Swallowing those pills at night was now like playing Russian roulette; the blues were, for the first time in many years, the leading cause of drug deaths in Scotland, overtaking even heroin.

Between long sucks of her Newport, Jessalyn told me she was still so angry at her best friend for missing her wedding that she’d mailed her a box of crickets.

Crickets? I said.

Dead crickets.

My mother always says it was my father’s fault I couldn’t get along with anyone.

Pontypridd

When I was born, they thought I was dead. My grandmother, who could neither read nor write, plunged me into a tub of cold water. I got started after that.

My father was a coal miner

A tired black horse lies down in a field, and doesn’t get up again.

It wasn’t nice to call her eyes empty, Sondy supposed. Guileless, most people would say. Furtive, is probably what they’d call Sondy’s eyes.

Your Uber arrives and now you remember you’re not wearing any underwear.

“Girls like porn too,” she said. “Don’t be sexist.”

I go into parties wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt that says Bonjour on the front and Au
Revoir on the back, eating candy cigarettes.

That comment got 55 upvotes. I downvoted it. I don’t have friends anymore

Getting chemical poisoning together seemed romantic, the closest you could come to being entombed, Pompeii-style, in each other’s arms.

all these changes in my life were made without my consent

I was in an S &M relationship with myself.

This place looks haunted as shit.

You touch everything you see. You want everything you touch.

It was finally my turn around Christmas time. Sure, I was just one more cock in an endless line, sneaking up to that apartment, but I was not above free pussy.

Uncle Dale says, “We’re lucky that none of us can fly.”

The human race was absurd and overwrought. Men were feeble-minded narcissists and women, acoustic blowhorns with an endless flurry of wind.

Against cloudless skies, any of the available disorders are at your disposal.

I said to Martin Amis once, told him Augie March is a jazz beat novel and he said his son reckons that 

Now she wore a menacing permutation of the cheerful, customer-service smile he had seen her display earlier.

and what’s the point, really, of casual sex, except to melt the ghosts off someone’s face

There’s not a thought in the throb. Not an inkling in the coppery clatter of his mouth. There’s only the turn. Only the fist: fast, everything behind it.

She thought he was going to kill her this time, but that was one of the unspoken rules: no killing each other. Also: no kitchen knives, no purpose-built weapons of any kind. No screaming, either. Neighbors, the police—they wouldn’t understand.

My mother’s screams woke me up.