I can just picture you giving a TED talk, pacing the stage in one of those fucking headphone getups, starting each sentence with the word “so,” thinking it makes you less of an asshole.

In the harmonious spaces and bright clear sunlight of this elegant house, you feel an acute awareness of how coarse and awkward you’ve become. If only the light could pass right through you.

Street photos of narcissists—like shooting fish in a barrel.

A listing vessel with a massive hole in its bow, drifting at sea. That is me, he thought—miraculously still afloat.

He couldn’t take great prose. The thought of someone having written it was too exhausting.

Our neighbor ran a small extermination business from a remodeled garage behind his house. Some weekends we’d sneak in, fascinated by a wall display of such mounted horrors as a freakish two-headed moth with a 12-inch wingspan. Later I discovered that every exterminator had one of these as part of their standard franchise package, fabricated by XYZ Pest Museum in Silver City, NM.

Resolutions, born of regret, nightly, always betrayed the next day.

End Times, or Beginning?