Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can't die soon enough.

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

My perception of the human animal is as an extremely dangerous predator. That's who I perceive us to be as a species. Maybe the most dangerous predator on the planet, with the exception of a few microbes. I'm really grateful for the degree of socialization that prevents us, most of the time, from killing and eating each other. And I admire all the social structures that have been designed and layered and niched in that encourage bonding toward a kind of social harmony that is meant to contain and counteract our natural inclinations toward predation, ferocity, and eating whatever moves.