Sublime

the park I bought dope. There was a bench nearby, so I sat down for a while and took in the perfect fall day. Then I came home and carved the word failure into a pumpkin.

But this was the home I had chosen.

One of my favorite stories is about an old woman and her husband—a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims.

The piercing cold — in our bedroom stepping on my dead wife’s comb BUSON

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:

This was my one great vacation in life. It would have to end sometime, but until it did I was determined to enjoy it.

OUR NEWSPAPER is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uneasy—the car waiting with its headlights on, at dawn, as the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I fin