These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, Right. Now I understand how this is done.