We can all of us be hurt, and no one is exclusively safe from worry and sadness.

It is hard to find a friend,' I said. 'It is the hardest thing in this world,' he agreed.

Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.

He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.

I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.

...things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.

I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.