He still has the dream in which he’s continued working on his long-abandoned novel and only now, after all these years, realizes he will have to start over. He always wakes with a heaviness in his chest. It wasn’t until after his father died that he recognized the feeling. He’d always sensed life had a plan for him, and he’d been right. There just aren’t any words for it.

You fail to avoid an old coworker on street, and just shake your head in greeting. It’s been that kind of year.

Death is a growth industry.

Your long-awaited genius grant; your self-designed modernist house; your late career retrospective; your fond encomiums from friends and colleagues: zero, nada, zippo, zilch.

I like to keep myself unbusy.

The word practice—cultivating a veneer of respectability while retaining the frisson of artistic endeavor.

I’m the kind of person who, if you know me, you either pretend not to see, or cross the street to avoid. I didn’t arrive at this awareness through self-knowledge, but only recently, through observation. Inwardly I feel nothing like the ponderous bore I sense myself to be in your presence. Perhaps this perceptual gap accounts for the spirit of unspecified ridicule I’ve always felt hovering about our interactions. Now that I understand it, my memories finally begin to make sense.

She said, normally people at this level of depression are dead by your age.

Maximum number of sounds heard simultaneously:

Her family was small and she had no real friends. She supposed that if her parents had thought about it they would have considered her a disappointment. Yet somehow her heart was still bursting with the sadness and joy of living, a sensation so painful that she sought oblivion by any means available.

1) thought
2) first draft
3) revision
4) deletion

Whenever I see an advertisement cut to a soundtrack of “What a Wonderful World,” I always feel like I’m being sold a great big steaming pile of shit.