do these things.

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out I’d come to Perver City. Technically a suburb of New Age City, Perver City is where all the people who can’t make it in New Age City wind up.

In the spirit of the Alpha and the Omega, in the way the Alpha was theOmega, and vice versa, he knew the beginning was also the end—and that the end was just another beginning.

With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.

I knew I was in deep shit. I didn’t know how deep—just that I still hadn’t touched bottom.

Nobody ever goes to that store to shop because it’s too crowded.

Childhood is either absurdly superficial or profoundly shitty. There’s no in-between. Anyone who reminisces about their happy childhood is delusional.

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled...

Over the years most of my peers had come to hate me—I never understood why. I guess I was just different and, like dogs, they could smell it. So I never had many friends.

The evidence never seemed to matter to those in power, who had already made up their minds and did what people typically do when their worldview is threatened by new data: they attacked the messenger.

Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously ‘present,’ an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.

Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.