Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective.

Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective.

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.

Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

My mother had always told her kids: if you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.

I'd come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival