Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I've never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line's always been really blurred for me. I'll hang out with them after the show. I'll hang out with them be...
Wait, that’s your idea? That’s your expert advice? You’re going to tell these novelists to just keep going? You’re going to tell these honest, earnest writers: You gotta have faith? Those are George Michael lyrics, asshole. If they wanted tha...
I can fly around the world in one night. I can wink and go up a chimney in a split second. I can be in 500 shopping malls on the same weekend. I can even fit enough gifts for the entire world into one tiny sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer, but I ...
In the wake of the tax bonanzas for new commercial projects, roadside strips boomed. Private developers responded to the lack of planned centers, public space, and public facilities in suburbs by building malls, office parks, and industrial parks as ...
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Mo...
From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished. What has gone wrong...
My wife told me she’d meet me at the mall, and I said, “Don’t be silly. We’ve already met. What, do you think I’d marry a stranger?
I've been a Christian since I was a little girl. But my Christianity is a muddy mess of thoughts and opinions and making God into what works for me-like going shopping at the mall and picking out whatever I want, putting together faith like I would a...
You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to ...
And so really, you have given me no choice but to take you shopping by force.” She sighed, then reached up, dropping her sunglasses down from their perch on her head to cover her eyes. “Do you even realize how happy the average teenage girl would...
The dirty secret she’d learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you’d once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the con...
I had a dream about you, you invited me shopping and I was so excited at the thought we were having a "day date" after we entered the mall you had dropped your wallet and bent down to pick it up, I noticed you were wearing a thong. I realized then th...
Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas.... Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who ...
Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'driv...
Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and ...
As the incidence and fear of rape on college campuses have increased, the term rape has been generalized to mean 'misuse; diminish the effects of; steal; defeat': "I just went to the mall and raped my VISA." "My dad phoned this morning and raped my b...
Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the t...
Barry's Customer: Hi, do you have the song "I Just Called To Say I Love You?" It's for my daughter's birthday. Barry: Yea we have it. Barry's Customer: Great, Great, can I have it? Barry: No, no, you can't. Barry's Customer: Why not? Barry: Well, it'...
Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peelin...
If you find the dividing line between fairy tales and reality, let me know. In my mind, the two run together, even though the intersections aren't always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or waiting for the bus or roaming the mall doesn't wa...
I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and s...
