My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.
Most often, our water is shut off because of some reconstruction project, either in our village or in the next one over. A hole is dug, a pipe is replaced, and within a few hours things are back to no...
Missing a nose. With these children Santa has to be careful not to ask, And what would you like for Christmas?
May 17, 1979 Raleigh Gas in four states is now selling for over $1 a gallon.
Look, I’ll say to Jesus, enough is enough. I suggest we nail some boards together and have ourselves an old-fashioned crucifixion.
Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in you...
Like prisoners and shepherds, many of them didn't care who they had sex with, the idea being that what happens in the dark stays in the dark. It's the next morning you have to worry about—the name-cal...
Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower....
Leeches are singing in my asshole.
July 3, 1981 Raleigh There is a new cancer that strikes only homosexual men. I heard about it on the radio tonight.
I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.
I’d been to only one Walmart in my life before this and I was shocked at how ugly it was, even by American standards. It was a mammoth jumble of absolute shit made more chaotic by brightly colored sig...
I’d always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn’t that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened...
It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt--make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.
It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again.
It is what it is, which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see. Isn’t that the state motto of South Dakota? I said the second or third time I heard it.
It hardly seems fair we'd get the universe all to ourselves...
Isn’t that sweet of my only son to travel all this way so he can whine about his pathetic little friend? Maybe if I weren’t strapped to my deathbed I could muster up the strength to give a damn.
In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.
In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I’m a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals...