THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN WHO HAD ARRIVED AT the Northeast Center angry and belligerent, as inclined to take a swing at you as not. He began showing up in Bill’s studio and started to paint. Bill watched...
Other people’s condiments are depressing.
But when it gets dark, I’m off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I’m free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not...
He said maybe irony is the lens through which we see the picture in reverse
I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two specie...
Neurosis is for the young, who think they are made of time
I used to lie in a lover's arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn't comfortable in his embrace...Wo...
I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.
You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.
It was a long time before I realized that you don't have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your ow...
I tried not to think of this as an omen, but unwelcome thoughts enter my head all the time.
For better or for worse, but not for lunch,...
The last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.
Looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen?
It’s easy to find that five or six hours have sped by without my noticing. I am having fun. This is not my world, these are not my fears. is great storytelling, and it is not my story.
What is this longing, she will want to ask. This troubling feeling of more to come. You can make something out of it, I want to tell her. But that's what her life is for.
Tirade Against He Passed Away You never hear it said, He is passing away. It is always a fait accompli. He passed. How I hate it. As if the body had nothing to do with it, as if the body hadn’t even b...
SIX MONTHS AGO A FRIEND WAS ANGRY WITH ME and I with her. I had written about something someone said many years ago, but it was she who heard the words, not me, a fact I had completely forgotten. Her...
I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don’t feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to...
Happy, for instance, once meant luck. Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.