A funeral in the rain, attended by five people who knew him online.

The manicured grounds masked an eroding social fabric.

Yesterday: the temperature dropped to 97—the 42nd straight day it has topped 90 degrees.
Metropolitan Forecast: Intense heat and humidity will prevail once again across the region. Wednesday will continue hot and humid. Readings near 100 degrees. Thurs, same. Fri, same.
Horoscope: The best of all worlds may be offered to you soon

How did you get this far without learning anything? Flattery doesn’t mean they love you. This is business. They will pick your bones dry.

Poor kid, starting to look like her father.

People seldom remembered having already met him.

He said, my work was always important to me, which wasn’t the same as actual importance. All that work, all those years, adding up to so little.

In Hawaii, celebrating the publication of his first book, he let a rip tide pull him out to sea. Predictably it became a best seller and spawned a thousand theories about his death. He’d always seemed more connected to the next life than to this one.

That year’s mingled scent of burnt coffee, jet fuel, lavatory disinfectant. Dismal at the time, now you’d give anything to have it back.

Seeing an old friend for the first time since the pandemic. Seeing in his shocked expression what I hadn’t yet noticed in the mirror.

He’d always believed you made your own luck, until his luck ran out.

After years of struggle, he finally broke through the glass floor.

Notes, 4 am
1) the past is a hallucination
2) worst possible combination: eternal life, no god

The fire came up the hill faster than I could have imagined.
It was already in the house.
·
Three feet of snow in June.
·
All trace of your existence will be wiped from the face of the earth.

Every human relationship poses the question,
“which of us is the crazy one?”

Manage to find someone willing to pay you for being some semblance of who you are, and you might survive.