He said everyone is going to die except us
 

I tried to remember something my dad told me about Luis Aparicio after Ozzie Guillen made an error in a game in 1991.

Your date’s cologne smells like rancid wine, which should be a good enough reason to bail, but it’s only hour two and you’ve made a commitment.

He doesn’t seem to think I’m a handful. I can tell by his texts.

Well, it’s happened
there is a baby
I just found out 
and he is precious

there is a baby now
and the father is handsome
he has a Sherpa-like
quality that gives me calm

I am comforted:
he

I have to believe that what I am writing — what I am living through — means something.

The Utah girls were already asleep. Unlike me, they were going home in a few days.

The Marathon was born out of a legend about a fifth-century Greek messenger named Philippides who ran 26.2 miles without stopping to deliver a message that the Greeks had defeated the Persians in battle.

To shut down and cool off like my laptop
All I need is wind and weed

She started to ride by his Marigny shotgun until he came out and became her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, a chef who meets with narcotics anonymously, orchestrates impromptu dinners in the backyard of a liquor store. 

And then Greta. I found her crawling toward the lake, on fire.

“To be inside of someone's mind has to be the sexiest thing in the world.”

There is no hotel breakfast. No air conditioning. No Tour Guide singing in the next room.

I was still pouting over hometown boy, and neck-deep in an article about foiled wallpaper when I got a Facebook message from Preston. Could we get together? 

He puts down his High Life. His pale hand drifts across the table toward mine

Bliss can flip into alienation and back into elation, adding to the teasing uncertainty of identity.

I can’t remember the last time I tried to play tennis or any sport but I can tell you all the winners from this week’s tournament

When you peed in the cup, Herman was behind you, watching.

‘Did you talk about capes,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Mary said.

But I don’t even know what a collective is. And I can’t remember if he had tattoos.

In the train carriage, we’re hot in our furs, brooding and half-drunk.

and Tahiti exists even if
I will never see it

One weird Halloween everybody dressed up as Elliott Smith.

I was taking a new drug that was making it so I could talk to my car. 

like HFCA is kind of artless manipulation 
it’s not subtle
 

We loved her but expected her to go on and on, weeping with her flowers and crown, reciting poems.

People keep saying that they can’t say anything but everyone is saying everything all the time. 

Finally, Mr. Mackey, the chair of the school’s English Department, delivered a rambling panegyric about the school’s depth of talented writers. I left my seat in the bleachers to fetch a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine.

Like many who quit drinking, my mother became a proselytizer for sobriety.

The only thing grows faster than corn here is despair.