During our first few years together, Leopard went through the washing machine after I peed on him, many times.

If Lucas is the most obvious Bob Stone avatar in Damascus Gate, Adam De Kuff might also be a contender, sharing with his author an improperly managed mental illness (it’s made very plain that De Kuff has stopped taking his prescribed bipolar meds a long while back)

“How do I know if it’s right?” I wrote. “How did you know?” “I just knew,” she texted back. 

I ain’t supposed to know about these woods. But I did know the coyotes.

My Magic cards were the coolest thing about me.

Stone had two modes of handwriting: one a gnarly cursive he used to talk to himself and the other block capitals, more easily legible. On a scrap of torn paper in a crate of Damascus Gate research material is a draft of a self-mocking doggerel poem...

I could not imagine the dark well of her grief. I wanted to pretend it had nothing to do with me. But I felt compelled to bear witness somehow.

In the book Les Misérables, it is not raining while Eponine dies. She is simply bleeding so much that she believes it is raining. So saturated in blood that her brain belies reason.

Two thousand nine is the centennial year of Malcolm Lowry, the British novelist and poet, whose extraordinary novel Under the Volcano appeared in 1947. Lowry’s first version of it was a loosely constructed story about Britons who witness a violent crime in Mexico.

What stands out in my memory now is the silence in that barn.

If Clubber Lang just chilled out, he would’ve been in Rocky’s corner, too.

Privacy, he called it, in my house full of men. Otherwise: quarantine.

Marlon, breath puffing out in the cool morning air, says to no one that if the students cry, he will cry too. This isn’t a process you want to see again through new eyes.

You would have believed on the screen was where my attention stayed.

Recently, I told my mother that I used to climb out of the bathroom window in the upstairs and crawl out onto the chimney ledge, where one slip of the ankle, knee, wrist, and I would have fallen three stories onto cement. Perhaps it began as another peace offering—I was trying to amuse her.

There was no way you could have a pair of Nikes and get clowned.

There was a yearning in me for her soft whiteness, which went powdery pink in her most private of places.

In that moment through blinding lights and pelting rain, I saw the police telling my parents what I’d done.

I told this story as a party trick for years.

"with sky as ceiling, / ground as home, / we can call the stranger / lover / and the earth / ours / at least for a little while." 

Take a percocet at around 4:30pm.

Eat a large weed cookie, drink 1 750ml can of beer and then 3 pints between 6:30pm and 10:00pm.

The more I read, the more about voices made sense.  Women’s voices.  The ways in which mine always seemed to stand out, too loud, against the quiet whispers of those around me.

You preheat your oven to 425°F before measuring out two and one third cups of self-rising flour into a glass Pyrex bowl. White Lily is the best though it can be hard to find outside of the south and is worth tracking down. It’s milled from a soft winter wheat, and with it your biscuits puff up into soft, light pillows that literally melt in your mouth.

Every twenty-something in Los Angeles has a comedian friend. In late winter, mine invited me to his show in Culver City with a foolproof pitch: no cover, no drink minimum, nearby parking.

There’s no room that’s mine. This thought occurred to me plenty as a child, but it was a fact without any emotion attached. I think about it especially when I watch house hunting shows: what a wish list looks like for people who get to choose where they live on purpose.