The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.

There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.

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.

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

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

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.