There's just no concept of layering a thick-sleeved sweater under a coat in L.A. A coat is more of a gesture than a necessity. You know, in case the temperature goes down to 55 degrees.

But now my problems had been set loose. They could be anywhere at any time and I was just like everyone else I knew: almost positive that there was something profoundly and undiagnosably wrong with me.

Sometimes we don't know what we want until we don't get it.

I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.

Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.

Picture it in your mind's nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener.

I wanted to be an archaeologist. But in school you have to take a tremendous amount of statistics for that, and I am not good at statistics. So I hit a real wall with archaeology. It's probably like wanting to be an architect - you think it's all fun and games, and then you have to get out a calculator and you're done.