The truth is I don’t think I’ve ever found anything as purely ‘moving’ as the end of The Velveteen Rabbit when I first read it

It turns out that having looming deadlines is about the best catalyst for
non-linear writing as a guy like me can ask for. Hence, declarations:


Sports Illustrated is Saturday morning escape-into-the-lingua-franca. To
be consumed with coffee, but no longer cigarettes.


Waiting for a postcard from Italy from one of your best friends, who has
become an honest-to-goodness devotee of the spiritual life with a shaved
head and second vowel-intensive name, is really a taxing kind of waiting.


Having an English major background and being mildly conversant in Theory
does sometimes (for me) catalyze a need to pick up the latest bit of
Continental (or if not the latest, the most readily accessed). It turns
out the love-hate doesn't dissipate.


"Everyone's married and saving or single and slaving," is something I
heard a stranger utter into a cellphone two days ago after a reuben on
rye and very precisely seasoned waffle fries. I did not like the person
doing the uttering, in part because it was uttered with the same kind
of piety that I associate with people in suits standing before cameras
speaking about public safety.