Richter in a documentary painting in a starched white shirt—is he just fucking with my OCD?

The older couple at the next table, whose lingering self regard stems from the memory that they were considered beautiful three or four decades ago.

Over the course of one sunny afternoon a stately ice shelf the size of Connecticut breaks loose and collapses into the ocean. You are dispersing. You have entered the floe.

The best advice I ever got, although for a time I didn’t take it that way. It wasn’t offered in kindness—just a curt STFU.

I don’t even look in the mirror—why would I take a selfie?

This year there was no tree; no lights; no gifts; no family; no steamed cranberry pudding with hard sauce. What remained of our holiday spirit was the annual Christmas weed for the guys on the trash truck. You never want to piss them off.

If we admitted how terrifying life is,
would we need more drugs, or less?

People tended to refer to him in compound nouns:
Fuckup
Dumbass
Shithead

Notes for a series of notes.

Self-involved, not entirely stupid, blind to your own deficiencies. You’ll do well.

Each sleepless night between the hours of 2 and 5 you traverse a vast region where your failings are laid bare under the moon’s implacable light.

The illusion of control is the source of untold human misery.

So far below an acceptable standard that it doesn’t even qualify as failure.

We miss you terribly, without the comfort of knowing our love and respect was reciprocated.

The gift of language: miracle and catastrophe.

At the time I was working for a local catering company. Two in the morning, five nights a week, sweating out last night’s alcohol in my polyester black and whites bussing dishes to back alley vans. I was on hold. To the world at large I was nobody. Soon enough I’d be nobody to myself.