A vulgar preference for the novel over the good.

When the pet adoption form reveals itself to be an unexpected inquiry into mortality.

Her notebooks were so much better than her novels or short stories. Why did anyone write fiction?

He said, we don’t use “food colors” for culinary enterprises, or “asian” typefaces for asian ones. That would be akin to performing in drag. We use food-adjacent colors.

We spent the next two decades holed up on the Cape in a drafty pink ranch house where I slammed out hundreds of short stories for low-paying sci-fi pulps. As it turns out, financial ruin and amphetamines make for a powerful muse. For a time we had a side line raising mushrooms in our basement, but it never paid off. That period finally ended when a collection of my writing marketed under the title The Unsound Mind of L. Rand Steiner met with modest success.

Listen—I never really made it out of there. The kids gave up on me long ago. Ann and I no longer speak. There’s a bad feeling lodged deep in my chest. The last time we spoke my son looked me in the eye and said well, Dad, it’s been weird. I didn’t know if he was saying goodbye, and was afraid to ask.

In the fullness of the bleakness of late November a nod of gratitude for this day.

She said, if you could kindly refrain from dropping objects where and when they cease to be of interest, it would greatly improve the lives of those around you.

All-purpose advice: wire now, detonate later.

In the end it just exhausts you to death.

The two primary obstacles to improvement were (1) starting, and (2) continuing.

Route 73 roadkill, returned to earth after months as public spectacle, I salute you.

The ninth month of the pandemic brought daily, unannounced weeping, an involuntary physical impulse that felt part of some collective global balancing, almost like—
A rice cooker letting off steam?
No, that’s fucking stupid. *Coughs. But maybe.
A volcano? A cat purring?
Plunging your eczematic hands into a bubbling vat of lye?
Yes, yes, that too.

We had no money then, and what little we had we spent on drugs. Back when we were still friends. Before I annoyed you, and my hair looked like shit.

I have a particularly ugly shirt reserved for days when I feel particularly ugly.

You’ve finally perfected your craft. The only interesting parts were the mistakes.

The level of stupidity was loosely commensurate to the level of ambition.