I was a loser and I was a fifth grader and I was hoping, never prayin’, to watch somebody open a can of whoop ass on The Stevens... more

The officer put me on the street behind my truck. I felt the control. It didn’t feel good. 

Naoko knew all too well how difficult it was to imbibe the air of a foreign culture. She had matriculated for a year at the University of Santa Barbara to study saxophone and marked each day as a progression from one shameful moment to the next.

It’s that night in the summer when your open windows mean nothing, when your bed is just stuffed heat

My daughter stood on tiptoe by the metal grocery cart and told me we needed two more bags of Colby Jack. 

He had a disciplined approach to all things that surely came from the military. For breakfast it was always two hard boiled eggs – you imagined he swallowed them whole – but on the road, he allowed one indulgence: a short stack of pancakes.

If I had to choose one moment that convinced me of my own insignificance, it would be that time I saw the world spin.

“I was just thinking about you,” he emailed, a week later. “I’m rereading The Bell Jar.”

They were not in Brooklyn, California, a nice suburb outside D.C.

They were in West Virginia.

Hey, here’s an idea: how about you don’t spend half the period texting your boyfriend, and then he won’t dump you in the middle of class. Ever think of that? Maybe you talk to him like a human being instead of sending him a bunch of fucking sideways sad faces. 

The first line in the Medieval Times employee handbook is “The King always wins” even though really it’s the Champion Knight who wins and every move of the nightly joust is scripted to ensure that always happens...

Everyday we took Jelly for a walk on the track.
If Julia was busy teaching, Scott and I took Jelly.
If Scott was busy teaching, Julia and I took Jelly.

My friend Jamie holds out a thistle bloom, her fingers curved gingerly around the prickles. “Eat this,” she says. 

Anthony was my reason for everything ... for South Park, for Tupac, for horror movies, for music that sounded like screaming, for my parents' vodka, my sister’s mascara, for all the girls I put down.

What we really wanted was to be older.  What we really wanted was for something to happen, take us away from Florida and into the rest of our lives, but that doesn't happen for teenagers, not so much, and so we stood and waited.

Civil War Day was a staple at Reginald Middle School, implemented somewhere in the shady patriotism of the Reagan era before carrying through as tradition.

She grips the bat the proper way, the way Dad taught her. Right over left, the knuckles lined up like railroad tracks or piano keys, two of... more

In the original cut of the movie, Ray says, “You wanna have a catch?” But test audiences were disappointed with the complete lack of father-son acknowledgement.

“It’s time to choose,” the prison warden gruffly informed the man on death row. 

On my way to somewhere else, I happen to pass my ex-boyfriend Rob’s apartment, months since I’ve seen him, but he’s been showing up in my sleep recently, making me roll and grumble.

That’s what your parents say when they come in with their Santa suits. But it’s not Saturday. It’s Tuesday. It’s time to go to school.

I’ve been shipped off to spend the summer with my uncle in Beijing. There is my face in the computer’s reflective meniscus, watching his stocks.

At the age of sixteen I worked a job digging holes. Sometimes it was ditches, other times it was retention ponds.The work was as hard as... more

We agreed to meet in a bar known as the ‘anus of the city.’ It had terrible lighting which obscured its ugly regulars. The regulars had heads like onions with names like Fred, Harry, Deborah, Henrietta. Years of drinking had withered their necks to the size of cocktail sticks and I didn’t pity them because I liked hating them.

She liked to take care of me and I let her. “Sorry about the bread,” she said, handing me a full plate. “It got soggy.”

We ate in the... more