In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

Holocausts do not amaze me. Rapes and child slavery do not amaze me. And Franklin, I know you feel otherwise, but Kevin does not amaze me. I am amazed when I drop a glove in the street and a teenager runs two blocks to return it. I am amazed when a checkout girl flashes me a wide smile with my change, though my own face had been a mask of expedience. Lost wallets posted to their owners, strangers who furnish meticulous directions, neighbors who water each other's houseplants - these things amaze me.

The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.

I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.