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.

Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.

I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.

What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?

And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea.

Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control.

... 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.