Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.

All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?

My books are not really books; theyre endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles.

The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.

I began thinking about my skeleton, this solid, beautiful thing inside me that I would never see.

The broader the topic, the easier it is, not only to fill a book, but to set the bar pretty high for really great stuff.