These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.