The Hungarian brings flowers to break up with me. I can see him through the window as he takes them from the trunk of his car in the Starbucks parking lot. 

See John's last Adventure Comic, "The Lucky Texan," here!

Skateboarders have to be tough. It’s not if you’ll get hurt but when, not if it will be bad but if it will be bad enough to keep you off the board.

I usually distance myself from someone after i’m physical with them.

I sent a text to my father, telling him I saw three coyotes. My father is an admirer of the natural world. I sent another text about a nearby house that had been abandoned. I'd noticed the word “SATAN” scrawled across the front door with blue paint that morning.

Ted had started the holidays in Aspen. Well, in the jail in Aspen, awaiting trial for a murder he’d committed in Snowmass.

It's the kind of world that makes you vomit well into sobriety.

In the dark we weren’t afraid to show our ugly selves. We admitted we loathed giving up our seats to old people and the pregnant. Don’t you just hate reading?  We both said at the same time. 

My novel is my father, I am saying, and it too is the best art I could make but not the best art I will make. For I am 33 and my feminist Jungian therapist says often: the beginning of adulthood is forgiving your parents for their sundry errors.

Halfway through Pilates class, the teacher decided to use telepathy. She said she was sick of the sound of her voice, always repeating the same cues. 

We left after midnight. We entered the forest, dark and green all around us, hundreds of miles deep.  Woven together in the little cocoon of our car, our world was as large as the headlight beams in the dark forest.

Understand, neurotic perfectionists are mostly calculated

For four days in 1997 I was a beam of light. Fuck off if you don’t believe me: I lit shit up. Daniel Ladinsky says Hafiz says, “The oil in the lamp the sun burns come from forests you once were, from rich deposits you left [behind],” but he was probably speaking metaphorically. 

The next day I send the above photo to a friend in Michigan. She asks if I'm fine. And what the doctor recommended. My response is typed laughter. I tell her I've been taking it easy. Staying medicated. But the chance of seeing a doctor is slim. The hospitals are over run. She's a little surprised. It's contrary to what she's been told.

If you require more of your ferret than simple love and affection, our staff of specialized trainers will provide you with an ATTACK FERRET for your security.  

They aren’t the most attractive boys at school—not smarter or more stylish and certainly no more articulate. Their appeal is a mystery to anyone who isn’t under their spell.

thinking about how all of it started

thinking about how the poems ends

The problem was I’d forgotten about the change in altitude. The grief counselor had suggested a getaway, so I fled the Alleghenies for the Rockies and the guest bedroom of my best college friend on a quiet block in Denver.

Once, at the watering hole, a man with a knit-closed eye

kissed me until I spat up a silver coin.

Thank you, everyone, for coming. I'd like to thank Mrs. Keether for this opportunity to speak...

I believe it now—I’d be a fool not to—but that doesn’t mean I agree with it.

four small test tubes.

It was a franchise, the Prez thing, but one as secret as the mob.

Your face, my light. What terrible things I’d do for it. 

But life was good for clowns back then