Hearing these happy songs after so many years. False memories of an ease you never acquired.

Few people are cruel enough to say what they’re thinking.

Man was created in order to manage the litter box in order for the cat to fulfill its destiny.

Figuratively speaking, he hit the windshield.
Figuratively speaking, it took weeks to clean him off.

His had been a life of accomplishment to no one but him. For him it had been a miracle.

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.

He was currently drinking a fine “blended whisky”—mixed bottom-of-bottle dregs of bourbon, vodka, vermouth, and fernet-branca.

At the time I was working for a local catering company. Two in the morning, five nights a week, sweating out last night’s alcohol in my polyester black and whites bussing dishes to back alley vans. I was on hold. To the world at large I was nobody. Soon enough I’d be nobody to myself.

It was a period in history when, for whatever reason, people by default ended up in Portland.

51/49, 50% of the time.

 “I have a Russian soul” = code for “I drink a lot”

Years later he finally learned to appreciate the flavor of the shit sandwich.