Yesterday a woman had her son pee into a cup, which of course tipped over. That’s fine, I said, but Santa’s also going to need a stool sample.
When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves. We...
What ultimately did me in was the self-adhesive condom. Putting it on was no problem, but its removal qualified as what, in certain cultures, is known as a bris. Wear it once, and you’ll need a solid...
Three days after that, the funeral was held, and while riding from the church to the cemetery Ava looked out the widow and noticed that everyone she passed was crying. Old people, college students, ev...
The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.
The bow tie is like the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party.
Movie characters might chase each other through the fog or race down the stairs of burning buildings, but that’s for beginners. Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the...
I’d asked the same question a few years earlier in Amsterdam and learned that in the Netherlands you’re more apt to bring a disease into it. Like if someone drives in a crazy way, it’s normal to call...
It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it.
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my...
In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn’t it often that way? It’s one thing for someone to describe you in print, to go through several drafts and, after careful...
In New York I'd go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I've upped it to six or seven, mainly because I'm too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qua...
In France the most often used word is connerie, which means bullshit, and in America it’s hands-down awesome, which has replaced incredible, good, and even just OK. Pretty much everything that isn’t t...
If you don’t think a mental patient has the right to bring a sawed-off shotgun to the church where his ex-girlfriend is getting married, you’re part of the problem.
I wonder whose job it was to assign these sexes in the first place. Did he do his work right there in the sanitarium, or did they rent him a little office where he could get away from all the noise?
I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.
Her expression changed then, becoming fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shakey ladder, the crazy person w...
Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.
When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.)
But things change once you've been together for 10 years. They rarely make movies about long-term couples and for good reason. Our lives are boring.