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.

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.