I’ve just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I’m now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
The best person you can be is the person you are when you are alone on a random Thursday. That’s who you are.
You can see self-pity every day if you live near a playground like I do. Little kids trip or get shoved and they fall over all the time. Usually, they don’t appear to be hurt. They look surprised to see that what was just an instant ago beneath their shoes is now pressed up against their nose. Little kids also know that injuries are an opportunity for extra affection. So whenever you see a little kid take a spill, they’ll look around to verify a nearby adult presence and then they’ll let it rip.
A tear wells in his eye. It wells and then spills down his cheek. And despite being pumped with booze and coke, I can read that one eye as clearly as a billboard for cigarettes. Only instead of saying Alive with Pleasure it says, I Have to Go Now.
He’d been single for so long, and the more I knew him, the more I saw the loneliness at his core. I felt like I brought him to life. He.
Self-pity isn’t the most accurate description for this feeling because it describes only half of it: sad for me, I’m hurt. What’s missing is the other half: and you need to do something about it.
That is self-pity and it is dangerous because it signals a lack of accountability for one’s mental state and, worse, the outcome of one’s life.
She reminded me of a scatterbrained old Cadillac that had been driven into the ground but somehow kept on starting, without fuss.
He smiled like a cat with fresh chipmunk blood on his whiskers.
Perfectionism is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If.
I hate when you play therapist. Especially with your accent. It makes everything you say sound so BBC.
I realized I could do anything to him and he would never hate me. I could never drive him away, spoil things between us, or otherwise sour things in his eyes, because he already knew how horrible I could be, yet he loved me, anyway.
So if you think the job really suits you, be you.
The truth is that life itself is brutally, obscenely unfair. Consider all those other millions of sperm cells that were just as good as the one that resulted in you, and where are they now? Dead, nowhere.
There is helium in his tone of voice, a lightness that means mischief.
Dutch isn’t easy for the outsider to learn, because it’s spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex. In order to make the correct sounds, you have to have quite a bit of phlegm at the ready, which is probably why everybody smokes. Nonsmokers can’t even understand Dutch, let alone speak a single word of it. The.
Oh my God, I think. I envy people who are so easygoing, but I also don’t understand them at all.
The decided mind is a closed mind. A closed mind can keep you separated from the ultimate truth.
See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to you chin? What’s the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin? Bubble gum. You have to take the bubble gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it’ll pick it up. Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.
You can never replace it. The good news is you do learn to live without it. You miss it. You want it. You hang out with a bunch of other crazy people who feel the same way and you live with it. And eventually, you start to sound like a cloying self-help book, like me.
My youth is gone, but something far better has taken its place.