Essays and Fictions

Hipsters aren’t visited by unseen tragedy (unless the mother kombucha falls off a ledge and breaks)

Danny had a parrot named Fucker. And besides dealers and hookers, Danny only had two visitors to his house—his mother and his parole officer. The parrot didn’t have many words or sentences to blurt out, because neither did Danny. So his parole officer would drop in, or his mother might bring him a casserole, and Fucker would say one of two things:

Danny said it took at least twenty minutes of chasing the rooster in circles until the geometry lined up.

Novels, suicide notes and memoirs all have one thing in common: they’re all fictions. Novels, obviously. Memoirs, while promising the truth of a life, are still inherently fictional by virtue of what’s excluded and what’s amplified. Memoirs are the manipulative presentation of one’s life for public consumption. The mundane and the embarrassing are

Lee was never sad or angry. She seemed happy to just be alive. She wasn’t pretentious or interested in what I did. She never once asked me if I thought she looked good. She was confident and funny and spontaneous.

In the end, I only believe in Siddhartha Gautama and Bertrand Russell. And although I’ve published many things indicating otherwise, I believe the only truly original artists of the last one hundred odd years are Vladimir Nabokov and Patricia Highsmith.

I’m forty years old as I write this. And what I’ve learned, if I’ve learned anything at all, is that you need to reconcile living with your insatiable hole. You don’t have to love it, but you need to accept it. I’ve come to accept that I’m a fundamentally incomplete creature. Parts of me are missing. I can’t reassemble myself, as much as I’ve tried

William Eggleston once said that his entire body of work was an attempt to write a novel. I think my entire body of work is a suicide note.

My small group of friends were all similarly anti-social, autodidactic, talented, and at war with the permanence of their bodies. It was a good time.