One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying.

I'm in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.

One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.

She understood the genre constraints, the decencies were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured price. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.