The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.
Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.
I wouldn’t be caught dead sacrificing myself for this country.
I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was ... but my gut told me something was terribly wrong.
Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.
I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a b...
What character with any sense of aesthetics desires a cradle-to-grave account of himself? That’s so passé, so nineteenth-century.
I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I’d just been born?
When it rains it pours and when it shines you get melanoma.
Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe fore...
Popping open a bottle of Southern Comfort to wet our whistles, we’d remember with a sense of having been personally cheated all our favorite musicians were dead, Hendrix and Morrison prime examples of people who refused to grow up, heroes of ours a...
Childhood is either absurdly superficial or profoundly shitty. There’s no in-between. Anyone who reminisces about their happy childhood is delusional.
Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.
The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.
Nobody ever goes to that store to shop because it’s too crowded.
Have you ever noticed how good things go to those who hate?
Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cootervil...
Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn’t it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.
True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their o...
I knew I was in deep shit. I didn’t know how deep—just that I still hadn’t touched bottom.
So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernic...
