I can tell she’s not convinced. But I’ve been Googling symptoms: confusion, nausea, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, visual hallucinations, erratic behavior.

That was the world then…

That was the world then….bawdy cars and tawdry thoughts and rundown wannabe skyscrapers brownie baked by the sun that just looked cheap against the horizon and everybody

She breathed deeply and saw an image of the naughtiest kids in the afterschool program laughing at her.

The day I stopped being a woman was a hard-boiled egg kind of day. 

Drainage stains. Snow turns to shivering rain. The rear facing concrete walls.

waylon in the kitchen
pancakes
the pain of a tattoo gun on ribs 

I hold myself in the plank position. The little dog sits on the rug watching. It’s a very expensive rug. She’s not supposed to be here. He’s up on the purple couch and I do not know what he is

“you’re bad at finishing beverages that aren’t alcoholic,” you told me

I first saw Todd Field’s Tár in a packed theatre in Bloomfield Township, Michigan with a crowd
of mostly middle-aged and above upper to upper-middle class New Yorker-tote-bag liberal types.
During the first 20 or so minutes of the film I found myself annoyed, fidgeting in my seat and
groaning as I sat through the titular EGOT winner’s conversation with Adam Gopnick.

My neighbor let his Rottweiler roam without a leash again and I’m an inch away from planting razor blades inside my tomatoes.

When I was a younger man in my early 20s slumming about Watauga County in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina living off of sacks of potatoes, Top Ramen, and 50 cent day-old bread from Jimmy John's in the midst of a youthful exploration of self-discovery, my primary means of spiritual sustenance being $2 40 oz bottles of malt liquor, my relationships with scoundrels, endearing friends, an abundance of hedonism, a lack of responsibility, a poor boy’s decadence, bright-eyed women, and Kamel Red cigarettes, Elizabeth Ellen was the first literary publisher to accept any work that I’d submitted. This was circa 2014. Felt that she was the Hackmuth to my Great Bandini.

I was zipped up to my nose in a sleeping bag, inhaling moist breath mingled with olfactory ghosts of campfires and wild sex past.

writing fiction in which people google things,
suffering in a very abstract way
trying very hard to shut the fuck up & failing

We paid the cover charge and stood among the young homosexuals of Columbus.

You must stop dating
physicists, that sere barnacling across
the cold, leeward faces of rocks.

At the head of the conference table sat a man scrolling on his phone, whom Michael intuited was the leader of this secret society. 

Becca, Ernie’s wife, estranged wife most of the novel until finally she is his ex-wife at the end, based on the author’s, based on Aaron’s, ex-wife, Elizabeth Ellen, who is, oddly, metally, writing these words, typing them into a Word doc at nine in the morning

I ask him if the smoke was from the engine fires
or the buildings collapsing — or both
of course it was both 
We pass Emily Ratajkowski and I try to run back to get a look at her face

-Editor at a literary journal attempting to be good, moral ppl (see: 1990s Christian Right)

I never wanted to run this ship. Frankly, I’d rather spend my time writing.

The other thing Belle did
Was burn three holes in my thigh
With her cigarette
Revenge for the chaos I’d caused

He had a little radio, and on the mornings it snowed, he listened over and over to the lists of school closings until he knew them by heart: Kellerville area, Longstead area, Mount Holly area, all the outlying place-names, all the Our Lady of’s. Sometimes there was only a two-hour delay, and he wondered what it must be like, to have the boon of two extra hours like that.

Mouth like the

moon. Until death,

be excited. Déjà vu

you’ve never had.

Above the tree line, the sky has turned the color of a day-old bruise. The reception has begun to clear. Whichever uncle had parked his motorcycle in the driveway was now gone.  
 

What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.

Now I bake bread to stay busy, to not think about dying.