That I own one of the world's largest collections of occult references, including a clutch of rare and ancient grimoires, ought to suggest I'd have been prepared for the shock. But nothing in my studies left me meaningfully prepared. . .

I pass the Grief Benches on my way to work. No one is on them today. Last night I saw a couple there, him wet eyed and her with her head down. She scrunched her eyes tight as I passed and I remember thinking she was a fraud. It's alright if you don't want

That bottle just sits there in the closet, next to the hats and a box full of old gloves. Years it’s been there. Try as we might, we never open it. We just don’t have a damn thing to celebrate. Who was it brought that bottle into our lives and went and ruined …

While I had believed that the subject had been exhausted, that the bottomless pit of the individual navel gazer had been done to death, now here arrives How To Find Yourself to show that previous literature had only scratched the surface of the belly butt

Life was small. It was tiny even, so tiny it was hard to see it sometimes. Life curled up to make itself even smaller, to fit into the kinds of holes that insects crawl into to get away from bigger insects. Life was sad. Life didn't want to be an insect.

We borrow a flag from a neighbor. It’s sitting on top of the TV in the den. We haven’t figured out where to display it yet.

Shakespeare was Shakespeare, after all, the greatest poet the language has ever boasted: why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries even bother with their paltry efforts?

I interviewed in an hour and didn’t have an umbrella, so I ducked inside the next door I passed. It didn’t matter what they sold, I wasn’t there to make a purchase.

That’s the way it went all day with me—didn’t get far, didn’t see much, just, with Mary, drank tea here and there. A fine day it was, too; not cloudy, not raining...

It had been Tom at the wharf who strode over to greet me, his friend Tom with the small spectacles standing at the bar. “Write it when you get home,” Bella said. I was wearing the same beads.

to say that he was doing fine

She's a nurse, plugging leaks, postponing via triage. I'm an engineer, watching essential systems shut down as my body buys extra minutes.

I don't know what happened to all the men. Used to wonder if they killed them all.

The Batman says it's his birthday. I take him at his word.

During war, as in any terrible time of upheaval, burials are merely quick words and a scattering of dirt, if the dead are lucky.