For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

And yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever.

The bow is so old, its horsehair is glue Sent to the factory, just like me and like you So how come they stayed your execution? The audience roars its standing ovation "Dust.

It's funny the things you think you're scared of until they're upon you, and then you're not.

So are you moving on now? Is that what brought you to the grand metropolis of Valladolid?” “No. The wind just blew me here.” “What? Like a plastic bag?” “I prefer to think of myself as a ship. Like a sailboat.

One day she told me that they'd decided that my gender was divvied into two neat piles-Men and Guys. Basically, all the saints of the world: Men. The jerks, the players, the wet T-shirt contest aficionados? They were Guys.

Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too.