This new doctor smiles as he enters the room, as if we’re sharing a joke though we’ve never met before. “Tell me,” he says, “how many people get your name right on the first try?”

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.” 

I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.

When I was nine my grandfather taped every episode of Ken Burns’s Baseball and mailed me the VHS tapes from Kansas City.... more

At first I thought he meant food, but he never asked what I wanted.

I’ve been going to ballgames since I was a young kid, and when I was a tween I discovered this old t-shirt of my dad’s.

Parker is the coolest kid in fourth grade. Everyone thinks so. If Parker says something is cool, it’s cool. Period. I don’t know any better, yet. Parker says this band that sings a song about Buddy Holly is cool. I ask around but none of the other fourth graders know what I’m talking about.

I walked through the senior hallway, heart beating fast. The boys’ stares burned into my skin as they whispered things to each other.

It’s the first time I remember feeling that superstrong tween indignation that he’d taken something that was supposed to be just mine.

I could never straighten my legs for a cartwheel and with roller skating, I could never move them right.

I used to write in circles. Starting in the center.

The next day, I woke first and made French toast. I had a teenaged hangover, buzzing and giddy.

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

My Magic cards were the coolest thing about me.

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

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

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

I just remember the room dense with familiar sound, the melancholy howl of the perfectly in-tune saxophones, the electric brilliance of trumpets, a drummer with eight arms; my mother looking over at me, expectantly, as if to say, “This is what you wanted, right? This is making you happy?”

My wife and kids and I are driving around in New Orleans, not too far from where I spent the first... more

By the time the keys were in my eager teenaged hand, this car had been through some shit. Even ignoring the holes burned into the driver’s-side door, the missing half of the left side mirror, and the warped, discolored metal down the rest of the vehicle, the car was 13 years old already, and it looked it.

My first boyfriend collected knives. He was the kind of boy who listened to Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, who liked to draw superheroes... more

I don’t remember when portable CD players came out, but I know the one my aunt got me for Christmas was the first to arrive... more

That first year of having her, I would drive by myself, just to feel that relief of no anxiety. I... more

The dog ran alongside me for about twenty yards, then I hit it. Or maybe it hit me. I still don’t know. I felt sick.

Tom Cruise is one of life’s winners. He felt the need, the need for speed, and singlehandedly saved America from those Soviet planes, or something—honestly you never understood what was going on in the second half of Top Gun. In A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson told Tom Cruise he couldn’t handle the truth, but Jack Nicholson was quite wrong.