The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she’d caught him staring. For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who unders...
You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter wa...
The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, l...
Aunt Prue was holding one of the squirrels in her hand, while it sucked ferociously on the end of the dropper. 'And once a day, we have ta clean their little private parts with a Q-tip, so they'll learn ta clean themselves.' That was a visual I didn'...
I am overweight. But to me, it's fat. I don't have Body Dysmorphic Disorder. When I look in the mirror I don't plunge into a depression and stick my finger down my throat or carve FAT in my arm with a pickle fork. I can appreciate when I look good as...
In August of 1998, I completed , the sequel to my novel , one of many of my books in which a dog is among the cast of principal characters. Every time I wrote a story that included a canine, my yearning for a dog grew. Readers and critics alike said ...
An apple a day might have kept the doctor away prior to the industrialization of food growing and preparation. But, according to research compiled by the United States Drug Administration (USDA) today’s apple contains residue of eleven different ne...
Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of im...
Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next,...
When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there’s one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that’d take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days ...
Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, 'Prove that you are a good person.' Another voice says, 'You’d better be ashamed of yourself.' There also is a voice that says, 'Nobody really cares about you,' and one that says, 'Be s...
The moon splits open. We move through, waterbirds rising to look for another lake. Or say we are living in a love-ocean, where trust works to caulk our body-boat, to make it last a little while, until the inevitable shipwreck, the total marriage, the...
That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far ...
as jolaha ka maram na jana, jinh jag ani pasarinhh tana; dharti akas dou gad khandaya, chand surya dou nari banaya; sahastra tar le purani puri, ajahu bine kathin hai duri; kahai kabir karm se jori, sut kusut bine bhal kori; No one could understand t...
Transition and change - guaranteed to cause anxiety. That anxiety shows itself in physical and behavioral ways, but also with thoughts (sometimes really crazy ones). This is the (primitive/automatic) brain's way of keeping us safe from the danger of ...
We do not now stand in the middle; in every aspect of our life we have, deliberately or by the 'conditioning' of birth, education or environment, allowed ourselves to stand on one bank of the river of life, with some intolerance of those who were foo...
She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally boug...
But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant se...
I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be. Cer...
Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography ...
And the whole time, people kept refilling my cup. Determined not to look like an idiot again, I kept drinking until I could finally take the vodka down without coughing or spitting. I stood, finding it much harder to do than I'd expected. The world w...
