She said, everything is barely.

Twenty years ago a stranger stopped you on the street and said “Some day you, too, will look like Dylan Thomas.” You thought of it often over the years, but less and less. Now, looking in the mirror, you get it. Not Dylan Thomas, exactly, but someone equally unrecognizable to your inner, younger self.

I’m going to drag my shit hair and shit beard in my shit car over to my shitty ass apartment, think about your smug superiority and thank god that I’m not you.

He was what we called a “heel-stepper.” Every response started with “yes, but no.”

He had attempted to make great art, always a mistake.

Did you have a reason for each of these esthetic choices, other than “just for the hell of it?”
Fuck no.

Observed in the waiting room of the School of Osteopathic Medicine:
1) Man in vomit-splashed pajama top, repeatedly asserting that he is both a lawyer and a doctor
2)

He had, without realizing it, absorbed the professional trick of imputing grave urgency to statements of no importance.

The situation was fluid. Which was to say, he’d been drinking a lot.

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.

The entire universe is made of sub-atomic particles.
Actually, just one particle, moving very fast.
The particle is getting old. The particle is wearing out. At first the disappearances are so small you don’t notice them. And then one day the color blue is gone, and you wonder if it ever existed to begin with.
I want my blue back.

The book’s celebrated “brutal honesty,” refreshing at first, is ultimately outweighed by a hipster/junky air of smug self-congratulation I’ve encountered in some AA people, reveling in their transgressive pasts while simultaneously gloating over their current virtue.

From the instant you vow never to forget, it begins to slip away

In times of upheaval, objects and beings are more stable resting on their balance points than on their bases.
Surf’s up.