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

You are twenty-six, so you know everything about anything.

I’ve thought a lot about what it is that draws me into slasher films as a gay man. Maybe I am drawn to them because I read about so many queer people being victimized; in a way I am turning to them for survival tips.

Over the course of being mounted by this tome, I took up a pipe, drank scotch from an airplane toilet, consigned to rubbing myself down with strange bleaches, minced any sense of diet intentionally diabetic by an assortment of binge ate junk...

I spent a considerable amount of my time online drooling on myself, arguing with the Courtney Love haters who camped out on her website, and searching for low- effort ways to get off the pills. None existed.

The most comfortable place I have ever been is lying on my back on a massage table at the front of a room of the Embassy Suites Ontario Airport in Southern California. I was naked from the waist

If you’ve ever been asked to place your anxiety on a litmus test of 1-10 and have no idea what a 10 would constitute, then you know how jarring and disconnected this question could be. I thought about running away from the office, I thought about knocking over one of her plants 

In the staff meeting she thought about enemas.  

In nearly every used book—bought, borrowed, or salvaged—I’ve found them. 

I was drunk and coked up and thought it’d be a good idea to cut through some strange wooded area. Then I was completely underwater. 

We were sitting on the shores of the Atlantic, waiting for the wind to change and the black flies to get blown back out to sea when the plane went down.

For all the hours we’ve spent with strangers, all the conversations and shared stories, we ask no one’s name—until now. 

There are five categories for hurricanes; most of the buildings here were built to withstand categories one and two.

No one is going anywhere, he says. You will sleep here tonight.

“Ah, so you’ve had an ordinary life,” she said.

In which we listen to ourselves being recounted in the mouth of the boyfriend 

The people in my workshop suggested the stories were detailing co-dependency. From my position of fiction writer I laughed and nodded in agreement so as not to appear too sentimental towards the material. I thought of my classmates as boring and responsible and generic, and reasoned that they couldn’t understand the characters’ interactions because they were only limitedly tolerant of anything eccentric—

I do not remember this, cannot call up the image. 

We are launching a new project, HOBART HANDBOOKS, the first project of which is our Handbook on Baseball, collecting some of our favorite pieces from our last thirteen years of online baseball

The story goes that Mario is Luigi’s brother. Nearly all we know about him is that he is a brother.

Sometimes we appreciate things a lot later in life than we should.

The tourists stand on the hostel balcony, shirtless, sun on their golden skin and hair or maybe their skin is the sun.

Yesterday my mom called me up and asked me to buy her cigarettes. I told her no and hung up. 

By dread I’m inspired, by fear I’m amused. The phrase was cursived on a cocktail napkin and folded into my handshake by a steel-haired young woman two weeks before my 20th birthday. 

In my head I can't believe what he just said. How the hell are we going to take a bunch of ordinary popsicle sticks and turn them into bombs? Bombs? Shit, they explode. There's fire involved! Is Kevin nuts? We'll kill people!