By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.

... her taste in music haunted my memory and I had to stop at Tower Records on the Upper West Side to buy ninety dollars' worth of rap CDs but, as expected, I'm at a loss: [...] voices uttering ugly words like digit, pudding, chunk.

There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.

After a while you learn that everything stops.