You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

At the last minute, I couldn't wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on someone's front stoop.

I would pay snakes to bite her.

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

I'm always looking for context in which people tell stories. In "Fight Club" it's these support groups for dying people, and then in "Choke" it's 12-step recovery groups. In one novel it's artists' colonies, in another novel it's a diary form that submariners' wives typically keep so that when their husband comes back from serving on a submarine they have an accounting of their spouse's time. So I'm always looking for, number one, a non-fiction context - because you can tell a more outrageous story if you use a non-fiction form.

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.