I lie in bed a long time before sleep comes. I wonder if I love Natalie or if I’m just so bored and I’m turning fleeting, tiny moments into full scale cinematic affairs in my head.
To begin abruptly: I’ve been some degree of suicidal since I was fourteen. I don’t think this makes me special. In fact, I think I’d be more of an individual if I’d always wanted to live.
A year wrapped in a day, a teardrop at the climax of every way that wounded, furthering the wounds.
There is kind of a freedom in the humiliation of feeling a little bit trashy.
I can tell she’s not convinced. But I’ve been Googling symptoms: confusion, nausea, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, visual hallucinations, erratic behavior.
That was the world then…
That was the world then….bawdy cars and tawdry thoughts and rundown wannabe skyscrapers brownie baked by the sun that just looked cheap against the horizon and everybody
She breathed deeply and saw an image of the naughtiest kids in the afterschool program laughing at her.
The day I stopped being a woman was a hard-boiled egg kind of day.
I hold myself in the plank position. The little dog sits on the rug watching. It’s a very expensive rug. She’s not supposed to be here. He’s up on the purple couch and I do not know what he is
I first saw Todd Field’s Tár in a packed theatre in Bloomfield Township, Michigan with a crowd
of mostly middle-aged and above upper to upper-middle class New Yorker-tote-bag liberal types.
During the first 20 or so minutes of the film I found myself annoyed, fidgeting in my seat and
groaning as I sat through the titular EGOT winner’s conversation with Adam Gopnick.
My neighbor let his Rottweiler roam without a leash again and I’m an inch away from planting razor blades inside my tomatoes.
When I was a younger man in my early 20s slumming about Watauga County in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina living off of sacks of potatoes, Top Ramen, and 50 cent day-old bread from Jimmy John's in the midst of a youthful exploration of self-discovery, my primary means of spiritual sustenance being $2 40 oz bottles of malt liquor, my relationships with scoundrels, endearing friends, an abundance of hedonism, a lack of responsibility, a poor boy’s decadence, bright-eyed women, and Kamel Red cigarettes, Elizabeth Ellen was the first literary publisher to accept any work that I’d submitted. This was circa 2014. Felt that she was the Hackmuth to my Great Bandini.
“you’re bad at finishing beverages that aren’t alcoholic,” you told me
I was zipped up to my nose in a sleeping bag, inhaling moist breath mingled with olfactory ghosts of campfires and wild sex past.
You must stop dating
physicists, that sere barnacling across
the cold, leeward faces of rocks.
writing fiction in which people google things,
suffering in a very abstract way
trying very hard to shut the fuck up & failing
We paid the cover charge and stood among the young homosexuals of Columbus.
