Essays and Fictions

The reason I want to write about drugs is that I don’t believe anyone has done a proper job of it. That it has been tried over and over and that there is already so much writing devoted to the topic doesn’t deter me. I also think I’m willing to be more honest than most other writers have been, and not ornament the language with psychedelic verbs or

The minute you get into your dope is the minute you stop progressing in the progressive world. No need for new clothes, new music, new hair styles. Drugs are beautiful in the way they create a singularly focused mind.

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.

The door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She had permed hair, a linen jacket, printed skirt; her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. So, it’s one of these offices, I thought. An office without a secondary exit. I liked secondary exits. The suffering needn’t meet the suffering in the anteroom of suffering.

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.

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:

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

It occurred to me that there was in fact no magazine, overt or hidden, that would not make sense in the waiting room of a psychotherapist. The