I never saw him that he wasn’t wearing a shirt with large square fold marks, as if he’d just come out of a store, pulled it from its package, and put it on.
1) infinite entry points for any text, image or situation
2) when the mind’s conception of itself becomes unsafe
Your mind, trapped inside your mind.
He comes to in the bathtub with no memory of how he got there. He looks in her eyes and sees pity and fear. Has this happened before? Has he already asked her this? Eventually he retains her answers, hanging on like a drowning man, terrified she’ll let go.
My participation in events to which I’d thought myself central, I came to realize, went mostly unnoticed.
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A few times a month I take the empty gun from the drawer and hold it to my temple. If someone asked why, I’d probably come up with something about “clearing the mind.” The truth is, I just like the way it feels.
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Last week for the first time I took a bullet from the cigar box, loaded it into the chamber and gave it a spin before holding the gun to my head. I can’t describe the surge of adrenaline as I visualized pulling the trigger.
After decades of sensible moderation, I packed it in and began drinking in earnest.
Certainty, in inverse proportion to intelligence.
Saw someone on the street and wondered if she was about the age our girl would be now.
I thought this might be what she would have looked like.
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If—what a word that is.
You know those movies with large, boisterous families who get together at the summer place, or at the old homestead for Christmas? What a pile of shit those are.
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.
It was the shortest day of the year and somewhere along the way the bottom had dropped out.
Work that withholds its methods or motives, or is a result of a process unrelated to the final result, or has a clever title that provokes in the viewer an unexpected reassessment, or which through a brutal economy of means affects a disproportionate response, or is so unapologetically stupid that it makes intelligence, craft or elegance seem frivolous.
