The stories in Virgin blew me away with their strange sexy intelligence and overall aliveness.

Because you find it interesting and want it analyzed without the burden of being analyzed yourself.

Standing in the kitchen the other day, out of nowhere I became disoriented and unsure of where I stood.

This guy’s old school, Roselli says to me over the phone, real old school. How old school can you be, I’m thinking, in a sport that’s already run its course in just a few years.

A Ford Explorer firetruck and a cul-de-sac basement had a birdbath at night.

Check out John's previous Adventure Comics:

"I Need Your Boat"

"The Lucky Texan"

Dialogue is not necessary

Rapturous VHS solitude

Deconstructionism

is just a fancy word for
skepticism
which is just a foggy word for
nihilism
which is just a

grandma was real creole
man
BRIGHT bright

I look across the street. I can see the bookstore. It’s right there. I think about kicking my way through the wall, making a sprint across the street. All before the marching band closing in comes stomping into view. Because after that I'm sunk. The flood gates will be open. And the entirety of the county's Christmas spirit will be let loose like a foul bowel movement from the asshole of a very old drunk. I decide against it.

OUTLAW LOVE

I can listen to “Thirteen” by Big Star and pretend
I am thirteen back in my flamingo
bedroom and a boy
would come to my

After the credits, I vacuum. I vacuum for hours and hours.

As the real world feels increasingly devoid of magic, we are correct to admire those writers who attempt to interject some magic back into it.

Transcendental with Reincarnation 

I was a bank/ cashier who stole /a five-dollar bill/ I was Laika/ a stray selected/ no more than bark/ part-husky/ part-terrier/ canine space orbiter/

By now you tell me how I feel.
You tell me
what I will do and how I will act.
You do the creating
for me,

Everyone picks the chairs up and puts them in a circle. Then they turn the music on and you start to walk along the perimeter.

I think ten t-shirts would be too many to write about, but I’m perversely hoping that twenty-two is somehow not too many. A writer can, I think, pass beyond “too many” or “too much” to a sense of rightness or aptness. The paradox: More than too much is sometimes not too much.

I can't in good conscience watch a sixteenth season of Big Brother.

My family’s eponymous foundation is a donor to Columbia University, in whose MFA program in Creative Writing I was enrolled, but due to some substance abuse problems last semester, I had to drop out . . .

What if you spent a morning pulling scallions from the soil and washing beets in a metal sink?

The first seven years we dolled ourselves up as witches in black nylon and swampy grease paint.

I'm going to abandon everything / after this poem 

By the time Zoe and I started down the Overseas Highway, we had been living a nomadic lifestyle out of our 1995 Corolla for nearly four months. 

Had a dream he was chained to a mountain while a buzzard ate his liver.