There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus Leave me the fuck alone comes out as Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point. This,
There was my life before I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be my life after, two chapters so dissimilar in style and content that they might have been w...
There are things you forget naturally-computer passwords, your father's continuing relationship with life-and then there are things you can't forget that you wish you could.
Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, Your trash. You’re trash. Your family’s trash...
The better country club operated on the principle that Raleigh mattered, that its old families were fine ones, and that they needed a place where they could enjoy one another’s company without being p...
The Romanians really do lead the world when it comes to cursing. What have you got for me? I asked a woman from Transylvania who was now living in Vienna.Shove your hand up my ass and jerk off my shit...
The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.
The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.
That's the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that...
Such movies are always a danger...falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced...The theme is universal and encourages...unhealthy comparisons...why can't our lives be like that?...
Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they're not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two houres and they go over the edge.
Someone in our family had taken to wiping his or her ass on the bath towels. What made this exceptionally disturbing was that all our towels were fudge-colored. You’d be drying your hair when, too lat...
Six months earlier, my ice breaker concerned a stripper who became a quadriplegic and eventually had her vagina eaten away by bedsores, not the easiest thing to wrangle into a conversation. But if I c...
She hit bottom when she physically attacked a deaf-mute. This was a boy of fourteen, a beloved neighborhood figure who delivered for the nearby deli.
Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it t...
Police caught the guy responsible for smashing windows and painting swastikas outside Jewish businesses on Devon Avenue. He’s out on bail now, and this morning’s paper included a picture of him. What...
People who have nothing to prove offer practical baby gifts: sturdy cotton rompers made to withstand the cycle of vomit and regular washing. People who are competing for the titles of best-loved aunts...
On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow’s dopey, almost lovesick expression on her fa...
Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, though I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps I’ve grown less likable over the years, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how to meet people. The init...
March 30, 1998Because I was in a bind with my BBC story, I devoted most of my day to defrosting the freezer.