What's your name?" "Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?" "Wanted." "By all the girls or just the law?

It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

Life isn't happily ever after... It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is.

The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'