But an apology too — you think you’re giving something, but you’re not. You’re really asking for something. You’re asking for forgiveness, you’re asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.

It was a shut door, and shut doors meant things kept to yourself. There were reasons you kept things to yourself, and they usually weren’t good, happy, open-air sort of reasons. Still, I didn’t want to see behind that door. You think you want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know. But you don’t. Not really. I had pried the lid off of the dark places of another person before, I had seen inside. Down deep. You don’t want to look at what’s rotting there.

Once an asshole, always an asshole.

A lot of life is just surviving what happens.

I'll tell you one thing about me, and that is that I'm not to keen on being bossed around. If, say, my Mom tells me to empty the dishwasher, I like to wait a little bit, you know, not hop up and do it right away, because then it feels more like my own idea. That's a little problematic when you have an actual boss.

Here, kitty, kitty, Chico says. The cover of his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day...Freud walks toward Chico in his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets...our pets seem to have made a pact with the devil.

Sometimes I’ve even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.