I try to turn everything into a metaphor so I don’t have to face it straight on.

Things to remember:

Ghost Deer, Ohio

Ray St. Ray

The walls, statues, and shrines of the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum are covered in offerings to the spirits—or loa—represented within. Plaques have pennies and dimes resting on their frames; there is a wishing stump filled with dollar bills. And there is lip-gloss everywhere.

There’s an episode of The Outer Limits where Alyssa Milano plays a college student that eats men whole with her vagina.

A fleet of pickup trucks and a white panel van have taken all the shady spots outside my parents’ house.

His first sensory seizures were like a passing light-headedness.

They stopped my mother’s heart four times.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

For ten years, General Motors knew about faulty ignition switches in its cars but concealed this information.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

I was wearing my home-made Giants uniform, as I did every day that week, laboriously sewed by mom who was not enamored of sewing. 

It is 5:30 in the morning. I am standing in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel, judging the distance between me and a planter because I am pretty sure I am going to throw up.  My stomach is in

I have been to many games at Shea Stadium and I know that this facility’s bar for unacceptable behavior is extremely low.

Let’s start this account of fuckfaces on October 18, 2006. I was 30 years old, recently engaged, in my third year of residency training at Chapel Hill, and depressed about the New York Mets. 

Dear Dicky,
You probably figured it out by now, but I’m sorry I stole the softball.

I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw Stand By Me. I guess that would have made it 1990. As the narrator, Gordie Lachance, says about the first time he saw a dead human being, as voiceover at the beginning of the movie: “a long time ago… but only if you measure terms in years...

Once I googled “Can you bunt in football?”  Answers.com had a helpful “Answered by the Community” reply: “No.”

There are bite marks exposing the bright green flesh of two kiwis in the blue glass fruit bowl.

I never call ahead to say I'm in town and on the way over because the front door is always unlocked. 

No one has all the answers. What could the man returning a fleece bodysuit say to the woman behind him getting ready to buy exactly the same item?

The wind isn’t really knocked out of you. When you fall, you panic, hold your breath, tense every muscle. 

somewhere on the internets, in a dusty archived sent folder and a long forgotten inbox is our turn to Genesis chapter two verse eight 

Sheila Heti’s words penned: BLOW-JOB ARTIST. I have always wanted to be everything to everyone.

At one point, Justin’s stick got swatted and went flying. He hesitated for a moment, before strut-skating to the bench. This is not something a hockey player would normally do, just leave an unbroken stick on the ice during a non-competitive game. Someone eventually pushed the stick over to the dark team’s bench. “Pick it up,” Tony heard him say. For a second, Tony thought Justin was talking to him. Turns out he was talking to his bodyguard.

Like many other men in their seventies, my father has prepared a set of final directives.