Auction Highlights: Aside from a significant amount of water damage, bullet holes and general wear, the painting is not of particular interest.

On Sunday night he put on his work suit and sat in a chair until dawn.

Four deer corpses on the road to Bethlehem.
Wildlife suicide in the new America.

In the dream he had been transfigured. Everything was equally beautiful, and equally ugly. Everything was infinite. He woke up with tears in his eyes.

In the daytime you cling to life with fierce desperation, but you often go to bed not caring if you ever wake up.

The illusion of control is the source of untold human misery.

Your waking mindset has gradually destabilized your dreams, and now your dreams have returned the favor. Each morning you wake up wondering if this is the day you begin to find your way back.

They weren’t real likes, they were pity likes.

What doesn’t kill you makes you older.

The world is held together by duct tape and magical thinking.

Things you thought were important turned out not to be important.
Things you thought were not important turned out to be important.

The manicured grounds masked an eroding social fabric.

Dinner with an old friend and his younger wife. She is lovely and shy, and in compensation you are more outgoing than usual. As you launch into another story about your friend as you knew him in college, a look passes between them and he squeezes her hand. You realize that her reticence is actually boredom and that dinner is, for them, an obligation to be endured as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Other worlds they have not told you of, that wish to speak to you.
—Herman Poole Blount