Please, trust me, I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.

Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?

Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work.

Smile with instinct, then lick your wounds in the darkest of dark corners. Trace the scars back to your own fingers and remember them.

Personally, I like a chocolate-colored sky, dark, dark chocolate.

When I recollect her, I see a long list of colors, but it's the three in which I saw her in the flesh that resonate the most. Sometimes I manage to float far above those three moments. I hang suspended, until a septic truth bleeds toward clarity. That's when I see them formulate: THE COLORS RED: [rectangle] WHITE: [circle] BLACK: [swastika] They fall on top of each other. The scribbled signature black, onto the blinding global white, onto the thick soupy red.

That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.