One afternoon while driving back from the beach, Hugh pointed out a McDonald's bag vomiting its contents onto the pavement. I say that any company whose products are found on the ground automatically...
On the off chance my caller would tell me to quit drinking, I positioned myself on the sofa with two six-packs and a bottle of nice scotch. Then I turned on the TV and ate a sandwich made from leftove...
My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.
My sister's the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline...Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it's not ye...
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.
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...
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 been at the plant for three weeks when Curly invited me to his trailer for a drink. He lived just outside Hood River in a double-wide he shared with his mother, a woman he often spoke about. I tol...
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 astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex - trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsess...
It was, I thought, what evil must smell like.
It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that eve...
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 make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.
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...
I wasn’t broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.