The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.

Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.

It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.

But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness. At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

Capitalism doesn't consider morality. It considers profitability.